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The politics of water - as this brilliant anthology makes clear - are the politics of human survival. Read this, and believe me, you'll never flush with the same equanimity again.
—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Dead Cities |
| A sweeping overview of water use issues. Dam Nation is an accessible and energizing resource for the next generation of activists and radical plumbers. —Art Ludwig, author of Create an Oasis with Greywater |
| As the world faces a water crisis, this collection of thoughtful essays, illuminating profiles, and personal narratives, is interwoven with constructive, practical suggestions that range from harvesting rainwater to installing composting toilets. Dam Nation is a call to action, a conservation manifesto to create a movement one person at time. —Robert Glennon, author of Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters |
| Water has joined oil as the key political liquids of our epoch, and this book will join Amita Baviskar's In the Belly of the River as a powerful weapon in the struggle of commoners everywhere against the neoliberal makeover of our world and its waters. —Iain Boal, author of Resisting the Virtual Life |
| �Two centuries of what Lewis Mumford called megatechnics have so altered the earth's hydrologic cycle that all life on the only water planet we know has grown as endangered as the bellwether salmon. An ever-ramifying network of dams, conduits, and pumps coerces water from riverbeds and aquifers, turning it toward cities and the fields that feed them in order to grow the most lucrative crop of all � land value. Like the alienated inhabitants of imperial Rome and Babylon, few urbanites know of the toxic deserts that are the city's price, nor of their peril as safe water and food run out. Dam Nation takes you to front line water battles around the world as told by young and indigenous peoples fighting to reclaim the earth's arteries, lakes, and seas. More than merely witnesses to the multiple crises engulfing our world, these committed activists tell us how biotechnics can make the water we have killed live again. If you love your children and the world that sustains as it delights them, listen to these voices, then act. —Gray Brechin, author of Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream | |
Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground
Edited by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, Laura Allen, and Oskar July Cole.
Illustrated by Annie Danger
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| Paper | 9" x 7" | 416 pgs. | ISBN: 1-932360-80-8 | List: $19.95 | 04/1/2007 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: Dam Nation combines environmental victories in the sustainable use movement with hands-on, participatory options for country and city dwellers. Not just a "how-to" but a "why-to," the book begins with the story of dams in the American West, and culminates in the vision of a new water culture. Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and Laura Allen, both restoration activists and educators, demand a new approach for American watersheds and taxpayers: the restoration of the water commons. Contributors to Dam Nation interviewed water organizers and innovators on five continents. Wide-ranging articles link diverse grassroots struggles with analysis of urban infrastructure, and river restoration with experiments in alternative water systems. The �water underground� surfaces to share strategies for redirecting household and urban waste streams, for recharging our aquifers and spirit of resistance alike, and for rebuilding our communities' physical and political strength.
About the author: Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is a Bay Area based writer, teacher and agitator. His books include Urban Wilds: Gardener's Stories of the Struggle for Land and Justice (water/under/ground, 2001), the kids book Sink or Swim: A History of Sausal Creek (water/under/ground, 2004) and the infamous The Guerrilla Graywater Girls' Guide to Water zine (with Laura Allen). His water conservation projects have been featured in The Utne Reader and The San Francisco Chronicle. Cleo has lived in Los Angeles, and Santa Fe and currently lives in Oakland, CA.
Laura Allen is a Bay Area gardener, activist, and elementary school teacher. She has a BA in Environmental Science from UC Berkeley and a teaching credential from the New College of California. She also attended Solar Energy International where she received certificates in photovoltaic design and installation, wind power and microhydro power. Co-author of the notorious Guerrilla Greywater Girls Guide to Water, her writings can also be found in Urban Wilds: gardeners' stories of the struggle for land and justice (water/under/ground, 2001), Clamor, and Home Power magazine. She has lived in Eureka and Oakland, California.
July Oskar Cole learned to swim in the TVA lakes of Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and to identify wild plants in the forests of the Cumberland Plateau. He learned most of the rest in the deserts of the U.S. Southwest: philosophy and astronomy in the Sangre de Cristo foothills, alternative building and "charco" style greywater practices in the Rio Grande bosque, and in the Basin and Range territory
more things than can be listed. In the San Francisco Bay Area, he keeps bees, designs and installs greywater treatment wetlands, and sells books. He co-edited Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground, and has also been published in ColorLines magazine and the 2006 Best Gay Erotica anthology.
From the book:
Table of Contents
Introduction by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
Up Shit Creek and How We Got There
Who Needs Dams? by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
On the fringes of the water grid
Part 1: Setting the Stage for Dams
Part 2: Building the Water Empire
Part 3: Salt, Silt, Dead Fish and Filthy Lucre: The Problems With Dams
Know your choices: Life after dams
The Grit Behind the Dams: How Three Mega-Dam Projects
are Mega-Failures and Still Being Built
by Andrea del Moral
Concrete Collosus vs. the River Dragon: Impressions of a Death Match on
the Long River
by Dragon Pierces Truth
Sidebar: G7 Dinner Party
Drying up: The Water Privatization Pandemic by Kari Lyderson and
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
Inside the Mother Moon by Velcrow Ripper
Two Dams Down: Undamming the West, one river at a time by Laura Allen and
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
Getting Off the Grid: How to Unplug from the Water Matrix
Introduction by Laura Allen
Reaping the Rain by Andrea del Moral
Profile: A Great Lakes Rain Garden by Alexis Levine
Cesspools and Cholera: The Development of the Modern Sewer by Joaquin
Ilem Uy
The Poop and Pee Revolution by Laura Allen
Profile: Poopalicious: Why I Love My Composting Toilet by Laura Allen
Profile: Permacultura Lane: Eco-living on the outskirts of Mexico City by
Laura Allen
Profile: Ecological Sanitation in Africa by Jeff Conant
Gray Gold by Laura Allen and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
Bucket Flush: Do-It-Yourself Water Conservation by Annie Danger
Profile: Graywater Bueno by Peter Pumpkineater
Plumbing basics comic by Bay Kelley
Profile: The Greywater Guerrilla�s First Wetlands by Laura Allen and Cleo
Woelfle-Erskine
How to Build a Graywater System comic by Bay Kelley
Profile: Austin Graywater by Scott Kellogg
Profile: Plumbing at King Street by Laura Allen
Profile: Graywater in Cold Climates by Kathryn Bat
Arcata Marsh by Laura Allen
Profile: Tijuana�s Ecoparque by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
Experimento rurbano: Learning Sustainability at a Spanish squat by Andrea
del Moral
Profile: Wash Your Clothes With Pedal Power by Laura Allen and Lu Yoder
Watershed
Introduction by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
Return to the Pak Moon by John Morton
Blues for the Bayou by Brian Azcona and Dan Etheridge
One Bad Fish Story by Jill Benowicz
Klamath Ag by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
Profile: Secrets of the Prairie by Laura Allen
Logjams, Check Dams and the Gift of Foresight: Restoration on Native Land
by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine
Profile: Renewing the World an interview with Dennis Martinez
Profile: Spirituality and the Native Earth an interview with Verna Teller
Profile: Remove the Dams on the Klamath River by Howard McConnel
Profile: Killing the Hopi Waters by Vernon Masayesva
Epilogue
Appendix I: Removal Mechanisms in Constructed Wetlands
Appendix II: Plants for Greywater Treatment Wetlands
Glossary
Resources
Notes on Contributors
Index
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