Throughout Time

“Ever since the Neolithic, the world has had an unquenchable thirst for water. Meeting that need was a key driver of social, economic and political change within the ancient world, one that played a fundamental role in both the rise and then fall of ancient civilizations. That unquenchable thirts continues today, perhaps more desperate than it ever has been before.” — Steven Mithen

Scientists estimate that 75 percent of the globe will face freshwater shortages by 2050. Clearly water is one of the great emerging issues of our time, and here is a book that puts it in a much-needed historical context. Steven Mithen’s Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World explores more than 10,000 years of man’s management of one of the most vital substances on earth.

Some civilizations fell, others engineered solutions, but all had much in common. Steven Mithen:
“Concern about water…is something that we share with the ancient Maya, Hohokam and Chinese. Those who built the canals in the Yellow River Valley of China, the Salt River Basin of Arizona, in the rainforests around Edzna and Angkor, and in the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial plain did so thousands of years apart, with no knowledge of each other and within completely different cultures. But they all shared similar ideas, plans and physical labours; they addressed the same questions about gradients and where to place head-gates; they found the same solutions imposed by the common properties of water and then engaged in the same fights against the accumulation of silt and protection against floods.“

Steven Mithen’s new book joins the Land Library’s collection of water books with a historic bent — books such as Brian Fagan’s Elixir: A Human History of Water (also pictured above), and the works of Kenneth R. Wright:

The Water Mysteries of Mesa Verde by Kenneth R. Wright, Machu Picchu: A Civil Engineering Marvel by Kenneth R. Wright, Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, Ruth M. Wright, and Gordon Francis McEwan.

“Our understanding of Machu Picchu as an exemplary feat of hydraulic engineering is thanks to the work of Kenneth R. Wright. He first visited Machu Picchu in 1974 with his wife, Ruth, returning in 1994 to begin an intensive study of how the Inca hydraulic system worked.” — Steven Mithen

Tipon: Water Engineering Masterpiece of the Inca Empire by Kenneth R. Wright, Gordon Francis McEwan, and Ruth M. Wright, and Moray: Inca Engineering Mystery by Kenneth R. Wright, Ruth M. Wright, Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, and Gordon Francis McEwan.

For many more essential books on water and water management, be sure to take a look at some of our past posts!

And here’s a bit more from Professor Steven Mithen:

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The Issue for Our Time?

“At the Toronto Film Festival, program director Thom Powers called Last Call at the Oasis a “feel-angry movie,” which he later amended to “feel-smart movie.” I was rather partial to both labels, since they emphasize the “feel” part. We wanted to make Last Call an emotional film as well as an educational one. One hope was for people to connect viscerally and personally to the water crisis. We wanted to bring water problems into the open, to show the impact on the lives of real people — to bring oft-hidden abstractions into the light of day where we can finally see what’s going on.” — Director Jennifer Yu

Less than 1% of the world’s water is fresh and drinkable, and thanks to drought, climate change, waste, and population growth, water is likely to be the most critical global issue for many years to come. On May 4th, a new documentary film from Academy Award winning director Jennifer Yu takes on the complexities of water in our lives. A companion book, Last Call at the Oasis: The Global Water Crisis and Where We Go From Here, has just been released, and features the analysis of scientists, policymakers, and writers such as Peter H. Gleick, Robert Glennon, Alex Prud’homme, and William McDonough. Reading this collection has put Jennifer Yu’s forthcoming film on our must-see list!

Knowing how central water is to our lives and future, the Land Library has slowly build up a considerable collection on this issue. We’ve especially focused on studies of North American watershed and rivers. Books such as these:

River in Ruin: The Story of the Carmel River by Ray A. March (only thirty-six miles long, this California river is also one of the top ten endangered rivers in North America), and The Mightier Hudson: The Spirited Revival of a Treasures Landscape by Roger D. Stone (building a new economy around the health of the river).

