Where the Water Goes: Review

 "Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River" by David Owen is a book that opens the readers eyes to many of the issues that affect the western United States.  The premise of this book is to travel the length of the Colorado River from its headwaters in the mountains all the way to its dried up delta in Mexico. David Owen is a columnist for the New Yorker and his ability to tell a story makes this book almost read like a novel and not like a conservation guide.  In a way that is one of the best things that could happen to a book of this type as water law is about as exciting to read about as it is to watch paint dry. 

As stated above, the book starts at the snow pack of the Rocky Mountains.  We see canals that drive the water across a continental divide and into a different river basin, see reservoirs and canals to sustain urban growth, dams and power stations to support agriculture, and eventually the issues with a river that travels many miles in mineral rich river beds and the effects of salination from the rivers journey.  Every chapter had a place of interest, except the last chapter, and some stories about the people and water uses that Owen encountered there.  These subtopics of each chapter made the book feel like an adventure story, almost as if you are following one droplet of water from falling as snow in the mountains to growing lettuce in Baja California, Mexico. 

Some of the most interesting facts that I learned from this book is that Las Vegas doesn't use as much water as one would imagine a city in the middle of the high desert would, in fact they return more water then they take out. I also learned how bad the salt situation is as the river gets ready to cross to Mexico and the way that lawyers in USA have created a bad deal for farmers in Mexico.  My biggest take away from reading this book is that there are a lot of smart people trying to make sure that the river can continue to help sustain the growth of California, Arizona, and Colorado but we really have no idea what is to be done.  

This book made me walk away thinking about all the ways that I am wasteful in my life.  I do not need to run the dishwasher every evening, I do not need to take a 10 minute shower, I do not need to water my lawn every day (once I have a lawn that is).  I also put the book down and thought about all the pollution that we are putting in our waterways.  I consider myself environmentally aware but not an environmentalist by any means, but I have a strong desire to stop using any single use plastic at all.  I also almost don't want to wear cotton because of the strain it puts on the water tables but then I'm not sure what I would wear.  Maybe we should all go back to wearing animal skins and furs..... who knows what is the right answer there. 

Overall I give this book a 4 out of 5.  There were parts where the story seemed to diverge from the topic at large a bit too much, though enjoyable it did not add to the story, and the final chapter had a completely different voice from the rest of the book.  I did enjoy it and would highly recommend it to any who wish to learn more about the way water is used or figure out if there is a way to preserve what little fresh water we actually have in the world.   

Alaska's Grizzly Gauntlet from National Geographic

 Hello everyone.  It has been a couple of weeks and I apologize for taking some time off of writing here but life has a way of getting crazy. I have been thinking about what I wanted to write about for this weeks post and realized that I have watched an amazing series on Disney plus called Grizzly Guantlet and I thought it would be kind of cool to share my thoughts with you all about the series. 

When I was a child I very much wanted to work with animals.  At one point I thought I wanted to be a cattle rancher because there was nothing more exciting than being a cowboy, at least in my mind.  I then moved on to loving to hike and backpack with my father and then later with the Boy Scouts of America. At the university level I enjoyed my biology courses the most which is why I actually watched this show. 

Summary and Thoughts:

This show follows photojournalist and adventurer Les Stroud as he tries to get in close with different wildlife in the Alaskan Frontier.  In the first episode he goes to Kodiak Island and follows a group of brown bears as they gorge themselves on salmon before the hibernation season begins.  He is even able to capture a juvenile brown bear putting her scent on one of his field cams, a very cool and precious moment if I do say so myself.  The best part of this first episode is the look at a family of bears where a cub is lost, learns to survive on its own, and is reunited with it mother.  

In the second episode we travel north to a small island where polar bears have started to come into town. This episode is one that I think everyone that wants to live a more green, or conservation minded, life should watch.  It shows the problems that our receding ice shelf is placing on the bear populations of the north. I never thought of bears as being the most intelligent beings in the natural world but this episode changed my mind on that.  We hear stories of patrols that are sent to look out for bears and how the bears learned to hide in the shadows and avoid them almost like they were extras in the movie "The Great Escape".  This is an absolutely sobering look at the struggle these massive animals are going through as their means of  migration and hunting have been taken away from them.

I don't want to give too much away from the remaining three episodes as they are equally informative and entertaining but I have to wrap this short summary up here soon.  In the remaining episodes Les travels by helicopter and sees the Caribou in their natural environment.  We see how these majestic animals scout out predators and the way the herds have adapted for survival.  We then travel to get up close and personal with moose.  That is one animal that I would avoid if I ever cam across one as they are frightening. We finish off the series checking out the salmon spawning season in black bear country.  Another amazing look at how animals have evolved to survive and what it looks like.

Overall:

I highly recommend that you all take a moment out of your lives and watch this show. It lit a fire under me to do all I can to help save the arctic and the animals that are threatened because of the loss of our polar ice caps and ice shelfs. It doesn't only paint a picture that is grim for the animals of the Arctic circle, it also paints a grim picture for the people that live and work in the arctic. 

I rate it a 4 out of 5 because of the awareness it brought us and the information that it shares.