A series of photographs by Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky, this book explores humanity's increasingly difficult and fraught relationship with the world's most vital natural resource. Over the past five years, Burtynsky has traveled the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to the banks of the Ganges, reconstructing the increasingly fragmented water cycle in an ambitious panorama. In stunningly colorful aerial images, many of them near-abstract, Burtynsky considers water in a multitude of ways: as a provider of energy, essential to the flourishing of harmonious ecosystems, a key element of religious rituals, and also as a resource in dangerously low supply. Many of these images draw our attention less to water itself than to the systems humans have devised to channel, harness, and control it. Photographs of maze-like stepwells in India, gigantic dams and aquaculture rights-of-way in China, beachfront developments in Florida, and irrigation networks in the American West are presented alongside cracked landscapes, dry riverbeds, and salt and shrimp farms in strange and disturbing colors. Many of these photographs are among Burtynsky's most abstract works to date; irrigation pivots evoke alignments of totem poles, and agricultural fields dizzying biomorphic compositions. By turns elegant and haunting, these images oscillate between the worlds of painting and photography to offer a striking portrait of water, which poses a question to past, present, and future humanity about its relationship to nature.

Edward Burtynsky's memorable industrial landscapes are included in the collections of more than fifty museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress in Washington, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His honors include the TED Prize, the Rencontres d'Arles Dialogue of Humanity Award, the Roloff Benny Prize, and the Flying Elephants Foundation Prize. He holds six honorary doctorates and was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006. Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic Society. He combines "the qualities of a scientist, a poet, and a passionate advocate for diversity." The author of seventeen books, he studied at Harvard University, where he earned degrees in anthropology and biology and a Ph.D. in ethnobotany. His extensive filmography includes Light at the Edge of the World, written and produced for the National Geographic Channel. His book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest received the 2012 Samuel Johnson Award. Russell Lord is the curator of photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He previously held positions at MoMA and the Harvard Art Museum and has written extensively on the history of photography. He is currently working on two books: Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument and a book on the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions he has curated include What is a Photograph? and Photography, Sequence, and Time and Reinventing Nature: Art from the School of Fontainebleau. His research focuses primarily on the relationship between photography and other visual media.