Read by Alex Southwick

Water is the essence of life - yet across the world, it's vanishing. Rivers are drying, aquifers collapsing, and once-fertile plains turning to dust. From Cape Town to California, scarcity is no longer a distant threat but a daily reality. In The Thirsting Earth, Alex Southwick journeys across a planet running out of its most vital resource. Through powerful reportage and vivid human stories, Southwick uncovers the fault lines where drought, politics, and inequality collide - and where innovation and resilience are beginning to take root. We meet the communities reviving ancient water-harvesting traditions, scientists reimagining desalination, and activists fighting to reclaim water as a common good rather than a commodity. Together, they offer a glimpse of a future where survival depends not on conquest of nature, but on collaboration with it. Urgent, humane, and unforgettable, The Thirsting Earth is both a warning and a testament - a chronicle of crisis, and a call to rediscover our most elemental connection to the world

Mode of access: World Wide Web