A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 31

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31st of a series

Readers Weigh In, Part 2

“Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. . . .The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

- Henry David Thoreau

  • Warren Cook, an old friend, recommended Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, Kerri Arsenault’s memoir of growing up in a small town on Maine’s Androscoggin River.

    Editor’s note: Here is what Robert Macfarlane, the author of Underland, wrote: “Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling, quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with America’s sins.” 
    And here is how the book itself begins: “Mexico, Maine, is a small paper mill town that lies in a valley, or ‘River Valley’ as we now call the area because I suppose you can’t have one without the other. . . .Rivers are living bodies that need oxygen, turn sick, can be wrecked by neglect like human bodies, which we often think of as separate, not belonging to the landscape that bore them out. They tell a story, these bodies. They are the story.”

  • “I don't like Trump either,” wrote a reader about my post on “Wasting Water,” “but Biden has had four years to take action on the Colorado River. Sometimes I think liberals hold Trump responsible for all bad things in this country, but there is plenty of blame to go around.”

    Editor’s note: We need to think differently about rivers. We’ve had over 60 years to act since the Colorado first stopped flowing regularly to the ocean. In John McPhee’s portrayal of the encounter between Floyd Dominy and David Brower, Dominy was often the more compelling figure, and their intense rivalry was the beginning of Brower’s demise. But looking back, Brower was right. The issue isn’t about “fixing” the Colorado or any other river; it’s learning to think about rivers differently. My takeaway from the “River Continuum Concept” is that a river is not a funnel for water to be used, extracted, mined, and sold; it’s an organism, just as our bodies are organisms, and it must be nurtured as such, for it is the foundation of life on earth, from microscopic life to human life.

  • Finally, my daughter Annie turned me on to this story:

Editor’s note: You can read more about this, including a response from the owners, in The Guardian.

Here is a link to a map of the shipping route the ice takes, which includes a treacherous leg down the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aden, which is currently the site of a hot war between Houthi rebels and western forces.

Of course, long before Greenlanders were shipping glacier cubes to the bars of Dubai, New Englanders were making fortunes selling ice to enslavers in the Caribbean. The first was Frederic “The Ice King” Tudor, who delivered still frozen water to Cuba and Martinique in 1806. In 1833, having improved insulation of the ice blocks through thicker coats of saw dust, he began shipping them to Calcutta, 14,000 miles and two equator crossings away. One source of the ice was Henry Thoreau’s beloved Walden Pond.

The Greenland entrepreneurs may want to increase sales while they can because a study published last week in the journal Nature, determined that the island’s glaciers have lost 20 percent more ice than previously believed – 6,000 gigatons in all since 2,000 – enough, the report says, to cover all of Texas in a sheet of ice more than 30 feet high.