And from the Pacific Northwest, Finding the River: An Environmental History of the Elwha by Jeff Crane, and from the Southwest, Reining in the Rio Grande: People, Land, and Water by Fred M. Phillips, G. Emlen Hall, and Mary E. Black.

And here’s the subject of one of our earlier posts, and one of four books selected for the Water 2012 Book Club:

The Colorado River: Flowing Through Conflict by Peter McBride and Jonathan Waterman.

“From the beginning, I was fascinated by the whole psychology behind the water crisis. Problems such as drought, pollution, contamination, competition for resources, and privatization aren’t new; they’ve existed since before civilization….In the movie, we wanted to explore this paradoxical behavior: Why don’t we act in ways that are in our own self-interest, especially when it comes to something as crucial as water?” — Director Jennifer Yu

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Water 2012 & Beyond

“It’s common knowledge that you can survive for weeks without food. But how long can you survive without water? A few days, at most. Human beings are mostly water and our planet is mostly water — indeed Earth is often called the ‘water planet,’ its blue seas and white cloudy mists forming the dominant features we see from space.
Yet in many ways water is scarce. Ninety-seven percent of the planet’s water is undrinkable seawater, and most of the rest is locked up in glaciers and ice caps, or falls in romote places. Even so, we’d have enough water if we hadn’t invented a staggering list of ways to pollute and squander our birthright.” Bill McKibben, in Water Matters.

Several organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Land Library, have joined together to celebrate our most precious natural resource. We’re still in the planning stages, but Water 2012 will be a year-long collaborative effort to promote awareness of the history, use, protection, and stewardship of Colorado’s water. Over the next few months, the Land Library will determine the best way we can contribute to this needed effort. (If you have ideas, please let us know!).

As of now, here’s three contributions we hope to make for Water 2012:

– The Land Library’s Rocky Mountain Land Series (in partnership with the Tattered Cover Book Store) will pay special attention to new books on water issues — we’re all ready seeing some excellent titles on the horizon!

– We have also created a new Water category for our blog-archives, and we’ll be doing many more posts on water in the West, its impact across the globe, and in our lives.

– Lastly, for now, we hope to add even more water titles to what is already one of the largest subject categories in the Land Library’s 25,000 volume collection.

Throughout the next many months, the Land Library hopes to learn much, much more about this critical issue. Stay tuned for more on Water 2012 and beyond!

Meanwhile, here are just a few of the books we’re already pulled from our shelves. Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource, edited by Tara Lohan (and pictured above) is an excellent place to begin. This collection gathers together essays by writers such as Maude Barlow, Barbara Kingsolver, Jacques Leslie, Bill McKibben, Sandra Postel, Elizabeth Royte, and more. A partial list of the essays included hints at the range of this thoughtful anthology: Why We Need a Water Ethic, Water in Myth & Religion, Acequias: Water Democracy in the U.S., A Short History of Dams, and Making Water a Human Right — all themes that we’ll return to in the year ahead.

And here’s a few more indispensable titles from the Land Library’s shelves:

Water: The Epic Struggle for Water, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon, Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What To Do About it by Robert Glennon, Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America by Chris Wood

Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the High Plains by William Ashworth, Water Consciousness: How We All Have to Change to Protect Our Most Critical Resource, edited by Tara Lohan, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water by Maude Barlow.

“Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.” — Carl Sagan, quoted in Water Matters.

