Water 4.0 by David Sedlak

For what it's worth—and you did just willingly click on a link to learn what I think about David Sedlak's Water 4.0, so surely it's worth something—this is the first "textbook"¹ I've been given as assigned reading that I've read cover to cover.

Water 4.0 is a book about the history of water management in view of putting current and future developments in wastewater treatment in perspective. It offers an inspired, albeit not necessarily reverent² view of how wastewater treatment works and where it's going. If you don't care about wastewater management, Water 4.0 will try to convince you that you should, and I think it'll do a pretty good job.

I think a big part of why I call Water 4.0 "not reverent" has to do with the fact that this book treats water management purely as an engineering problem. It does a good job at communicating the magnitude and marvel of waste water treatment systems, but in the view of Water 4.0, water is treated as an abstract resource to be manipulated. The book seems to imagine that the water manager exists outside of the physical universe, defining how water should move through an urban or rural system in accordance with rigid laws, including both natural and social constraints. It seems to have no opinion on the constraints except to the extent that they hinder or further the mandated goals of the water utility. To be fair, I get the impression that this is the dominant framework of water management in the west (this book briefly touches on the historical waste water management systems of China and Japan, but it mostly focuses on Europe and the US), but I think it's still a fair criticism if you're someone like me who likes to care about things, and you're interesting in looking forward to how things could be done differently.

Sedlak argues that the future of our water system has two paths: "Water 3.1," a modification of the existing water infrastructure to patch some of the issues that'll be exacerbated in the coming years by climate change, and "Water 4.0," an attempt to radically reimagine the way we do water management, namely, by incorporating more sewage recycling, desalination, and distributed infrastructure into the system. While Water 4.0 may be more immediately expensive than Water 3.1, he believes that the costs and limitations of patching our old infrastructure will force water utilities to radically reimagine the way we do things. I think this is optimistic; my electricity utility is currently considering opting to instate rolling brownouts rather than pay to cut back trees and insulate wires to prevent wildfires, so it doesn't feel like too much of a stretch that my water utility would rather put a hard cap on my daily water allowance than pay to build out the infrastructure to make sustainable use of the water we have. Getting that better infrastructure will absolutely take federal government funding, as Sedlak notes, and I have a feeling most of the push is going to need to come from us if we ever want to realize Water 4.0.

All that said, it's a good book if you're interested in the invisible pieces of infrastructure that make urban living possible. It's an excellent book if you're specifically interested in water management and want a broad-based introduction to what we're doing, where we're going and how we got here.

Footnotes

¹ This is not a textbook, but it does serve the purpose of a textbook in a class I'm taking

² For example, Braiding Sweetgrass has what I'd call a "reverent" view of ecology. It presents a vision of ecology that feels greater than life. It makes the case for why that framing is deserved. Water 4.0 is a very pragmatic book.