How I came to write Water Inc.

     Water Inc. is a thriller about politics and the environment, and its high-stakes drama turns around water, the blue gold of the 21st century. Here is how I came to write that book.

     Five years ago, I was living in Cincinnati. I had been a writer of non-fiction for twenty years, and for fifteen of them, issues related to the environment had figured prominently in my writing. I had been deeply concerned about the dwindling of fresh water supplies and the commercialization of water, continentally and globally, for some time, and had decided it should be the topic of my next book. The reality of summer temperatures that were topping 105 F. degrees daily, scorched lawns, dying flowers, and Ohio and Kentucky farm fields that were brown and cracked made me feel a certain desperation to get on with the job. And so did two other glaring factors. First, this heat wave and accompanying drought were part of a larger problem of global warming, a problem that was bad and going to get worse. Yet nary a word was devoted to that subject in the local media, and deaths that were directly due to it across the Midwest and Northeast were treated like acts of God — as opposed to nature gone awry thanks to human behavior — in the national press. Second, the stark reality of corporate power — and irresponsibility — was, in a sense, inescapable in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is a beautiful, small, and, on a per capita basis, very wealthy city. But it is, stunningly, a company town. Proctor and Gamble is the reigning power and its headquarters provide the city with its downtown 'civic' square. My research into water had shown me that more and more, around the world, huge water corporations much like Proctor and Gamble were dictating policy and effectively dictating terms to local and national governments, in ways that were making environmental and social problems much, much worse. It was time to do my bit to illuminate the dangers.

     But though I felt the hounds of hell at my back, howling at me to write, write, write, I couldn't produce a word. I experienced a massive writer's block — something very rare for me -- and I was compelled to spend some very uncomfortable time trying to turn the creative flow back on. After about a month of pacing my study and throwing pens and balled-up pages of false starts at the door, I finally I realized I that I could only write the book I wanted to if I turned to fiction. This was a daunting prospect since I'd never written a word of it before. Still, it was obvious to me that if I didn't want to face the big water companies in court because of my descriptions of just how nefarious their behaviors were, the only way I could tell the whole truth — and paint the whole picture — was to resort to fiction: a true irony in a democracy, but a reality. As well, I realized that for me, no matter how many statistics I could adduce or how large my catalogue of issues and facts, or indeed, how compelling my prose, I was limited in certain ways as a non-fiction writer. To a large extent non-fiction is writing about one's subjects, which ultimately means writing from the outside. Fiction is writing as one's characters, and it would allow me to write from inside my material. And I realized with utter amazement that I had a whole cast of characters inside me clamoring to get out. All the dimensions to life and politics that remained unspoken in non-fiction wanted to be represented, and they were becoming personified.

     In particular, I really felt the need to tell the stories of the people whose actions, in their very different ways, directly affect our environment. In considering what kind of fiction I should write, I listened to my clamoring characters, and felt they wanted to be part of a thriller, written more or less in the spirit of John Le Carré — which is to say, in a form that would provide great reading pleasure while delivering the bitter truth. Once I had come this far in my thinking, my characters stopped their cacophony inside my head and virtually jumped onto the page. My writer's block disappeared in a frenzy of typing! I'd heard about this phenomenon, but no one was more astonished than I that it was happening to me.

     To begin with, I was determined to portray something of the consciousness of the people who consider it their right, and even duty, to make huge interventions into the natural world to rearrange it, usually with the idea that it's good for their communities, and often for the promise of enormous profits. When we had no collective knowledge about the harms such interventions caused — I'm speaking here of enormous dams and diversions, strip mining, clear-cutting forests and so forth — such people could consider themselves to be heroes of civilization and masters of the universe deserving of respect and obedience. As our knowledge of the extreme damage done by these interventions has grown — enough, even twenty years ago, to discredit these megaprojects as solutions of choice for resource management and extraction — the nature barons have either refused to acknowledge the evidence, or, like my leading businessman, William Ericsson Greele, have acknowledged it privately, but disregarded the evidence publicly, pleading that famous rationalization: 'there's no alternative to solving humanity's pressing needs.' For two periods in my life — one in the late 1960s, another in the early 1990s — I had an opportunity to observe up close many of the ways in which the corporate heads, politicians, and bureaucrats in charge of such projects interact, and, absent very strong opposition, take it upon themselves to make decisions with enormous multi-generational implications — social, economic, and environmental. I have heard them speak of their own superior knowledge and judgement, how much they know best, how, in effect, their interests and those of society are identical. Though today — five years since I began the first draft of Water Inc. — we can read more about environmental problems in our daily press than we could then, it's still true that the perspective of these heroic world-changers, a perspective rooted in a celebration of all things big, powerful, and profitable, is doubtless the most influential in the world today.

