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When I think of my 6-year-old daughter and how she and the rest of her generation will spend their lives coping with mounting climate change, nothing worries me more than water. Water, it’s often said, is life, and nowhere is this truer than in California, where Chiara and I live. Control of water has shaped the Golden State’s history, enabling the mega-growth of our great cities, transforming the Central Valley into an agricultural superpower that produces most of America’s fruits and vegetables, creating personal fortunes for some and ruin for others, and provoking endless trickery and squabbling along the way. It was in California, after all, that Mark Twain penned his imperishable line, "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over."

Modern residents of California often forget that the state is a desert; the next 50 years will remind them. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that record drought "will become the norm" [my emphasis] across the western third of the United States by 2050. Rising temperatures will also shrink the snowpack atop the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, which currently supply roughly 40 percent of California’s water. In Yosemite National Park, "the way things are going, [the] glaciers will be entirely gone within a few decades," according to Greg Stock, a geologist with the National Park Service. "If they dry up, I don’t know of any way to replace that water."

Meanwhile, humans make matters worse through their reckless consumption of water. Cynthia Barnett begins her hopeful, instructive book, Blue Revolution, by reporting the grotesque self-indulgence found in Granite Bay, California, an upscale suburb east of Sacramento where backyard swimming pools and waterfalls lead residents to use nearly 500 gallons of water per person each day, compared with a national average of 150. Aiding and abetting such waste is the city’s policy of flat water rates: residents pay the same no matter how much water they use.

California’s water vulnerabilities and wastefulness are mirrored around the world, and again climate change exacerbates the problem. In Asia, at least 500 million people obtain some of their drinking and irrigation water from the glaciers atop the Himalayas; NASA scientist Yao Tandong has estimated that 40 percent of these glaciers will disappear by 2050. In South America, most of the glaciers atop the Andes are expected to disappear by 2030.

Floods attract more media attention (witness the TV coverage of the June 2011 floods in the U.S. Midwest), but history suggests that globally, drought will be the overriding danger as climate change intensifies in the years ahead. "Floods kill thousands, drought can kill millions," goes the adage recited by Robert Wilkinson, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

But much can be done to avoid the worst scenarios. Task number one is to halt the global warming that drives climate change. Even as we do so, however, we must recognize that the laws of physics and chemistry ensure that average global temperatures will keep rising for at least another 50 years no matter how quickly emissions decline. Thus my daughter and the two billion other people around the world who are less than 20 years old have been involuntarily conscripted into what I call Generation Hot.

If the members of Generation Hot are to survive this unhappy fate, all of us must pursue a dual strategy that experts summarize as "avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable." That is, we must reduce global warming soon enough to prevent unmanageable impacts -- for example, 80 feet of sea-level rise -- and at the same time we must adapt to the impacts that are already unavoidable. In the case of water, humans will have to master a difficult balancing act, for climate change will bring not only more extreme droughts but also stronger storms and therefore fiercer floods -- in other words, both too much water and too little.

The good news is that cutting-edge leaders around the world are already making impressive progress, as Barnett reports. And some of the most extraordinary results have been achieved in some of the unlikeliest of places.

Even by the bloated standards of the United States, San Antonio, Texas, had long been a water glutton. Average daily per capita consumption was 225 gallons. In 1991 environmentalists sued the Department of the Interior and the Fish and Wildlife Service, arguing that overpumping of the city’s aquifer was endangering fish and salamanders. Two years later, a U.S. district court judge agreed and ordered San Antonio to make "a fundamental change" in water management.

City planners responded by waging a war on waste, and soon discovered that greater water efficiency is the cheapest, most environmentally friendly way to find new water -- just as improving energy efficiency is the greenest, most lucrative source of new energy. The local public water utility initiated a program called Plumbers to People that fixes leaky pipes of low-income residents for free. And -- surprise! -- the real estate industry pitched in too. Most air-conditioners are water-cooled; large commercial units can guzzle thousands of gallons a day, much of which drips off as condensate. Rex Poppy, an engineer for one of San Antonio’s leading property companies, devised a way to recycle this condensate (and save considerable amounts of water and money) that became standard local practice. Most remarkably, San Antonio got all stakeholders, even irrigators, to support a city ordinance that made it outright illegal to waste water. New homes and businesses were thenceforth required to install high-efficiency toilets and appliances, while irrigation was allowed only in certain places and only between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 a.m.

As a result, local per capita water consumption fell to 115 gallons a day -- half the city’s previous rate and well below the U.S. average. The advocacy group Alliance for Water Efficiency, one of the unsung heroes in Blue Revolution, praises San Antonio’s efforts as the farthest-reaching in the nation.

Still, such enlightened self-interest is not spreading quickly enough to save America’s aquifers from unsustainable rates of depletion, Barnett asserts.Which raises a question: if saving water makes so much sense, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Barnett’s explanation is that America lacks "a water ethic." Drawing on Aldo Leopold’s championing of "a land ethic" in A Sand County Almanac, Barnett seems to mean a mix of legal strictures (such as the judge’s ruling in San Antonio), economic incentives (such as charging progressively higher rates to heavier users), and above all civic sentiment (just as littering has in recent decades come to be shunned as an antisocial act, so should wasting water).

Just how to foster a water ethic is, alas, not fleshed out in enough detail in Blue Revolution, though Barnett does identify some of the chief obstacles. Individual complacency is partly to blame. The average American has come to take clean, abundant water for granted; per capita consumption today is four times what it was in 1950. One of the not-so-fun facts reported in this book is that lawns -- which Barnett defines to include not only grass around homes but also sports fields and highway median strips -- have become America’s single largest crop by planted area. As much as 19 trillion gallons of water a year are used to irrigate this "51st state."

Corporate greed, political grandstanding, and other institutional scourges are even bigger culprits. America tends to spurn water efficiency, Barnett argues, because "politicians want to bring home visible new projects…. Check out any multimillion-dollar water project in the nation, and behind it you will find a powerful set of backers whose profits are directly proportional to its size."

Developing a water ethic was the root of the turnaround in San Antonio, Barnett claims, and the same has been true in the Netherlands and Singapore, two foreign success stories recounted here. Such an ethic cannot be imposed solely from above, judging from the examples in Blue Revolution, though visionary leadership (and the occasional lawsuit) are important. Rather, recognizing the finite, irreplaceable nature of water and valuing it accordingly must be nurtured at the grass roots. The ethic begins in conversations with relatives, neighbors, and co-workers and spreads outward and upward from there. It took three years of public discussion for San Antonio to hammer out its pathbreaking water ordinance, but because all stakeholders felt represented in the process, the new approach -- or ethic, if you prefer -- enjoys widespread support and seems unlikely to be reversed.

While cautioning that no two localities will implement the ethic in exactly the same way, Barnett does sketch some of the essential principles. Americans should "value water, from appreciating local streams to pricing water right." We should "work together to use less and less -- rather than fight each other to grab more and more." We should "keep water local" and "leave as much as prudently possible in nature… so that our children and grandchildren, with the benefit of time and evolving knowledge, can make their own decisions about water."

Turning these ideals into reality will take political will and courage, Barnett acknowledges. If Blue Revolution fails to provide a blueprint for how to achieve this transformation, its on-the-ground reporting nevertheless demonstrates that the tools are there, ready to be grasped. In the name of Generation Hot, let the revolution begin.