![]() ![]() ![]() “Where the Water Goes” raises more questions than it answers, but if wondering where the water comes from prompts readers to plumb this voluminous literature around the Colorado River more deeply, then Owen’s book will have done important work. John Wesley Powell, who led the first American expedition to navigate the Colorado River, issued a prophecy later in his life: “There is not sufficient water to supply these lands.” It is a prophecy that has echoed down through the decades in a host of books and laws and rulings, and yet the water is still there, as are more and more people whose life the water makes possible. There is precedent for hopeful change, including the hilariously understated, patiently negotiated bureaucratic codicil known as Minute 319, where every Colorado River state and nation, from Mexico to the native peoples of what is now the Western United States, got something, including nature - a one-time “pulse” flow of water in 2014 to see what might happen if the Colorado reached the sea anew. The “Water Buffaloes” of Arizona may waste and store Colorado River water today just so California can’t claim it, but that is not an immutable fact. Like the individual snowflakes that add up to the snowpack that gives the Colorado River its force, seemingly small shifts can feed a flood of change. Yet it is a host of individual actions and amendments in thinking that add up to a necessary society-level change, like the way oil pipelines have become a subject of protest rather than a matter of course, or the exile of smoking from American life. There is a brand of upbeat defeatism in Owen’s exploration of this efficiency paradox: There is nothing I can do as an individual to solve this problem so perhaps I might as well not bother trying and just go golfing. Without Colorado River water, much of America could not enjoy salad greens in winter, for example. And water is not just water, it’s electricity - both generation at dams but also massive coal-burning to power pumps - as well as food. Using less water to flood fields or lawns means more water to build suburbs in desert cities. The core conundrum of the Colorado in Owen’s view is efficiency, which happens to be the subject of his last book. Owen has the keen observation of a birder combined with the breezy writing to draw you in with unusual insights - like the vagaries of an American economy that make a vineyard in Colorado a loss leader for tourism dollars, or quagga mussels invading the river and its reservoirs - but he also often wanders off course, away from the river and an explanation of where its water goes. George Gore, for whom one canyon Owen visited is named, or the effort to frack free natural gas with nuclear bombs. But the flow of Owen’s journey also sometimes bogs down in distracting asides, from lodging recommendations to incompletely explored tidbits of provocative history like the mass-killing Anglo-Irish hunter Sir St. Owen’s travelogue serves as a primer on a system ruled by “Water Buffaloes,” the men and women who decide among themselves where the water goes and who gets what, an arcane group perhaps better called beavers for their overwhelming desire to dam and shunt flowing water. The problem then, as now, is people - and what we have chosen to do with the water. ![]() This is well-traveled territory, including Marc Reisner’s classic book from 1986, “Cadillac Desert,” which remains the definitive work on the West and its water woes. The prolific author and New Yorker contributor David Owen details what has happened to the river that once carved the Grand Canyon in his new book, a brisk and informative travelogue that wends from headwaters in the state of Colorado to where the water trickles to a halt in a riverbed cracked by the heat of the desert sun in Mexico. And few, if any, rivers reveal this unnatural world more than the Colorado, which no longer reaches the sea or carries along its entire 1,450-mile length much of the reddish silt that inspired its name. Across this vast region of America, few, if any, rivers flow without hosting one or more dams, concrete channels, diversions or other human-made “improvements” that allow people and farming to flourish in this dry country. The waterways of the West now exist as monuments to an ambitious desert civilization. WHERE THE WATER GOES Life and Death Along the Colorado River By David Owen 274 pp. ![]()
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