Overview

In Purified, veteran journalist Peter Annin shows that wastewater has become a surprising weapon in America's war against water scarcity. Annin probes deep into the water reuse movement in five water-strapped states--California, Texas, Virginia, Nevada, and Florida. He drinks beer made from purified sewage, visits communities where purified sewage came to the rescue, and examines how one of the nation's largest wastewater plants hopes to recycle one hundred percent of its wastewater by 2035. At each stop, listeners come face to face with the people who are struggling for, and against, recycled water. While the current filtration technology transforms sewage into something akin to distilled water--free of chemicals and safe to drink--water recycling's challenge isn't technology. It's terminology. Concerns about communities being used as ""guinea pigs,"" sensationalist media coverage, and taglines like ""toilet to tap"" have repeatedly crippled water recycling efforts. Potable water recycling has become the hottest frontier in the race for expanded water supply options. But can public opinion turn in time to avoid the worst consequences? Purified's fast-paced narrative cuts through the fearmongering and misinformation to make the case that recycled water is direly needed in the climate-change era. Water cannot be taken for granted anymore--and that includes sewage.

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A veteran conflict and environmental journalist, Peter Annin spent more than a decade reporting on a wide variety of issues for Newsweek. For many years he specialized in coverage of domestic terrorism and other conflicts, including the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and the Branch Davidian standoff outside Waco, Texas. He has also spent many years writing about the environment, including droughts in the Southwest, hurricanes in the Southeast, wind power on the Great Plains, and the causes and consequences of the ""dead zone"" in the Gulf of Mexico. After his time at Newsweek, Annin became associate director of the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, a nonpartisan national nonprofit that organizes educational fellowships for midcareer environmental journalists. In September 2006 he published his first book, The Great Lakes Water Wars, which has been called the definitive work on the Great Lakes water diversion controversy, and received the Great Lakes Book Award for nonfiction in 2007. From 2010 to 2015 Annin served as managing director of the University of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative, which targets the interrelated problems of invasive species, land use, and climate change, focusing on their synergistic impacts on water resources. In 2018, Annin published an extensively revised and updated edition of Water Wars which was recognized with a Great Lakes Leadership Award in Communication Excellence from the Great Lakes Protection Fund in 2020. He currently serves as director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin and a master's in international affairs from Columbia University in New York. David de Vries, an Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator and veteran stage actor and director, spent three years in the cast of Wicked and was the last Lumiere in the Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast. He has also appeared in numerous films and voiced commercial campaigns for companies large and small, including American Express, AT&T, UPS, Motorola, Georgia-Pacific, Delta Airlines, Coca Cola, and Ford, among others. He can be seen in a number of feature films, including The Founder, The Accountant, Captain America: Civil War, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. On television, his credits include House of Cards, Nashville, and Halt and Catch Fire.

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