Water - A Natural History (Broché)

In Water : A Natural History, environmental engineer Alice Outwater takes us on a journey that begins five hundred years ago, back to the wardrobe records of the kings of France and the diaries of the first Western explorers, to recover a lost knowledge - how the land cleans its own water. Water moves from the reservoir to the toilet, from the grasslands of the Midwest to the Everglades of Florida, through the guts of a wastewater treatment plant and out to the waterways again.
Step by step we come to learn what should have been obvious from the beginning : a complex ecological system long kept American water remarkably clean but as we have randomly removed necessary components from it, we have simplified the system to the point where it can no longer do its job. While engineering can depollute water, only these ecologically interacting systems can create healthy waterways.
Water is the unforgettable story of the symbiosis that existed between the country's water, the land from which is springs, and the life the two support together. It is a story that none of us who hope to live on this planet can afford so miss.