BiblioVault - Books about Water

The Geography of Water

Mary Emerick

University of Alaska Press, 2015

In this exquisite debut novel, Mary Emerick takes readers into the watery landscape of southeast Alaska and the depths of a family in crisis.
An abusive father and a broken home forces a teenage Winnie to seek the safety of a neighboring bay and a pair of unlikely father figures. Years later her mother goes missing, and Winnie returns to the hunting and fishing lodge she grew up in to find the world she knew gone. Her once-powerful father disfigured by a bear attack. Her childhood hero revealed as merely human. And her mother’s story rewritten by a stray note.
As Winnie uses the help of friends to sort out the details of her mother’s final exodus, she finds herself pulled into a murky swirl of family secrets and devastating revelations. As the search heads higher into the mountains, Winnie must learn to depend on her own strength in order to reach the one she loves.

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Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me

Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition

Bruce Jackson

Harvard University Press, 1974

Gold Metal Waters

The Animas River and the Gold King Mine Spill

Brad T. Clark

University Press of Colorado, 2022

Gold Metal Waters presents a uniquely inter- and transdisciplinary examination into the August 2015 Gold King Mine spill in Silverton, Colorado, when more than three million gallons of subterranean mine water, carrying 880,000 pounds of heavy metals, spilled into a tributary of the Animas River. The book illuminates the ongoing ecological, economic, political, social, and cultural significance of a regional event with far-reaching implications, showing how this natural and technical disaster has affected and continues to affect local and national communities, including Native American reservations, as well as agriculture and wildlife in the region.

This singular event is surveyed and interpreted from multiple diverse perspectives—college professors, students, and scientists and activists from a range of academic and epistemological backgrounds—with each chapter reflecting unique professional and personal experiences. Contributors examine both the context for this event and responses to it, embedding this discussion within the broader context of the tens of thousands of mines leaking pollutants into waterways and soils throughout Colorado and the failure to adequately mitigate the larger ongoing crisis.

The Gold King Mine spill was the catalyst that finally brought Superfund listing to the Silverton area; it was a truly sensational event in many respects. Gold Metal Waters will be of interest to students and scholars in all disciplines, but especially in environmental history, western history, mining history, politics, and communication, as well as general readers concerned with human relationships with the environment.

Contributors: Alane Brown, Brian L. Burke, Karletta Chief, Steven Chischilly, Becky Clausen, Michael A. Dichio, Betty Carter Dorr, Cynthia Dott, Gary Gianniny, David Gonzales, Andrew Gulliford, Lisa Marie Jacobs, Ashley Merchant, Teresa Montoya, Scott W. Roberts, Lorraine L. Taylor, Jack Turner, Keith D. Winchester, Megan C. Wrona, Janene Yazzie

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Great Salt Lake

A Perspective from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Bishop W. Christopher Waddell

University of Utah Press, 2024

The Great Salt Lake is deeply tied to the identity and history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As Latter-day Saints settled in the Great Basin, they relied on the Great Salt Lake for industry and recreation. Bishop W. Christopher Waddell explains that today, given the crisis faced by the lake, leaders of the LDS Church consider preserving the Great Salt Lake to be a sacred duty to care for God’s creations and a “critical issue for our state and citizens of Utah.” The LDS Church strives to positively impact the lake and continually improve its water-wise practices by working with local and community leaders, reducing water use at meetinghouses and facilities by utilizing sustainable landscaping principles and effective water management, and donating permanent water shares that will preserve water currently flowing into the lake in perpetuity.

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The Gulf of California

Biodiversity and Conservation

Richard C. Brusca

University of Arizona Press, 2010

Few places in the world can claim such a diversity of species as the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez), with its 6,000 recorded animal species estimated to be half the number actually living in its waters. So rich are the Gulf's water that over a half-million tons of seafood are taken from them annually—and this figure does not count the wasted by-catch, which would triple or quadruple that tonnage. This timely book provides a benchmark for understanding the Gulf's extraordinary diversity, how it is threatened, and in what ways it is—or should be—protected.

In spite of its dazzling richness, most of the Gulf's coastline now harbors but a pale shadow of the diversity that existed just a half-century ago. Recommendations based on sound, careful science must guide Mexico in moving forward to protect the Gulf of California.

This edited volume contains contributions by twenty-four Gulf of California experts, from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. From the origins of the Gulf to its physical and chemical characteristics, from urgently needed conservation alternatives for fisheries and the entire Gulf ecosystem to information about its invertebrates, fishes, cetaceans, and sea turtles, this thought-provoking book provides new insights and clear paths to achieve sustainable use solidly based on robust science. The interdisciplinary, international cooperation involved in creating this much-needed collection provides a model for achieving success in answering critically important questions about a precious but rapidly disappearing ecological treasure.

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