I Wrote A Book About Water: Here’s What I Learned
Over three years in the making, and the conclusions I reached surprised even me.
I’d already written one environmental book, plus several reports for the BBC on water issues. So writing my next book on the subject of the water crisis seemed a logical step when discussing it with my publisher in February 2020 — how hard can it be? The following month I had a book deal, but the world had a pandemic — I was locked down and thinking more about my family’s health and survival. The book now seemed impossible. And the words ‘how hard can it be?’ took on a whole new meaning.
Slowly, as life began finding a new normal, so did the book. In fact, there was even a pandemic sweet-spot where all the ‘big names’ in the field of water, from the UN to Nasa to Matt Damon’s water.org co-founder Gary White, were grounded like the rest of us. The perennially hard-to-reach people were now stuck at home twiddling their thumbs; equally suddenly, we were all given a crash course in video call software (oh Skype — I still wonder how you missed this moment), and I began amassing more interviews in a short space of time than perhaps ever before.
Then, first via regular tonsil-tickling PCRs and later thanks to the Pfizer vaccine, we could meet in person again, and the book really took…
