Where the water goes Life and death along the Colorado River

Review by New York Times Review

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, by Arundhati Roy. (Vintage, $16.95.) In her first novel since her Booker Prize-winning book, "The God of Small Things," Roy explores India's political turmoil, particularly the Kashmiri separatist movement, through the lives of social outcasts. Our reviewer, Karan Mahajan, praised the story's "sheer fidelity and beauty of detail," writing that Roy the novelist has returned "fully and brilliantly intact." WHERE THE WATER GOES: Life and Death Along the Colorado River, by David Owen. (Riverhead, $16.) The Colorado is in peril. Drought, climate change and overuse are draining the river - an important source of water, electricity and food. Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, visits farms, reservoirs and power plants along its route, and considers what actions could help preserve the river. WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE SOLOMONS, by Bethany Ball. (Grove, $16.) A financial scandal threatens to upend the branches of a Jewish family in this wry debut novel. When Marc, an Israeli transplant in Los Angeles, is implicated in a laundering scheme, the Solomons back on a Jordan River Valley kibbutz must try to make sense of the news. Balancing literary and political history, Ball renders her characters with sensitivity and strains of dark humor. MARTIN LUTHER: Renegade and Prophet, by Lyndal Roper. (Random House, $20.) A penetrating biography focuses on Luther's upbringing, religious formation and inner life as he articulated his theological arguments and grappled with fame and scrutiny. "I want to understand Luther himself," Roper, a historian at Oxford, writes of her project. "I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body." RISE THE DARK, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/ Little, Brown, $15.99.) In Montana, a messianic leader plans to shut down a power grid that supplies electricity to half the country, with a woman taken hostage to ensure the scheme goes through. Her captor is the same man that Markus Novak, a private investigator and the central character, believes killed his wife, drawing together a painful personal reckoning and terrorist plot. SURFING WITH SARTRE: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning, by Aaron James. (Anchor, $15.95.) The author, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, outlines the system of meaning underpinning his favorite pastime. As James writes, if he were to debate with Sartre, one of his intellectual heroes, he'd draw on the tao of surfing: its ideas about freedom, power, happiness and control.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Although considerably shorter than the nation's longest river, the Missouri, and much narrower in most spots than the mighty Mississippi, the Colorado River nonetheless rivals the other two in the number of states it crosses and the amount of people served by its circuitously flowing waters. Often referred to as the American Nile for its multiple uses and the indelible marks it has carved into the southwestern landscape, including the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River captivated New Yorker staff writer Owen (The Conundrum, 2012) enough over the years to inspire this eloquent survey of the waterway's geography and its many impacts on nearby life. Interweaving descriptions from his own explorations of the river on the ground and in the air, Owen offers a wealth of engrossing and often surprising details about the complicated nature of water rights, recreational usage (worth $26 billion a year), and depletion threats from climate change and the fracking industry. With water shortages looming across the globe, Owen's work provides invaluable lessons on the rewards and pitfalls involved in managing an essential natural resource.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The Colorado River, the main water source of America's desert Southwest, flows sorely vexed to the sea-almost-in this revealing investigation of hydroecology in extremis. New Yorker contributor Owen (The Conundrum) follows the Colorado from its Rocky Mountain headwaters to the point where it trickles out in the Mexican desert, well short of its historical outlet to the sea, visiting the massive infrastructures-the mighty Hoover Dam, giant pipes, pumping stations, canals, and humble sprinklers-that divert its waters for millions of uses. Along the way he encounters people whose lives entwine with the river, including lawyers wrangling endlessly over arbitrary apportionment rules-existing allotments grant various users more water than actually flows in the river-and utility planners trying to stretch the flow among a growing population, as well as ordinary farmers, boaters, and the quirky subculture of transient RV camps on its banks. Through his reportage, Owen teases out the contradictions of the complex issues surrounding the Colorado: water conservation efforts, he finds, can do more harm than good because allegedly "wasted" water often returns to replenish the river and aquifers. Rather than simply bemoan environmental degradation, Owen presents a deeper, more useful analysis of the subtle interplay between natural and human needs. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

