Salina - Written in Water: Messages of Hope for Earths Most Precious Resource

Peter Gleick

Fishing with the Cucap | Frank Clifford

Cleaning Up the Nashua | Marion Stoddart

Solving Water Shortages Through Ancient Knowledge | Anupam Mishra

Searching for a New Water Ethic | Sandra Postel

Reflecting on a Lifetime of Environmental Reporting | Fred Pearce

Witnessing the Consequences of Kenyas Flower Farms | Maude Barlow

Talking About Sanitation | Rose George

A Short Story | Shekhar Kapur

Breaking Places | Bill McKibben

Taking the Long View at Mount Everest | Alton C. Byers

Monitoring the Miners Canary in the Congo | Melanie Stiassny

Bringing Fresh Water and New Ideas to the Dominican Republic | Ellsworth Havens

Reviving Arid Villages | Rajendra Singh

Traveling the West by Horseback | William Waterway Marks

Building a Charity | Scott Harrison

Teaching Kids to Love Rain Forests | Lynne Cherry

Taxing Yourself | Alex Matthiessen

Recognizing the Importance of the Watershed | Christine Todd Whitman

Defending Water and Place | Jorge Recharte

Reclaiming Our Food | Frederick Kirschenmann

Caring for Watersheds | Dave Rosgen

Safeguarding Water | Kathy Robb

The Ultraviolet Solution to Clean Water | Ashok Gadgil

How We, Like Kalahari Bushmen, Can Trade Our Human Right to Water | James Workman

Stories from a Blue Planet | Alexandra Cousteau

I VE WORKED PROFESSIONALLY IN WATER for a long timebeginning in the 1970s. But like many of the authors in this collection, my connection to water goes back to long before my professional career, to childhood expeditions exploring the waters of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, the northern peninsula of Michigan, the inland lakes of Maine. I watched my buttoned-down, pale, officebound lawyer father go off on a two-week river trip riding wooden dories down the Grand Canyon and come back home a bearded, tanned, happy river god. He told me stories of riding the same river and seeing the same ancient canyon walls seen by an earlier one-armed river god, John Wesley Powell, whose own story inspired so many others to work on water. Ive now been down the same stretches of the Colorado River, knowing that decades before my father slept on the same riverbanks, saw those same etched rocks, felt the same sense of awe and wonder over the power of a river. If we protect the river, perhaps my children and their children and more generations will experience that same wonder and awe.

A little bit of oxygen and two little bits of hydrogen. Two of the most basic elements in the universe. Yet they combine to form a magical substance fundamental to life itself: water. We live on a watery planet, unique in our solar system and probably extraordinarily rare in the galaxy. Some have described Earth as the Goldilocks planet. Not too hot, or liquid water couldnt exist, and not too cold, or it would be a frozen wasteland. Just right. And just right it is, with a remarkable combination of water flowing in different forms through different stocks: vast oceans, ice caps, rivers, lakes, water vapor in the atmosphere, and the water that makes up the blood in our veins.

Just as the geological history of the planet can be written in the way the worlds water has ebbed and flowed among these stocks, so too the history of humanity can be written in the different Ages of Water and the way civilizations have understood, managed, and used water. And just as the history of humanity can be written in water, so too can the history of individuals, as the diverse, poetical, and often intensely personal essays in this book show. The power of water has etched the canyons of the planet and the canyons of our souls.

As humans emerged from the fog of evolution, our relationship to water has evolved. The First Age of Water saw simple and serendipitous uses of water. Hunter-gatherer tribes took water from wherever it was available for drinking and cleaning and used flowing water to remove their wastes, where natures biological processes recycled them. If water was bad, or unavailable, people moved or got sick and died, but life was short and brutish already.

The development of agriculture and the establishment of permanent communities began to change our relationship to water, ushering in the Second Age of Water. This age saw the first intentional manipulations of the hydrological cycle to move water from places of abundance to places of scarcity, to control floods and droughts, to separate water supply from wastes, and to treat contaminated water. These technological manipulations have become ever more sophisticated over time, as our engineering, chemical, and physical capabilities, knowledge, and expertise have grown. From the first small earthen or rock dams built in ancient Egypt, India, and Mesopotamia, we now seek to control the largest rivers in the world with huge concrete-and-steel infrastructure. From simple sand filters and the use of chemicals to clean and purify wastewaters, we now have the ability to turn the worst quality wastewaters into the purest drinking water using microscopic membranes, ultraviolet light, ozonation, and other techniques. From simple flooding of agricultural fields using rudimentary canals and hand-dug ditches, we now can accurately measure crop water needs and soil moisture with satellites and neutron probes and apply precise amounts of water to specific areas where and when we want.