Season 3 of the Water Shelf Podcast begins with a bang! Aaron Mead, author of Body in a Barrel: A Las Vegas Mafia Crime Novella, talks with me about his fictional treatment of Lake Mead’s slow, climate-change-induced unveiling of long-immersed depths. Building on his written Water Shelf interview, Mr. Mead discusses his water industry and theological studies roots, two layers that contributed complexity as well as publication challenges for his path-breaking work.

Mr. Mead is a Senior Engineer with Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

David Zetland gives a powerhouse interview on his many decades of writing on water, the commons, and climate change. He discusses his recently reissued book Living with Water Scarcity (2014/2023) which does a wonderful job explaining water economics to the general reader. We also get into why water managers fail and, in his opinion, why academic publishing has lost its luster.

Professor Zetland is a senior university lecturer in political-economy at Leiden University College in the Netherlands. In addition to Living, he has published The End of Abundance (2011), The Best of Aguanomics (2018), and The Little Book of The Commons (2022) - all freely available for download at kysq.org.

Note to listeners: The interview recording contains minor sound quality issues, probably due to the long-distance conversation.

In this episode, Sayd Randle joins us from Kathmandu, Nepal, to talk about her fascinating new book, Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2025). We discuss her ethnographic approach to water and the challenges and opportunities of localizing urban water supplies. She also gives us a peek at what she's now working on halfway around the world.

Dr. Randle is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Singapore Management University.