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Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first "water-exporting country" when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subcontinent's water-stressed economic epicenter. Hopes that receipts from water sales could improve Lesotho's fortunes, however, have clashed with fears that soil erosion from overgrazing livestock could fill its reservoirs with sediment. In this wide-ranging and deeply researched book, Colin Hoag shows how producing water commodities incites a fluvial imagination. Engineering water security for urban South Africa draws attention ever further into Lesotho's rural upstream catchments: from reservoirs to the soils and vegetation above them, and even to the social lives of herders at remote livestock posts. As we enter our planet's water-export era, Lesotho exposes the possibilities and perils ahead.
"Overall, the book was a fascinating read and source of discussion in our classroom. An approach to constructing an ethnography of a landscape spoke to the issues of environmental change in the Anthropocene so central to our current crisis." - African Journal of Range and Forage Science
"The book is enjoyable to read and the argument is clear and easy to follow, with little jargon or theory to get in the way of the non-anthropologist reader." - Journal of Environmental Anthropology and the Interpretation of Landscapes
"The work of Colin Hoag is an outstanding work of political ecology and environmental humanities. All the chapters demonstrate his capacity to consider both the broader context (analyzing the history of Lesotho and using socio-economic data, particularly those linked to pastoralism) and the local perspective (through ethnographic approach and in-depth analysis of discourses and landscape)."
- Water Alternatives Book Review
