"Ingram and Malamud-Roam's book presents a remarkable mix of science, paleoclimatology, history, and poetic writing, telling the story of water in the West and how it is intimately tied to the Earth's varying climate. The authors vividly remind us of two things: first, society ignores the lessons of past climatic extremes at our peril, and second, we can no longer assume that the past is a reliable guide to the future, as human influence over the climate grows. The climate is changing, and our relationship to it must change as well. This book tells us how."--Peter Gleick, author of Bottled and Sold and coauthor of A Twenty-First Century U.S. Water Policy "Earth's climate has changed before, but always on a geological time scale. By burning millions of years worth of fossil fuels in a couple of centuries, humans have now forced atmospheric change onto our time scale. To make matters worse, in the American Southwest we have built a civilization on the assumption that we can get away with it. As The West without Water eloquently and passionately reveals, we can't."--James Lawrence Powell, author of Dead Pool "In this intriguing account of a past more distant than any we have known, these authors offer us all the rare gift of foresight about what counts the most: the direction our society must take to sustain the richness of life on earth."--Tim Palmer, author of Rivers of California and Lifelines: The Case for River Conservation