Varda Burstyn would like to make light of it but, in truth, there’s just too much of an ecological mess out there to inject much levity.

Burstyn, who has been championing the environment, and getting under the establishment’s skin, for more years than she cares to reveal, is talking about water — specifically Water Inc. (Penguin, $37), her novel.

Now creating ripples on two continents and expected to wash ashore later this year in Spain, Korea and Portugal, Burstyn’s book, which shapes a very real world water crisis into an eco-thriller, could well be a tsunami-in-waiting for wanton water-wasters the world over.

Water Inc. is selling so briskly in Canada, Britain and the U.S. that it’s about to go into its second printing. And it’s starting to consume a lot of Burstyn’s time.

A story about big business-government collusion and a megaproject to pipe water from the Quebec wilderness into drought-stricken parts of the U.S., the novel is becoming a lightning rod for everything that’s wretched about the way we treat our biosphere.

While there’s still as much water on the planet today as there was four billion years ago, it’s what we’re doing with it and to it that gets Burstyn’s goat. As a one-time vice-chair of Greenpeace Canada, she’s made the environment her business for 35 years. And, increasingly, she’s appalled.

Burstyn says the novel is designed as a wake-up call for anyone who doesn’t realize the planet has a water problem — a big one.

Water, and fisheries, have just been identified in a four-year study by 1,300 of the world’s scientists as the most degraded and overused ecosystems in the biosphere. Fresh water supplies, in fact, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported in April, “are now so degraded that they are well beyond levels that can sustain existing demands, let alone provide for future needs.”

Add to that the reports from disparate parts of the world: Half the planet’s population lives in countries where water tables are falling and wells are going dry; a third of the world’s population will be seriously short of water by 2025; the UN says water will be one of the major problems of the 21st century and warns there could be water wars within a decade.

Water Inc. is the first in a trilogy that Burstyn will use to flag public interest in the politics and economics of the environment.

Water Inc. has already been likened to stories by techno-thriller writer Michael Crichton, whose novels Jurassic Park, Timeline, State of Fear and Andromeda Strain, among others, have earned him the title “king of catastrophe.”

But Burstyn prefers to call her novel “an antidote” to Crichton’s work. Which may be so. Water Inc. will scare the pants off anyone worried about where their next drink of water will come from — but it’s told to them from a non-technological point of view.

Ironically, even as she was finishing her book, President George W. Bush was threatening to pre-empt it as a piece of fiction, telling world journalists of hopes to pipe water from the Canadian north to relieve drought-stricken midwestern and southern states.

And that’s exactly what Water Inc. envisions: A powerful consortium of businessmen in cahoots with a Quebec cabinet minister to destabilize that province and strike a deal to pipe its water from the north into the U.S. The consortium is headed by corporate visionary William Greele, a billionaire who easily forms a cabal of business leaders.

A Seattle aerospace engineer gets wind of the planned pipeline and a cast of conservationists is quickly assembled to block the pipeline.

This “replumbing of the planet” is already being seen in Quebec, Burstyn says. Just a week ago, the Quebec government gave unanimous approval to the development of public-private partnerships, which could lead to the privatizing of water.

“People are waking up one morning to find a bottling company has arrived and is just sucking the stuff out of the ground.”

© The Vancouver Province 2005