Canadian environmentalist Varda Burstyn has won many awards for her writing for film, television, radio, and scholarly publications. She has obviously decided to try to get some environmental messages across in her first novel — an “eco-political thriller”.

William Greele, an extremely wealthy and thoroughly nasty character, creates a consortium of fellow greedy American CEO’s to pipe water down from Quebec. His main opponents are Malcolm, (a nature-lover who is however working in the “military-industrial complex”) and Claire (a director of eco-Justice USA).

“…bottled water is the source of a twenty-two billion dollar a year industry worldwide…if affluent people buy [it] all the time, they remove political pressure from authorities to guarantee clean safe water for everyone…as public systems deteriorate…only the well-off will have safe water.” Further, “one point five million tons of plastic are used every year by the bottled water industry with the toxic chemicals posing a threat to the environment at both the manufacturing and the disposal stage…and the transport adds significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.”

Claire in Water Inc.

Burstyn misses no opportunity to inform her readers of the devastation that is occurring on the earth –even Greele himself reviews some of the climate changes and pollution problems to his co-conspirators. Yet this book is a page-turner; one has to keep reading to determine the fate of both the project and the individuals.

Unfortunately, there are a few too many protagonists in this novel, and they are not as well-developed as, for example, the group in “The Monkey Wrench Gang” by Edward Abbey (another great read for anyone interested in environmental issues). And even though Burstyn doesn’t match Abbey in the laugh department, she has a good sense of humour. Her interesting array of characters illustrates how a diverse group of people with many skills is necessary to foil such a despicable attempt of eco-terrorism as the diversion of major waterways.

This book, with its themes of power and the commodification of water, is apparently the first in a trilogy. I will be looking forward to Burstyn’s next publication.

For another good read about water, I recommend “The Fifth Sacred Thing” by Starhawk, an American ecofeminist.

In Water Inc., Malcolm compliments Claire on a “thought-provoking” speech; she replies that that is one of the adjectives she most likes to hear. All three of the books mentioned in this article are worthy of the same description; yet they are very entertaining at the same time. All are available through the Kamloops Public Library.

Action: Refill your own (preferably glass) bottle rather than buying bottled water.

Article by Anne Grube
July 2005, SOUND