Water: A Natural History Book

Nominated for the Winship/PEN New England Award

In Water: A Natural History, Alice Outwater takes us on a journey that begins 500 years ago, back to the wardrobe records of the kings of France and the diaries of the first Western explorers, to recover a lost knowledge -- how the land cleans its water. Water moves from the reservoir to the 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. Step by step, we come to learn what should have been done from the beginning: A complex ecological system long kept American water remarkably clean but as we have randomly removed necessary components from it, we have simplified the system to the point where it can no longer do its job. While engineering can depollute water, only these ecologically interacting systems can create healthy waterways. Water is the unforgettable story of the symbiosis that existed between the country's water, the land from which it springs and the life the two support together. It is a story that none of us who hope to live on this planet can afford to miss.