David Zetland gives a powerhouse interview on his many decades of writing on water, the commons, and climate change. He discusses his recently reissued book Living with Water Scarcity (2014/2023) which does a wonderful job explaining water economics to the general reader. We also get into why water managers fail and, in his opinion, why academic publishing has lost its luster.

Professor Zetland is a senior university lecturer in political-economy at Leiden University College in the Netherlands. In addition to Living, he has published The End of Abundance (2011), The Best of Aguanomics (2018), and The Little Book of The Commons (2022) - all freely available for download at kysq.org.

Note to listeners: The interview recording contains minor sound quality issues, probably due to the long-distance conversation.

In this episode, Sayd Randle joins us from Kathmandu, Nepal, to talk about her fascinating new book, Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2025). We discuss her ethnographic approach to water and the challenges and opportunities of localizing urban water supplies. She also gives us a peek at what she's now working on halfway around the world.

Dr. Randle is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Singapore Management University.

Paul Brown joins the Water Shelf Podcast to discuss his unique, entertaining, and self-published book, Too Good to Be True: Scottsdale and Privatization in the 1980s (2020). His detailed account of a water treatment plant public-private partnership evokes both a specific time and place and larger themes of professional development and learning from your mistakes.

Mr. Brown is President of Paul Redvers Brown Inc., having previously served for 37 years at CDM Smith, including as Executive Vice President and Board Member. He is a Fellow of the International Water Association, a member of the Urban Water Institute's Board of Directors, and previously served on the Boards of Kennedy/Jenks Consultants, the International Society of Sustainability Professionals, and the Council for Watershed Health.

Giulio Boccaletti provides a master class on water, politics, and social organization in this fascinating discussion of his book Water: A Biography (Pantheon Books, 2021). His "story of people and water" traces the historical dialectic between the practical realities of water management and the development of political ideologies, and he argues for republicanism over authoritarianism in addressing climate change.

Dr. Boccaletti is the Scientific Director of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change Foundation, Honorary Research Associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and Executive Producer of the upcoming PBS/BBC Studios series “The Future of Nature.”

Shimi Anisfeld kicks off Season 2 of the Water Shelf Podcast by introducing his fascinating book Water Management: Prioritizing Justice and Sustainability (Island Press, 2024) - an impressively comprehensive and immensely readable university textbook on this important topic supplemented by a free companion website.

Dr. Shimon Anisfeld is Senior Lecturer II and Research Scientist in Water Resources and Environmental Chemistry at Yale University.

Buzz Thompson joins the Water Shelf Podcast to talk about his innovative and extraordinary new book, Liquid Asset: How Business and Government Can Partner to Solve the Freshwater Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Barton H. “Buzz” Thompson, Jr. is the Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law at the Stanford Law School. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, where he directs the Water in the West program, and is a Professor of Environmental Behavioral Sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Buzz is a practicing attorney specializing in water resources, was a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and a Supreme Court-appointed Special Master, and has authored or co-authored numerous books on environmental law and policy.

Why does someone with so many accolades and accomplishments go by "Buzz"? Listen to the podcast and find out!

I have the great pleasure to speak with Dr. David Sedlak about his remarkable new book, Water for All: Global Solutions for a Changing Climate (Yale University Press, 2023).

Dr. Sedlak is the Plato Malozemoff Professor of Environmental Engineering at University of California Berkeley. He is Director of the Berkeley Water Center, Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Center for Reinventing the Nation's Urban Water Infrastructure (ReNUWIt), and Master Cartographer for the National Alliance for Water Innovation.

Erica Gies visits the Water Shelf podcast to talk about her fantastic and internationally distributed recent book, Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

Ms. Gies is an independent journalist covering science and the environment from Victoria, British Columbia, and San Francisco, California. Her work appears in the New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Ensia, The Economist, bioGraphic, National Geographic, and other outlets.