G. Tracy Mehan III, Executive Director for Government Affairs at AWWA, is back with another excellent book review: The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers by Martin Doyle of Duke University'sNicholas School of the Environment.
Tracy sent his review, which will appear in a forthcoming 2019 issue of The Environmental Forum (Environmental Law Institute):
Download GTM_The_Source_review
Having just spent six days near the banks of the Missouri River the topic resonates with me.
The first few sentences should whet your appetite:
Your reviewer grew up in St. Louis near the confluence of great rivers; imbibed the lore of Lewis & Clark, Father Marquette,and Mark Twain; participated in sandbagging operations during floods; and worked on legal and policy matters on the Missouri and Mississippi.
One of my mother’s ancestors set the record for the fastest steamboat run from St. Louis to Fort Benton, Montana, before the Flood Control Act of 1944 and the Pick-Sloan plan basically rendered the Missouri a human artifact, with dams, reservoirs, and exaggerated promises of prosperity. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, “in defiance of common sense, economics, and even simple hydrology,” created “an instance where both agencies managed to win,” as described by Marc Reisner in his classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. See myreview, “A Classic a Quarter Century Later” (May/June 2011).
In my salad days, I would break the winter doldrums by eagle-watching at the big lock and dam at Clarksville, north of St. Louis. It is designed to control the Mississippi River, T. S. Eliot’s “strong brown god-sullen, untamed, intractable.” In winter, the Missouri-Illinois stretch of the river has the largest collection of eagles outside of Alaska. When every pond, creek, and small river freezes over, they come to the big dams to feed on the fish coming through the spillways. It was not unusual to see 200 eagles of all ages and sizes congregating for the feast.
And the ending seals the deal:
The final chapter, on “The Restoration Economy,” illustrates the opportunities to restore the physical, chemical, and biological integrity of rivers and streams and provide environmental amenities for which people, wealthy ones anyway, are willing to pay. These strike the right concluding notes for The Source, an excellent book indeed. The question is, Can we implement these restorative activities sufficiently and at scale to return more value and function to America’s 250,000 rivers over 3 million miles?
We look forward to hearing more from Martin Doyle on these matters.
From reading Tracy's exceptional review I think it's safe to say that his last sentence is spot-on.
You might want to read my review of Mississippi River Tragedies by Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer.
Here is a piece they wrote about the Missouri River that I posted on my blog.
Enjoy!
“I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.” — Charles Kuralt
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