Book review
I was a little hesitant to pick up this title. I’ve always enjoyed natural and social histories, but I generally think of water as a background or setting for the subjects I read about rather than the story itself. David Owen’s Where the Water Goes has changed that. He takes what could easily be a very dull topic – water rights, irrigation policy, and desert settlement patterns – and turns it into a surprisingly addictive read. Unlike many writers in this genre who must find ways to weave quirky tales into their technical histories to maintain engagement, Owen’s explorations of the river’s history and development stand on their own.
Key to the success of Owen’s presentation is his organization. Rather than tracking the history of the river from discovery to today, or addressing it topically, he takes a geosocial approach. Starting at the headwaters, he follows the river to its eventual extinction in Mexico. At each stop, he explores the nature of the river and how neighboring communities have exploited and interacted with it. This personalization is useful both for retaining the reader and contextualizing the knowledge he shares – understanding the relative importance of salination management from crop runoff is a lot easier when you meet the farmers who use the water. As these stories intersect, Owen begins to reveal the larger impacts of water management on the entire river basin, and on the overall development patterns of the Western US.
The book discusses a lot of technical issues – everything from the ‘Law of the River’ to dam design to reservoir management. But it does so in a very approachable way that doesn’t assume a large body of existing knowledge in the reader. These topics are also presented with an eye for justice and practicality. Owen doesn’t simply summarize how water rights are owned and executed; he discusses the moral reasoning that governs this system, the real-world limits of executing water claims on downstream waters (it only flows one way, after all), and the political challenges in finding solutions to ongoing shortages. But throughout this, it never leaves the human and ecological impacts of these technical processes.
It’s hard to convey this through examples, but Owen’s writing is also very fun to read. I have a friend who likes to quip that they could listen to Morgan Freeman read the phone book, and I think Owen has a similar quality to his writing – I’d gladly read his work on otherwise very mundane topics. If you want to understand what is rapidly becoming one of the defining social, political, environmental, and economic issues facing the Western US, I highly recommend this book. Even if you’re not, this is a valuable parable on learning to share and preserve both finite resources and those resources once considered limitless.
- Goodreads rating – 3.92
- REVIEW – Andrew Benesh