Water

A Natural History

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By Alice Outwater

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$11.99

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$15.99 CAD

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  1. ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD
  2. Trade Paperback $16.50 $20.00 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around August 6, 2008. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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.
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Genre:

On Sale
Aug 6, 2008
Page Count
224 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780786725816

Alice Outwater

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.

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