Book Review:

Water: A Natural History, by Alice Outwater

Basic Books, 1996

There’s a remarkable little book, less than 200 pages long, which provides some real
insight into the relationship between humankind and nature. This book, entitled Water, A
Natural History, is divided into two major sets of essays, the first on the impact of settlers
on the natural water systems of North America from the 17th century on, the second on
the impact of engineered waterways throughout the 20th century.

It is the first section, “Dismantling The Natural System” which distinguishes this book
from the mass of critical writing about human behavior and the natural environment. In
this group of six essays, Outwater takes us on a remarkable exploration of the role of
beaver, ground hogs, and buffalo on the hydrogeology of the continent. Her writing
simply captures the imagination as she draws connections between the behavior of these
creatures, such as dam building, burrowing, and digging, and the entire pattern of water
movement through the land.

Her writing brings us back to a vivid understanding of what our country was like before it
was settled by Europeans, and specifically how close the relationship between animal
behavior and the very shape of ecological systems is. Take the beaver, for example. We
all know that these 40-inch long creatures have an impact on waterways, and it would not
surprise most people to know that a family of beavers can build a 35-foot long dam in a
week. But have you thought of the collective impact of a population of 200 million
beavers, the approximate number which lived here in the 1500’s?

Through their dam building behavior, beavers essentially “construct” wetlands, which
expand the area of transition zone between water and land and provide fertile habitat and
groundwater recharge. Each beaver impacted something like an acre of land in this way,
which, multiplied by the number of beavers, amounts to an area of more than 300,000
square miles of wetlands… a tenth of the entire land area of the United States. The
beaver population was decimated, down to today’s’ population of some 7 million, by the
year 1700. And for what? Hats. The beaver hat was so fashionable across Europe that
beaver skins bankrolled most of the early colonists, and they were the principal export
from the port of New York until the trade ended abruptly when the animals could no
longer be found easily.

Outwater tells a similar story about the other key species which impacted water patterns.
It turns out the prairie dog towns, which used to range across thousands of square miles,
with about fifty holes per acre, were inhabited by literally billions of individuals.
Because it was assumed that they competed with sheep and cattle for forage, and because
of the myth that horses broke their legs in prairie dog holes, they were systematically
poisoned. In 1920 alone, Outwater reports, 132,000 men spread 32 million acres with
poisoned grain. Today prairie dog town cover no more than 2 million acres, and the
hundreds of millions of burrows which had allowed rain to penetrate deep below the
surface layer and recharge the major aquifers are gone.

In its own understated way, Water is one of the most profoundly moving books about the
human relationship with natural ecosystems I’ve ever come across. This is because it
describes so convincingly a set of complex relationships that can never be recovered. I
had simply never imagined the way in which millions of buffalo, seeking to protect
themselves from misquito bites, could impact entire aquifers by digging which acted like
recharge ponds. She describes a scene of beautiful interdependence that we have so
profoundly destroyed without a single clue as to what we were doing.

Although the writing in Water has some weaknesses, most notably in the final chapter
where the author brings her own career as a wastewater engineer into focus in a
somewhat disjointed fashion, this is a “must read” for anyone who knows that nature and
natural ecosystems are worth preserving. It makes some connections for us that had been
invisible, and gives us valuable clues about many of the other ties between biodiversity
and a healthy natural environment. By allowing us to begin to grasp the enormity of the
changes we have collectively imposed on the landscape, she offers inspiration and
ammunition to those of us striving to draw the line in front of what we have left.