Water: A Natural History

by Alice Outwater

Overview

An environmental engineer turned ecology writer relates the history of our waterways and her own growing understanding of what needs to be done to save this essential natural resource.

Water: A Natural History takes us back to the diaries of the first Western explorers; it moves from the reservoir to the modern toilet, from the grasslands of the Midwest to the Everglades of Florida, through the guts of a wastewater treatment plant and out to the waterways again. It shows how human-engineered dams, canals and farms replaced nature's beaver dams, prairie dog tunnels, and buffalo wallows. Step by step, Outwater makes clear what should have always been obvious: while engineering can de-pollute water, only ecologically interacting systems can create healthy waterways.

Important reading for students of environmental studies, the heart of this history is a vision of our land and waterways as they once were, and a plan that can restore them to their former glory: a land of living streams, public lands with hundreds of millions of beaver-built wetlands, prairie dog towns that increase the amount of rainfall that percolates to the groundwater, and forests that feed their fallen trees to the sea.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465037803
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	09/27/1997
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	949,281
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1360L (what's this?)

About the Author

Alice Outwater is an environmental engineer, a consultant in sludge management, and the coauthor, with Larry Gonick, of The Cartoon Guide to Environmental Science.

Editorial Reviews

A generation after the Clean Water Act was passed, one third of our waters are still polluted, according to the author, and only 6% of contamination is caused by industry. Environmental engineer Outwater, who managed scum and sludge removal in the Boston Harbor cleanup, reaches back into our history to chart the changes in our waters. Once, a tenth of the total land area was beaver-built wetland; the beaver's decline caused the first major shift in the nation's water cycle. The depressions buffalo made on the ground and the holes dug by prairie dogs collected rain and runoff that seeped down to the water table; our waterways have been transformed by the loss of these keystone species. Outwater looks at grasslands and forests, artificial waterways, agriculture, aqueducts and toilet bowls, sewers and sludge (she gives a guided tour of a waste-treatment plant). She makes a strong case for restoring natural systems to public landsrepopulating beaver, bison and prairie dogs. This book is a valuable addition to environmental literature and to our understanding of water. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

If the United States is to have clean water again, we need to bring back the beaver and the buffalo. This theory may seem far-fetched, but after reading this book, readers will see that it makes wonderful sense. The author is an environmental engineer, with experience in sludge management through her work on the late 1980s Boston Harbor cleanup project and consulting business. Her main premise is that legislative control of industrial waste is not sufficient to clean up our polluted waterways. Natural cleansing as water travels through its cycle is needed as well, but the systems that provide it have been severely interrupted. Outwater's explanations of how beaver and buffalo (and other keystone species, such as prairie dogs, alligators, and freshwater mussels, to name a few) alter the environment, and in the process create cleansing paths for water, are well constructed and informative. The chapter on sewage systems, though not dinner conversation, is nonetheless fascinating. This thought-provoking book belongs in all environmental collections, academic and public.Nancy J. Moeckel, Miami Univ. Lib., Oxford, Ohio

Library Journal

YAThis fascinating history of America's water systems concentrates on what the author describes as keystone species: beaver, prairie dogs, buffalo, freshwater mollusks, and alligators. The effect of European settlers on grasslands, forests, and waterways, and modern society's efforts to reshape the land and its waters are also covered, but the focus is on the beautiful, effective system of cleansing water that nature provided, and that we now must attempt to restore. Outwater worked on the Boston Harbor cleanup and found that the efforts to reduce industrial and municipal contaminants, while substantial, have had little effect on water quality in the last decade. She argues that those keystone species, "natures' engineers," must be allowed to flourish, at least on public lands, before our waterways can be restored to something close to their former state. YAs with an interest in the environment can browse through this highly readable resource and discover amazing facts, such as how the demand for beaver hats in 17th-century Europe caused widespread destruction of the wetlands in this country, and how the elimination of buffalo and prairie dogs degraded the streams and rivers of the plains and helped drain their aquifers.Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA

School Library Journal

The parts are considerably better than the whole in this disjointed work on water ("the blood of land") in North America.

Trained as an environmental engineer, Outwater is at home with the technical minutiae of such matters as water treatment and sewage handling, about which she writes with surprising vigor. As a collection of oddments on the human manipulation of water, her book has many virtues: You will learn, for instance, that Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was the first American town to develop a filtered water supply; you will also learn in great detail how "raw sludge brew" is separated, how methane from sewage is converted to a source of power, and how aqueducts work. Outwater is also good at describing some of the basic matters of river ecology, noting the importance to the food chain of free-flowing rivers that support high levels of nutrients, and she makes a good case for restoring beavers and prairie dogs to public lands as agents to increase the production of wetlands, a crucial element of the ecosystem largely reclaimed over the past two centuries for agricultural and municipal uses. But Outwater is less successful at weaving the complexities of human affairs into larger questions of nature and the environment. She relies too often on undigested facts rather than carefully interpreted information. What is missing from this book is an appreciation for water both as a natural element—there is precious little in these pages about the chemistry of water or on how rain happens to form and fall—and as a defining force in human history.

The focus is much narrower than the broad title and subtitle suggest, and readers will have to look elsewhere for a thorough natural history of water.

Kirkus Reviews