Water: A Natural History

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. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A plea for ecologial conservation that focuses on "keystone species" such as beavers, prairie dogs, and mollusks, describing how "nature's engineers" must be allowed to revive our decimated waterways.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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 lands?repopulating beaver, bison and prairie dogs. This book is a valuable addition to environmental literature and to our understanding of water.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Outwater, an environmental engineer, wrote this surprising, engagingly lucid treatise after participating in the Boston Harbor cleanup and discovering that the sources of water pollution are not as simple as we once believed. Tainted water continues to be a problem even though industries no longer dump massive quantities of toxic chemicals directly into lakes and rivers. What scientists have found is that polluted water is the result of extensive changes to the natural water cycle, changes associated with the habitat-destroying activities of people. Outwater begins her eye-opening explanation by describing the beneficial effects that beavers and prairie dogs, North America's natural hydrologists, have on the water cycle, then chronicles what went wrong after those species were brought to the brink of extinction, crises related to deforestation and the paving over and plowing under of wetlands and grasslands. If water is "the blood of the land--always in motion," then everything that impedes its cleansing flow is a problem and fair game for environmentalists. Donna Seaman