Water is the foundation of civilization.

Despite its growing scarcity and preciousness to life, ironically, water is also man’s most misgoverned, inefficiently allocated and profligately wasted natural resource. Societies’ own poor management of water, in other words, is a key component of their water scarcity crises. In market democracies and authoritarian sites, alike, modern governments still routinely maintain monopolistic control over their nation’s supply, pricing and allocation; commonly, it is distributed as a social good, as political largess to favored interest groups, and in overweeningly ambitious public projects. 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. Rarely is any inherent value ascribed to the water itself. Only the cost of capturing and distributing it is routinely accounted. Nor is any cost ascribed to the degradation of the water ecosystem from whence it comes and to which, often in a polluted condition, it ultimately returns. By belonging to everyone and being the private responsibility of no one, water for most of history has been consumed greedily and polluted recklessly in a classic case of a “tragedy of the commons.”

Steven Solomon: Water, The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, p. 376.  see Http://water.parkoffletter.org