Entire American states risk being uninhabitable deserts in the future due to pushed anthropization and unbridled urbanization. But it is the entire planet that is losing its most precious asset: water. Daria Addabbo's photographs, taken mainly in California, Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas, are able to bring the American experience of the climate crisis to an emotional dimension, experiencing changes that belong to geological eras over a lifetime. . In these pages there remains the waiting, suspension, adaptation, loss, confusion and blindness. Daria Addabbo has not limited herself to portraying the absence of water as a chronic condition of the contemporary West, but she has managed to photograph the thirst of Americans and their soil. The images are accompanied by the text by Alessandro Portelli: a reasoning on water in four chapters, which mixes symbolic, cultural, political and economic levels. The water flows effortlessly, free from barriers. Melville, in the short novel Benito Cereno, praises water as a "republican element", a metaphor for equality that derives from social mobility. Water belongs to everyone. Instead, the water, in these areas, and beyond, is harnessed in aqueducts, barriers and dams, a full expression of the domination of the economy over nature. What follows? The westward expansion of the modern urban lifestyle, uncontrolled anthropization, unbridled urban development that transforms rivers and valleys into an asphalt desert, which generates another desert upstream to quench its thirst.