Steven Solomon has written a masterful history of what is becoming the world’s scarcest critical resource.

In "Water" (HarperCollins; 608 pages; $27.99), he illustrates how water has played a key role in the turning points of civilization, eventually leading to the rise and fall of great powers. After eons as hunter-gatherers, following herds of animals from waterhole to waterhole, some tribes began settling down and became farmers. Early walled irrigated farming and trading settlements ultimately arose in locations favored with good water supplies.

With the development of recent centuries’ plow agriculture, the mastery of quenching red hot iron in water to make steel tools was another water-related boon to mankind. That this technology was used for weaponry as well led groups to fight for power over lands with natural waterways, where flowing water powered grain mills and eventually factories.

Solomon demonstrates connections between waterwheel mechanization and myriad advances in commerce and invention. Waterwheel-powered paper mills led to the invention of the printing press, and waterwheels played a decisive role in medieval Europe’s development of the blast furnace to smelt iron to supply church bells. By the 14th century, waterwheels drove the spindles in silk mills and later generated the power that spun cotton and other lower-priced textiles. Export and trade, transported by seas, rivers and canals, led to the profit-making logic of marketing and then to Europe’s economic rise.

Although water is the only common substance to exist in nature as a liquid, a gas and a solid, until the early 1700s it primarily was used in its liquid state. The expansive force of steam — water in its gaseous form — has been understood since antiquity, yet no one had tried to apply the knowledge to a practical technology. The first successful, but primitive, steam engine was built in England in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen and used to remove water from coal mines. The historic breakthrough powered the Industrial Revolution.

The progression of water use in energy production — from simple channeled water current, to waterwheels, to coolant for nuclear plants — has led to major a environmental challenge: urban water pollution. At this point in the book, Solomon turns from water’s past to today’s recognition of its perilous future.

In the 20th century, water use grew twice as fast as populations, he writes.

“Despite its growing scarcity and preciousness to life, ironically, water is also man’s most misgoverned, inefficiently allocated and profligately wasted natural resource,” Solomon warns. “Societies’ own poor management of water, in other words, is a key component of their water scarcity crises. ... Almost universally, governments still treat water as if it were a limitless gift of nature to be freely dispensed by any authority with the power to exploit it. In contrast to oil and nearly every other natural commodity, water is largely exempted from market discipline.”

We are reminded that, at the minimum, a person needs about two to three quarts of clean, freshwater daily just to stay alive; a person would die within a week without it. Every day, hundreds of millions of people across the world walk miles to fetch enough clean water for their family’s basic survival.

About 70 percent of the Earth is covered by water. But only 2.5 percent of it is fresh, and most of that is locked away in glaciers, ice caps and underground aquifers. Water accessible through the water cycle of evaporation and precipitation is a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the whole. Freshwater is fast overtaking oil as the world’s scarcest critical resource.

Solomon writes that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the global water crisis, but he does make some suggestions. There is room for a few new big dams on some little developed rivers in poor countries. For desperately needed storage against droughts, a return to traditional methods such as water tanks, small irrigation cooperatives and communally maintained earthen dams could be part of the equation. Solutions must be worked out locally, regionally and nationally on a trial-and-error basis. However, the big point is that organization, more than technology, holds the key to getting through the freshwater crisis.

For the United States, he maps a threefold role: Set an example that others can imitate by creating a green governing mechanism; use the bounty from increased water productivity to produce more food and staples for export to those who live in water-poor countries; and support international efforts to mitigate climate change and water-borne diseases.

Steven Solomon is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, Business Week, The Economist, Forbes and Esquire, and has commented on American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” He is also the author of “The Confidence Game.” Solomon lives in Washington.

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AN EXCERPT

Ogallala’s “fossil water” was the drop-by-drop accumulation from prehistoric ice ages — one of the largest known subterranean reservoirs that existed deep inside the planet’s bowels in varying depths. Around the planet there was up to 100 times more fresh water locked away in aquifers than flowed freely and readily accessibly on the surface. Such fossil aquifers existed like nonrenewable, stand-alone reservoirs insulated from the planet’s continuous, natural hydrological recycling of surface and shallow groundwater through evaporation and precipitation. They recharged so slowly — Ogallala only a half an inch per year from the trickle down from the surface — that they effectively could be used only once before depleting like an empty gas tank.