     Equally, I wanted to tell the story of the kind of people whose perspectives do not dominate our daily press, whose paradigms are not automatic and unquestioned, whose interests do not drive international economic treaties or massive resource megaprojects. As in real life, so in my novel, they can be broken down into two main categories. First, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the great manipulators are their key opponents, the professional environmentalists, the people who spend their working lives, usually for a fraction of what they could earn in business or as compliant professionals, working to save our planet. There are many such people in the world today — they are the staff of the Sierra Club and the World Watch Institute and the Riverkeepers Alliance and and Greenpeace and all their counterparts in many different organizations, on every continent. But these people are rarely profiled in the press and they're never quoted as experts or pundits on the national networks. Celebrity culture couldn't care less about them (unless, for a moment, they're on a stage with a Hollywood star) and very few people who don't share their lives have any idea about how they live, love and work day to day. During a recent radio interview about my book in Canada, Sheila Copps, a former deputy prime minister (the person who heads the government when the PM is sick or out of country) interrupted my answer to a question about water scarcity to ask, "Do environmentalists ever have any fun? I mean, they seem soooo serious." It was an astonishing comment, and I said so. I didn't know whether this reflected a remarkable lack of awareness of important people who have been long-standing and members of the body politic, or was really attempting to deflect a crucial subject by implying that I was one more 'boring environmentalist' who takes everything too seriously. Either way,.I thought, wow, am I glad I wrote that book!

     Finally, and in some ways just as important to me, I wanted to explore the conflicts and contradictions of so many people — in fact, the vast majority — who are neither the great manipulators nor the dedicated eco-warriors. These are the folks who work every day in businesses, in government, in the military. Many may take some feeling of accomplishment or pride in their work, but if they are thoughtful people and people of conscience whose work contributes to environmental degradation, over the years they grow more and more uneasy with their role, until they find themselves experience acute anxiety and self-loathing. For many such people — especially those with children — the dilemmas are often excruciating. I wanted to bring out the kinds of traps that people like this feel they are caught in, and the different choices they may decide to make. I'm very fond of literary fiction. But as a person who has been steeped in political life for more than three decades, I'm also hooked on political fiction, especially good political crime novels. For me, John Le Carré is the master of the genre. The tragic melancholy that marks his work is, I think, true to the situations and issues he animates. I found myself sobbing at the end of his extraodinary last book, Absolute Friends. To lighten the load, on the other hand, I often turn to Carl Hiassen's screwball Florida-based environmental thrillers, which make me laugh all the way through the pain, and the laughter makes me feel that somehow, we'll muddle through. I am also a great long-time fan of Sara Paretsky's tough, politically conscious whodunits featuring her courageous heroine, VI Warshawski — a lady who has both a clear-sighted perspective on, and a conscience about, some of the ugliest aspects of American society. I think some of the finest political fiction of the last half-century has been written in the form of the thriller, or crime novel. Still, as a critic of many cultural conventions, I'm also very much aware that the conventions of such novels can be ideologically loaded, and in this way, can 'for example, along with a gorgeous 'uberheroine' — as the vast majority of thrillers do (Robert Ludlum comes to mind, even John Grisham of whom I'm quite fond) — implicitly conveys a particular series of messages such as: the individual is the most important actor; only stereoptypically beautiful people can be heroes and heroines; and the hero/heroine is the great mover of history. The reader's focus and identification is placed directly on and with the hero and heroine, not with a larger, more varied and complex group. And when this happens, the real interplay of economic and political forces falls, inevitably, into the background. So in Water Inc I chose to push the boundaries of these conventions in a few important ways. Perhaps some of the questions that follow will help illuminate how I did this. Happy reading.

Varda Burstyn August 20, 2005