Award-winning reporter and bestselling author
Fishman—a three-time winner of the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism—is a renowned investigative and explanatory journalist. He is the author of The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, the bestselling book about water in a generation, chosen as a common read for a dozen schools and universities.
He spent six months covering the Challenger space shuttle disaster as a national reporter for The Washington Post, and has reported on space ever since, for The Atlantic, Fast Company, and Smithsonian. Fishman is also the author of The Wal-Mart Effect, the New York Times bestseller that was the first book to get inside Wal-Mart and explain how the world’s largest company really works. Fishman is a contributor to The Atlantic, Fast Company, and Smithsonian, and is also the co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, A Curious Mind, about the power of curiosity, with Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.
View All Speakers1:30 PM-2:30 PM
The big splash: How water will shape our future
Water is going to be the most important and most contentious resource for almost every country in the world. Within the next 50 years, water will become a source of conflict between countries, a competitive issue among companies, and will require a whole new way of thinking for everyone on the planet.
Charles Fishman, author of the most influential water book in a generation, The Big Thirst, has circled the globe to find the people tackling and solving water problems—from the sheep farms of Australia, to the slums of Delhi, to the high-tech factories of the United States. Fishman will show how water challenges will touch each of us, and also how tackling those problems can create both a competitive advantage and a critical sense of security.
In a fireside chat with Shaun Haney, RealAgriculture, the conversation will explore how the industries, organizations, and communities that see the tumultuous future of water, and prepare for it, will be the ones that thrive.
