‘My ambition, like LeCarre, is to deliver a great read while I deliver the bitter message,’ says author Varda Burstyn.
Scary, but True: Environmentalist's eco-thriller delivers a frightening take on the world's water crisis.

Excerpts from: 05/22/2005, pg. C10, The Citizen's Weekly: Reading by Mike Gillespie. The Ottawa Citizen.

Now creating ripples on two continents and expected to wash ashore later this year in Spain, Korea and Portugal, Burstyn's book, which shapes a very real world water crisis into an eco-thriller, could well be a tsunami-in-waiting for wanton water-wasters the world over.

A story about big business-government collusion and a megaproject to pipe water from the Quebec wilderness into drought-stricken parts of the U.S., the novel is becoming a lightning rod for everything that's wretched about the way we treat our biosphere…

Burstyn has been around enough to know that such Doomsday messages often fall on deaf ears. She realizes, too, that convincing a skeptical world there's a very real issue with the world's water supplies can best be told through fiction.

Hence, Water Inc., first in a trilogy that Burstyn will use to flag public interest in the politics and economics of the environment. While, as she says, there's not a whole lot of jocularity in this issue, she recognizes the need to inject some levity in her series.

Water Inc. has already been likened to stories by techno-thriller writer Michael Crichton whose novels Jurassic Park, Timeline, State of Fear and Andromeda Strain, among others, have earned him the title "king of catastrophe."

But Burstyn prefers to call her novel "an antidote" to Crichton's work. Which may be so. Water Inc. will scare the pants off anyone worried about where their next drink of water will come from -- but told to them from a non-technological point of view…

Water Inc. plays off against some very real facts about global water diversion: massive projects planned in China, India, Spain, Greece, Africa and North America where twin pipelines are being considered on the West Coast, along with a mega-scheme called the Grand Canal that would bring fresh water from the Hudson Bay region down into the Great Lakes system for American consumption…

Burstyn seems primed for an environmental donnybrook, but first things first: her book. There are deals to be signed with a British audio book company, a Korean publisher, a deal to publish Water Inc. in French in Quebec, then get ready for a major U.S. publicity drive early this summer….

 

"Author of WATER INC. Warns Against Misuse of Precious Resources"
Interview-review: CANADIAN PRESS

Anne-Marie Tobin

TORONTO (CP) - Readers who pick up Varda Burstyn's book Water Inc. this summer, and start turning the pages during a blistering heat wave or dry spell, might feel like they're reading fact, not fiction.

It's an eco-thriller about severe water shortages in the United States and a powerful secret consortium plotting to build a pipeline to carry Quebec water to parched regions of the continent.

Burstyn, who was on the board of Greenpeace in the '90s, began the story during a relentlessly hot summer in Cincinnati in 1999, when temperatures rose to 39 C and there was a "drought that was absolutely scorching the midwest."

"There are sections of the book where I describe the drought and what was happening," said Burstyn, who now divides her time between Toronto and southern Quebec. "It was actually happening while I was there."

But, she said, nobody seemed to be talking about global warming or the problems of pollution and ecology.

She said projections indicate that a huge aquifer underneath the midwest will be dry within 10 years, and certainly by 2025 there will be "phenomenal shortages."

"The Colorado River is no longer reaching the sea, there are communities in Texas and Arizona where they're shipping water in by truck already."

"We are looking at a long-term drought trend, or medium term drought trend and we are living in it already."

But despite the seriousness of the issue and her track record in nonfiction, Burstyn decided to tackle her first novel rather than write a "heavy serious tome."

"I really felt that to tell the truth about what was going on with respect to water and not to be sued and held up in the courts ... that I was going to have to go to fiction," she said.

"The second reason was that having been involved in government and in the environmental movement in many different cities and places, cultures, in my life, I had all these stories that I really wanted to tell, and I couldn't see telling them in a nonfiction format," she said.

"I want to talk about the people who affect the environment, whether they're the ones who really feel entitled to go in there and rip a chunk of that environment out and damn the consequences. Or whether they're the people on the other side who are trying to stop that from happening."

The protagonists whose lives could be endangered by fighting the pipeline include Malcolm Macpherson, a Seattle aerospace engineer, and his new romantic interest, Claire Davidowicz, the head of an environmental organization. The action is fast-paced, and the book lives up to its jacket notes describing it as a "tale of greed, heroism, clashing loyalties, love and mortal risk."

Indeed, Burstyn reveals there was another reason she decided to try writing fiction.

"To confess the truth, I didn't have a lot of spiritual reservoir left about the environment. I was feeling very, very blue down there," she said of her observations about huge corporations and George Bush's approach to the environment.

"If you're a real environmentalist, you can have an existential crisis over the environment. And I was having one. And I thought that in order to assuage my own spirit if I wrote a novel, I could really have some fun with it and that would help me, you know, to write about the issues."

The story is told as though it's happening in the near future, but many elements are already in the past, she said.

"This could be at the end of this summer, this could be next year in terms of the planning for such a pipeline. And in fact, George Bush has called for these pipelines and I do believe that discussions are taking place. I cannot get confirmation of that," she said.

"The public learns about it only when it's a fait accompli."

Burstyn said Canada should share its water with the rest of the continent, but in a way that allows the whole water system to renew itself, that protects water from pollution and that treats water as a human right and not as a commodity.

"The trade agreements which I talk about in my book are such that it makes it almost impossible for countries who are part of these treaties to take sovereignty over their natural resources," she said.

"So I would add finally that what we have to do is to have a continental convention on water that trumps the trade agreements and in fact, nullifies the commodifation of water that is implicit in them, and that makes water a resource that is governed by public authorities."

© The Canadian Press, 2005

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