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Caught in the Gyre

In David de Rothschild’s book, Plastiki — Across the Pacific on Plastic: An Adventure to Save Our Oceans, he writes about the five great oceanic gyres, especially the North Pacific Gyre, twice the size of Texas, which concentrates 3.5 million tons of discarded plastic. He also offers this chilling definition of a gyre’s grim hold on our plastic wastes: “A gyre is a place where currents meet and form a whirlpool type system — this forms a meeting place for ocean debris. Millions of tiny and large pieces of plastic accumulate here; due to the currents they remain trapped, breaking down over time to become smaller and smaller pieces of plastic until they eventually become plastic dust. This ‘dust’ will never go away but will instead stay in the ocean accumulating toxins and working its way into the food chain as more animals digest these invisible and dangerous items of plastic waste.“

Plastiki also reports this astounding incident:

“Did junk food kill a 36-foot gray whale that washed up dead on a beach near Seattle in May 2010? Biologists aren’t sure whether the whale mistook garbage for food or accidentally swept it in during normal feeding, but when they cut open its stomach, here’s what they found: 5 lengths of fabric, 2 lengths of duct tape, 1 sock, 3 feet of electrical tape, 1 sweatpant leg, 1 golf ball, 2 towels, fishing line, 15 inches of green rope, 1 Capri-Sun juice packet, 3 feet of nylon rope, 1 red plastic cylinder, 2 grocery bags, 30 scraps of plastic bags.“

Sad to say, Plastiki is full of the most depressing environmental news imaginable, but it’s also an incredibly inspiring book as well. The Land Library often goes to our own shelves for the pure inspiration of the remarkable lives of our fellow creatures. The following works of natural history gives us hope, and further fires our commitment to do a little less harm to this fragile planet of ours. What a world this is, to contain lives such as these!

The Great Sperm Whale: A Natural History of the Ocean’s Most Magnificent and Mysterious Creatures by Richard Ellis (his latest book, after a lifetime of whale studies), The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea by Phillip Hoare, The Grandest of Lives: Eye to Eye with Whales by Douglas Chadwick.

Gray Whale, artwork by Richard Ellis

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Kon-Tiki for Our Times

In March of 2010, explorer David de Rothschild, and a hardy crew of adventurers set sail from San Francisco Bay on a small boat (the Plastiki) made of 12,500 discarded plastic bottles, glued together with adhesives derived from sugar and cashew nuts. Four months later they made landfall in Sydney, Australia. Along the way, they brought worldwide attention to the plight of the oceans, and the toxic threat of plastics in the fragile marine environment.

Here’s the statistic that David de Rothschild read one day which inspired the entire Plastiki project: Every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic garbage (United Nations Environment Programme).

Rothschild knew he had to join with others to do something: “…plastic was the main human fingerprint on the oceans, then why not use it as the basis for a craft, a boat that would highlight this mess….The adventure of Plastiki, from San Francisco to Sydney, would showcase a new way of thinking about waste, and it would generate the stories to inspire more ways of thinking, more dreams, more adventures.”

Rothschild shares these new stories, along with ways to live saner on earth, in his new book Plastiki — Across the Pacific on Plastic: An Adventure to Save our Oceans. It’s a wonderful book, full of photos, and very helpful fact boxes and illustrated charts. Each member of the Plastiki team gets their own profile/interview, including Olaf Heyerdahl, grandson of the Kon-Tiki‘s Thor Heyerdahl, an early inspiration for the Plastiki adventure.

Stay tuned for our next post which will highlight some of the most disturbing details on plastic-pollution reported in the Plastiki book. For now, the Land Library can highly recommend these three titles from our shelves!

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn, American Plastic: A Cultural History by Jeffrey L. Meikle, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel (a just published book recommended by David de Rothschild — “the first step to creating change in understanding, and the first step to understanding anything to do with plastics is reading Susan Freinkel’s compelling, much-needed, and truly brilliant book.“).

David de Rothschild on a sea of trash, OR, David de Rothschild on the stuff boats (& dreams) are made of??

At the end of their journey, the Plastiki crew was even more committed to making a positive change in the world: “Change that can dramatically shift our daily habits away from the unnecessary and destructive addiction to single-use plastics, but even more important and urgent, a change in attitudes toward understanding, valuing, and protecting one of our planet’s most precious and important natural systems: the oceans.” — David de Rothschild

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The Return of the Cranes

Paul Johnsgard captures the drama of the greatest gathering of cranes on earth — the flocking in early spring of more than a half million sandhill cranes along the Platte River, Nebraska. — George Archibald, cofounder of the International Crane Foundation.

