Nova Scotia resident Marq de Villiers won a Governor General’s Literary Award for his 1999 book, Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, a look at the political, environmental, and cultural uses and misuses of the planet’s most essential natural commodity. A decade and a half on, with climate change a pressing issue, de Villiers returns with a companion volume that examines, among other things, the legal ramifications of globalization on the subject of who “owns” the world’s increasingly precious and imperilled supply of drinkable water.