Go With the Flow! Every Last Drop: Bringing Clean Water Home by Michelle Mulder

Imagine if you turned on a faucet and nothing came out. What if there was water but it contained substances that would make you sick or even kill you?

What would you do for a drink of water?

On a continent blessed with water, it is easy to give that resource little attention. Streams, rivers, and lakes filled with it, fog and clouds heavy with it in the atmosphere, stored as ice and snow, we have water in abundance, water to waste.

Or do we?

In Michelle Mulder's fascinating Every Last Drop: Bringing Clean Water Home (Orca Footprints)(Orca Books), author Mulder tells young readers that the water we have is only what the earth has always had, even back when dinosaurs were the biggest consumers, and we're drinking the same water they did. And what we know about using water goes way back to ancient times when our ancestors invented cisterns and reservoirs, irrigation, aqueducts, and filtering pots, and in the case of the Minoans of 3600 years ago, flush toilets, and the vast, underground and cathedral-like reservoirs in Turkey 1600 years ago. Still, because of population growth, industry, and climate changes, we are also being seriously forced to tap the reservoir of human water management wisdom to provide enough water for drinking, farming, and other uses now, so that, as she puts it, we can continue riding our water cycle right into the future.

Author Michelle Mulder's book is filled with lively color photos from all over the world, diagrams, informational sidebars, and fascinating factoids (e.g., Canada has twenty percent of the world's water, and in some places children's see-saws pump underground water into their system), and manages to sound the alarms for future water shortages while teaching conservation techniques to middle readers in every chapter. Great for conservation science and student research writing, this one is chock full of information that will have kids eschewing their plastic water bottles and giving a glass of clean water its due respect. Says Booklist"... startling water facts, and color photos of children collecting and conserving water around the world make this high-interest reading,"