New Yorker staff writer Owen (The -Conundrum; Green Metropolis) tackles the twisted history of the Colorado River. Water rights drafted in the gold rush era and formalized on miscalculations in the early 20th century are still controversial today. Farmers, businesses, cities, states, and Mexico clash over a water supply constantly decreasing as a result of changes in weather and population. The author includes the exploration and development history of the waterway and biographies of legendary figures such as John Wesley Powell, who led a three-month expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers, and riverboat pilot Nellie Bush. Owen travels the length of the Colorado from the headwaters to the delta (now dry) by plane, by car, and on foot, talking to stakeholders about their issues. This purposefully rambling narrative frames the discussion of water as a vital continental concern. VERDICT An essential read for not only the environmentally minded but also all citizens who are curious about where their water comes from. Highly recommended for public, school, and academic libraries. [Prepub Alert, 10/10/15.]-Catherine Lantz, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Travels along the endangered Colorado River and its tributaries reveal the challenges of providing water to 36 million people throughout the West.New Yorker staff writer Owen (The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse, 2012, etc.) elaborates on the critique he presented in his previous book, this time focusing on one crucial natural resource: water. Devising a sustainable water policy, he argues convincingly, is complicated and sometimes counterintuitive. "Many of the technological wonders that we think of as solutions to our gathering environmental problems actually exacerbate other environmental problems," he asserts. Wind turbines, electric car batteries, and computer chips, for example, depend on the extraction of rare elements from places "where labor and land are cheap, and where regulatory oversight is minimal." This extraction damages land, ecosystems, rivers, and, not least, miners' lives. Foremost among the many problems inherent in water use from the Colorado is salt. Because salt does not settle out the way silt does, it remains in recycled water, making that water unsuitable for drinking and agriculture. In high enough concentrations, plants cannot grow in topsoil saturated with salt: the salt flats of Utah stand as an example. If lawns and golf courses use salt-laden water, they can add tons of salt to every acre of soil. Following the river's winding route, Owen interviewed environmental experts, farmers, RV drivers, and politicians, investigating water policy, laws, and conservation strategies. In California, he visited the agricultural Imperial Valley, irrigated by "a valley-sized plumbing system," and the Salton Sea, "created by an act of engineering imbecility" that involved diverting the Colorado River. The largest lake in California is now desolate, saltier than the Pacific Ocean and unable to sustain the fish and birds that once thrived in it. The author chides off-the-grid environmentalists who are willfully blind to the energies they use to sustain their lives and makes a case for city life as environmentally responsible. As Owen amply proves, "water issues are never only about water." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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THE HEADWATERS Our pilot, David Kunkel, asked me to retrieve his oxygen bottle from under my seat, and when I handed it to him he gripped the plastic breathing tube with his teeth and opened the valve. We had taken off from Boulder not long before and were flying over Rocky Mountain National Park, thirty miles to the northwest. Kunkel was navigating with the help of an iPad Mini, which was resting on his legs. "People don't usually think altitude is affecting them," he said. "But if you ask them to count backward from a hundred by sevens they have trouble." What struck me at that moment was not how high we were but how low: a little earlier, we had flown within what seemed like hailing distance of the sheer east face of Longs Peak, and now, as Kunkel banked steeply to the right to give us a better view of a stream at the bottom of a narrow valley, his wing tip appeared to pass just feet from the jagged declivity beneath us. Snow had fallen in the mountains during the night, and I half expected it to swirl up in our wake. The other passenger, sitting in the copilot's seat and leaning out the window with a big camera, was Jennifer Pitt, who at the time was a senior researcher for the Environmental Defense Fund. Pitt is in her forties. She has long brown hair, which she had pulled back into a ponytail,and she was wearing a purple fleece. She worked at the EDF, mostly on issues related to the Colorado River, from 1999 till 2015, when she moved to a similar job at the National Audubon Society. In recent years, her focus has been on the river's other end, in Mexico, but she had agreed to show me its source. Our principal destination that day was the Colorado's headwaters, just over the Continental Divide, roughly fifty miles south of the Wyoming state line. "The best way to see a river system is from the air," she'd told me earlier. She arranged our flight through LightHawk, an international nonprofit organization that supplies volunteer pilots and their airplanes, at no charge, for a varietyof environmental purposes. The previous day, a LightHawk pilot had flown twenty black-footed ferrets from Fort Collins to a spot nearthe Grand Canyon, for relocation. Before our flight, I looked up Kunkel on