Just in time for the upcoming crane migration comes the latest volume from the great prairie naturalist Paul Johnsgard — Sandhill and Whooping Cranes: Ancient Voices Over America’s Wetlands. Johnsgard’s new book provides a detailed ecology of both crane species, along with the wetlands on which they depend. Johnsgard also fully explores the uncertain future the cranes face due to climate change and the constant pressure of human settlement.

Of immediate value to the travel plans of naturalists far and wide, this book includes a detailed 35-page guide to crane-viewing sites in the United States and Canada. As for the author, Paul Johnsgard’s travel plans have been the same for nearly fifty years:
Returning each spring to the central Platte Valley to observe the migration of a half-million sandhill cranes is a mind-shattering experience that can only be had in Nebraska, and only by making a special effort to participate in it. From the time the Platte River becomes ice-free in February, until almost the middle of April, hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes use the valley…the largest assemblage by far of any cranes in the world.

Here’s a few more books from the Land Library’s shelves to enrich anyone’s encounter with cranes in the wild:

Peter Matthiessen’s global crane survey, The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes, and Cranes: A Natural History of a Bird in Crisis by Janice M. Hughes.

Paul Johnsgard’s earlier book, Crane Music: A Natural History of American Cranes, Cranes: The Noblest Flyers by Alice Lindsay Price, and a beautifully done new book on the sandhill crane’s fellow traveler, Whooping Crane: Images from the Wild by Klaus Nigge

If 2011 allows you the opportunity to view one of the Earth’s great migrations, be sure to take advantage of the books above, along with regional natural histories that will give you an even broader context. Here’s two excellent volumes if you trek to Nebraska’s Platte River, or another renowned crane-viewing site — Colorado’s San Luis Valley:

The Platte: Channels in Time by Paul Johnsgard, and The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes by Susan J. Tweit and Glenn Oakley

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Nuts for Huts

“Why fishing huts? Why should I have spent months tracking down these curious riverside structures all over Britain? Why, as a friend kindly put it, am I nuts about huts?” — Jo Orchard-Lisle

As many of you know, periodically the Land Library receives a well-traveled box of books from a British bookseller. Our last shipment included a book that set us dreaming about adding something truly unique to Buffalo Peaks Ranch, the future home of the Rocky Mountain Land Library. Given the ranch’s miles of Gold Medal trout streams, what better inspiration can we have than Jo Orchard-Lisle’s Fishing Huts: The Angler’s Sanctuary?

Like many exceptional books, Fishing Huts was sparked by a bit of obsession. Jo Orchard-Lisle: “The idea of making a tour grew on me rapidly. I determined to visit as many as I could, and to learn or imagine what changes they had witnessed over the years. So it was that I set out on an odyssey along the rivers of Scotland, England and Wales. I found huts of every description — old, new, large, small, elaborate, primitive, grand, simple.”

Over 270 color photos accompany Jo Orchard-Lisle’s fun narrative. The cover photo (pictured above) features perhaps the most famous fishing hut of all: Charles Cotton’s Fishing House on the River Dove, better known as “The Temple” –the famous haunt of Cotton and his friend Izaak Walton (also pictured above), the author of the all-time classic, The Compleat Angler.

