The Walsh Water Group conducts comparative anthropological and historical research on the social use and management of water, with the goal of understanding and addressing the crises of scarcity and contamination that confront humans around the world today. The Group employs a critical, creative, ethnographic method in dealing with these intractable problems. We take a holistic perspective, integrating discussions of infrastructure, political economy, and culture in order to shed light on long-term trends in water systems across scales.