Google and was disconcerted to find a news story about him landing his Cessna 340 on a highway high in the Rockies after losing both engines in succession. But then I realized that nothing like that could happen to us, because the plane he'd be using for our trip, a Maule M-7, had just one engine. I looked up Pitt, too. She was born in Boston and grew up in Westchester County, New York, in a suburb of New York City. "I think you can trace my interest in rivers back to my childhood in Westchester," she told me later, "because I grew up in a river town, on the Hudson, and when I was a kid Pete Seeger came to my school and sang to me about rivers." As an undergraduate, at Harvard, she majored in American history and literature, but developed an interest in urban planning and landscape architecture. "After graduation," she continued, "I worked in Manhattan for a year, for the Department of Parks and Recreation, and realized that that was not what I wanted to do." She got a job as an interpretive ranger in Mesa Verde National Park, in southwestern Colorado,and that experience, she said, "gave another twist to my view of the world, and how an ancient culture used the resources around them." She earned a master's degree in environmental sciences, with a focus on water, at the Yale School of Forestry, then worked in Washington, D.C., for five years, mostly at the National Park Service. In 1999, the Environmental Defense Fund hired her to create programs related to the Colorado River and the ecosystems that depend on it. In 2003, she married Michael Cohen, a senior associate at the Pacific Institute, another environmental organization. (They met at a water conference in Tucson.) They live in Boulder and have a daughter. Kunkel dipped a wing, and Pitt pointed toward the Never Summer Mountains, on our right. "There's the Grand Ditch," she said. I saw what looked like a road or a hiking trail cut across the face of a steeply sloping forest of snow-dusted conifers; she explained that it was an aqueduct, dating to 1890. Its original full name was the North Grand River Ditch. (Until 1921, the section of the Colorado that's upstream from its confluence with the Green, in eastern Utah, was called the Grand. Hence: Grand Lake, Grand Junction, Grand Valley--but not Grand Canyon, which was named for its grandness.) It was built with pickaxes and black powder, mostly by Japanese laborers, and it operates by gravity--an impressive feat of pre-laser engineering. The Grand Ditch is fourteen miles long, and much of it is above ten thousand feet. It carries water across the Continental Divide at La Poudre Pass and empties it into a stream that flows toward the state's eastern plains, where even by the late 1800s farmers were feeling parched. It doesn't tap the Colorado directly, but captures as much as forty percent of the flow from slopes that would otherwise feed it, like a sap-gathering gash in the trunk of a rubber tree. We had already flown over several larger, more recent additions to the same network: Long Draw Reservoir, completed in 1930; Estes Lake, which serves as a trans-basin junction box; and five connected natural and man-made lakes that lie on the western side of the divide and gather and store water from the Colorado or its watershed. The northernmost of the lakes spills as much as a third of a billion gallons a day into the Alva B. Adams Tunnel, which was built in the 1940s. Adams was a lawyer and a U.S. senator, and in the early 1930s he served as the chairman of the Committee on Irrigationand Reclamation. The tunnel moves the water under the center of the park, drops it through five hydroelectric generating plants, and delivers it to a distribution system that serves a populous area east of the mountains, including Boulder. The main elements of the system are known collectively as the Colorado-Big Thompson Project. (In the West, "project" almost always means "dam," "reservoir," "aqueduct," "canal," or all four). Kunkel made a slow turn to the left. "We just flew over the headwaters," he said. Our position was easier to see on his iPad than on the ground. The sky had been blue when we took off, but since we'd entered the mountains he'd had to pick his way under and around what sometimes looked like an upside-down ocean of clouds. The ceiling made flying difficult but helped to explain the existence of the water-storing-and-shifting network we'd been looking at. As moisture-laden weather systems move eastward across the western United States, they pile up over the Rockies, dumping snow and rain. Eighty percent of Colorado's precipitation falls on the western half of the state, yet eighty-five percent of the population lives to the east, in the mountains' "rainshadow." If transporting water from one side to the other were impossible, most of the people who live and farm on the eastern side of the mountains would have to move. Pitt said, "Even people who describe themselves as worried environmentalists usually have no idea where their water comes from. We did a focus group once where somebody asserted vehemently that Denver did not get any water from the other side of the mountains, and we actually had to intervene and make sure that the guy leading the focus group knew that that was wrong, so that the whole two-hour discussion didn't go off in some other direction." Excerpted from Where the Water Goes: Life and Death along the Colorado River by David Owen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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