Here’s three more fun huts:

“It was a great sadness to me that I never reached the enchanting little hut, poised like an eagle’s eyrie on a crag above the Blackwater, a tributary of the Brora. Its simplicity and its position, miles from anywhere, in the wilds of Sutherland, both seem to me perfect, and I have been lucky enough to get a friend to photograph it.“

The hut of F.M. Halford, author of the classic Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889). “Although recently restored, Oakley, or Halford’s Hut, has remained almost unchanged since it was built in 1906. It is now beautifully maintained by The National Trust, whose volunteers have created the little flower garden alongside.“

The author, inspired by her hut tour of the United Kingdom, built her own angler’s sanctuary along the River Avon. And so with this, Fishing Huts ends: “The hut is full of light but two simple panes have been fitted in the wall on the river side for further views. Work on the interior is still continuing as I write but it’s nearly done and so my journey ends, but with the enjoyable prospect of many happy hours in my hut ahead.“

OK, this much is certain. The future fishing hut at Buffalo Peaks Ranch will have four walls, at least four of which will be lined by books. Books such as these that speak to the precious freshwaters upon which we depend for so much:

Two classics: Cutthroat: Native Trout of the West by Patrick Trotter, Trout and Salmon of North America by Robert J. Behnke.

BugWater: A fly fisher’s look through the seasons at bugs in their aquatic habitat and the fish that eat them by Arlen Thomason, A View of the River by Luna Leopold (not an angling title, but like many of the books featured here, essential volumes for any riparian library!), Field Guide to Freshwater Invertebrates of North America by James H. Thorp (just published this past month).

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Waters by Kathleen Dean Moore, The River in Winter: New & Selected Essays by Stanley Crawford, The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton.

Yes, that Izaak Walton, the one whose simple, enigmatic and inspiring quote we someday hope to carve above the door of a very simple, book-lined hut along the banks of the South Platte River at Buffalo Peaks Ranch: Study to be quiet.

This post is part of an ongoing series inspired by the University of Colorado School of Architecture’s design work for Buffalo Peaks Ranch.

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Quickly Becoming a Fan of Fens

Recently we posted a piece on a fun field trip to South Park — High Creek Fen: Both A Glacial Remnant & Biologic Hot Spot. On our return to Denver, we were anxious to learn more about South Park’s high mountain wetlands.

We’re still looking and learning, and hopefully we’ll be able to expand our wetland shelves soon. Meanwhile, we just stumbled across this fun poem from our Kids Nature Library in Waterton Canyon:

Fens

I’m a fan of fens
of bogs, marshes and bayous –
those in-between places of the earth
not quite water, not quite land
those untrustworthy places
that make you watch where you stand
those horror movie places
damp and thick with fog
full of jaws and flashing claws
scales and thrashing tails
You can’t be bored in a bayou
a fen, a marsh, a bog –
those misunderstood places
where logs can have teeth
reeds can have wings
where the air so still, so quiet
always growls, buzzes, sings

– Marilyn Singer

Footprints on the Roof: Poems about the Earth by Marilyn Singer & illustrated by Meilo So, and another fun book of wetland poetry: Song of the Water Boatman and other Pond Poems by Joyce Sidman, with illustrations by Beckie Prange.
Both books can be found at our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library.

Thanks to Joe Rocchio for the High Creek Fen photo above — from his wonderful aapa mire site!

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High Creek Fen: Both a Glacial Remnant & Biologic Hot Spot

We continue to explore the varied landscape of South Park — the future home of the Rocky Mountain Land Library. Recently we went on a field trip sponsored by the Colorado Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, spending an entire day at their High Creek Fen Preserve.

What’s a fen? Well by the end of the day (and with the expert guidance of TNC trip leader John Sanderson) we knew that this wild landscape was kept mucky by a constant groundwater flow. We also crouched low to identify several globally rare plant species, and several that can only be found in the great boreal north. In fact, High Creek Fen contains more rare plant species than any other wetland known in Colorado.

