OK, so on my other blog, the main purpose is to document
what books I’ve been reading lately. Finally,
I’ve finished a book just for Watershed: Alice Outwater’s Water: A Natural History.
I want to see if I can sum up the book in a few short bits.
Part 1: In which Alice talks about water by talking about animals.
Chapters 1 &2:
You know what makes healthy water environments? Beavers. But we killed most all of the buck-toothed dam-building wonders to make hats.
Chapters 3&4:
You know what makes healthy water environments? Forests and trees. But we cut down most of the forests to clear land for farmin’ and livin’.
Chapter 5:
You know what makes healthy water environments? Prairie Dogs and Buffalo. But we killed most all of them to make way for cattle and heavily-plowed farms.
Chapter 6:
You know what makes healthy water environments? Grass. But we dug up most of the grasslands to grow other things we liked
better.
Part 2: In which Alice talks about water by talking about waste.
Chapter 7:
Dams are good for engineers, developers, and farmers, but really bad for salmon and most other things that live in rivers.
Chapter 8:
You know what makes healthy water environments? Mussels and alligators. You know what didn’t use to? The Army Corps of Engineers.
Chapter 9:
For all of civilization, we have struggled not to shit where we drink. Mostly, we have done a mixed job, but we tend to get better at it when loads of people die from tainted water. (By the way, those Romans did some good sewer work. Wonder if they were union contractors?)
Chapter 10:
Since WW2, we have created all new sorts of shit to dump into our water: detergent, rayon, and those damn tampon applicators. Shout out to the Region! “By the early 1960s, the sluggish Calumet River (to give just one example), which empties into Lake Michigan, was receiving a daily dose of about 100,000 pounds of oil, 35,000 pounds of ammonia, 3,500 pounds of phenols, and 3,000 pounds of cyanide from the dense industrial complex around Chicago, Gary, and Hammond.” Home Sweet Home!
(Quick Region Rat note:
When friends of mine talk about driving from the East Coast through Chicagoland to parts west, they almost always mention how bad the border between Indiana and Illinois smells. [Right at the 50 cent toll booth, for those in the know.] A stench even worse than
the slog pits of North New Jersey. And always, these folks say, “Yep, Gary Indiana, sure smells bad.” And I grin to myself and think: “Baby, that ain’t Gary! That’s Hammond! My hometown!” Now back to our book summation, already in progress.)
Chapter 11:
Alice Outwater went to MIT. (MIT grads name drop their school more than even Harvard folks.) She worked on the cleanup of Boston Harbor, one of many cleanups and improvements in the way we use and treat our water. But after all the treatment, after all the changes to the way industry dumps waste, after doing all we can, our water is still pretty polluted. Here comes the first money quote:
“Cleaning up industrial and municipal discharges has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and a third of the nation’s waterways are still polluted.”
Man o man, doesn’t that make you feel great? Anyway, Outwater then describes the massive effort that the Army Corps of Engineers put on to control the Kissimmee chain of lakes and Lake Okeechobee. But we have discovered that waterways that are made unnatural do a much worse job of cleaning themselves. So now (or at least in 1996 when the book came out) the Corps is starting to put things back the way they were.
Here’s the second money (slightly edited) quote, which I think sums up the entire book. It’s almost a thesis statement:
“Back when I was managing scum –”
OK, I just have to break in to say: that may be one of the best opening clauses to a sentence in the history of American non-fiction. OK, back to the quote:
“Back when I was managing scum, I learned that before people are willing to change the ways in which they impact the waterways, they have to understand how the system works.
…
There is the will torestore our land. We have just forgotten much of what is missing from it.
…
If the prairie dogs and the beavers are allowed to reestablish their ancestral populations on public land, the dirt will fly, and the waterways will begin to regain their former pristine glory. On public land, at least, it is time for the beavers and the prairie dogs to come home.”
What heartless rodent haters among us can’t agree to such a thing?