As much as we learned about that glorious high mountain landscape, we came home anxious to know more. Luckily we came across an incredibly informative website, The aapa mire. Much of what follows is from Joe Rocchio’s post, High Creek Fen: A Pocket of Unique Beauty & Diversity in the Southern Rocky Mountains:

“After pulling out of Fairplay and driving south on Hwy. 285, a strange cluster of spruce trees appears….completely out of place amidst the short-grass steppe of South Park’s valley floor.“

“High Creek Fen emerges from the high montane steppe revealing an immense area of wet ground. Hummocks, pools, rivulets, and a creek; spruce trees, willows, bog birch, bulrushes, sedges, cottongrass, and aquatic plants all blanket the area.“

“Although early botanical explorers had visited the site, it is a bit astonishing that the significance of High Creek Fen as a refugia for glacial relics and haven for rare critters went unnoticed until 1990 when Dr. David Cooper recognized the unique character and biodiversity significance of this ecological Eden.” photo by Joe Rocchio

And here’s just a couple of the wetland plants that we saw on our day at the fen:

Carex viridula (green sedge) found along water tracks, sedge lawns, and at the base of hummocks. photo by Joe Rocchio

Packera pauciflora (few flowered ragwort) found in wet meadows. photo by Joe Rocchio

We found a shady spot for lunch, and heard more about the history of the fen from TNC’s John Sanderson. After David Cooper’s discovery of High Creek Fen’s globally important biodiversity, The Nature Conservancy led a campaign to protect it, eventually purchasing the property, while keeping it open for public tours and further study.

After lunch, John took us to the edge of one of the soggiest stretches of the fen. We found lots more aquatic plant species, along with rare insect inhabitants. (Joe Rocchio’s post reports that nine aquatic beetles have been found here not known elsewhere in Colorado).

And we’re happy to report that none of our field trip participants took a spill in this hummocky uncertain terrain!

Toward the end of the day, a storm system came out of the high peaks to the West, so it was off to the waiting cars, but not before taking one last look at a remarkable place:

We loved our day on High Creek Fen! And it’s exciting to think that the Land Library’s future home (Buffalo Peaks Ranch, pictured below) has a smaller, but still significant fen of its own!

Give yourself a treat and be sure to visit Joe Rocchio’s aapa mire website, along with his satellite site, The Geography of Home, full of stunning images of Western landscapes!

In thanks to Joe Rocchio’s partnership in this post, we close with these apt words from the aapa mire site: “Spending the day at High Creek Fen is an easy way to get lost — in time and space. There are very few wetlands, let alone fens, in the Southern Rocky Mountains as large and as diverse as this site. Although I have never been to the true boreal or arctic reaches of the North American continent, when I’m immersed in High Creek Fen’s wilderness I definitely feel as if I’m in those far northern landscapes — and very far from anything I have ever experienced.“

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Salmon in the Trees & the rich cycle of life

One of the rarest ecosystems on earth, the Tongass rain forest fringes the coastal panhandle of Alaska. Humpback whales, orcas, and sea lions cruise the forested shorelines. Wild salmon swim upstream, feeding some of the world’s highest densities of grizzlies, black bears, and bald eagles.

Photographer Amy Gulick’s Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest explores the entire ecosystem that makes up Tongass National Forest — its habitat, wildlife, and people.

Along with Amy Gulick’s award-winning photographs, this extremely thoughtful book features essays from an impressive cast of writers and conservationists: Douglas Chadwick, Brad Matsen, Richard Nelson, Carl Safina, John Straley, among others. The easy collaborative feel of this book sets it apart, and serves the Tongass region well.

“That the Tongass is among the planet’s loveliest settings as well as one of its outstanding biological hot spots is no accident. The dramatic ice-cut topography and beckoning marine passageways both drive dynamic processes that yield life in profusion. Beyond that, the landscapes and seascapes interact in ways that multiply each other’s vitality. The result? A superecosystem.” — Douglas Chadwick

And joining Amy Gulick, to make this book so visually stunning, is the artwork of an old favorite of the Land Library — Ray Troll:

Deep Forest by Ray Troll (from Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest)

For more on Ray Troll, you can revisit an earlier Land Library post:

– The Perfect Blend of Pancakes and Paleontology

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