Customer Reviews

What the River Reveals: Understanding and Restoring Healthy Watersheds

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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I did not really care for this book. The title is a misnomer, this book is not about defining&restoring healthy watersheds. It's more about the damage that dams and logging have done to rivers in the Pacific Northwest. Although the author talks about her conversations with various foresters, ecologists, etc. there is very little science in this book. There is too much focus on Salmon runs, breeding grounds, etc and while the dams in the northwest have devestated these, this subject has no bearing on restoring watersheds in say....Indiana (where I live). Also, Ms. Rapp seems to offer no real alternatives or large scale solutions, just continual re-iterations of the problems with daming rivers. After several stories about her hiking along rivers, attending conferences in the Northwest, etc...I got the impression that Ms Rapp is more interested in preserving places of natural beauty, rather than sustanability in the broadest sense of the word. Ms. Rapp reminds me of the folks who like wilderness hiking and camping, but complain about oil companies, Nukes, etc. Somehow they don't see anything wrong with driving their SUV 50-300 miles into the mountians every chance they get.

Further , I think a book with this title ought to give a few detailed "success stories" of rivers that have been restored to a more natural state. There must be better books out there on this subject.

As an FYI, my interests are woodlot and habitat restoration, and sustainable agriculture, so this review was not written by an ATV owning, cattle rancher who doesn't give a damn about our environment.

This book is written in an informative and entertaining style which pulls you to finish the book. There is a lot of good information on how watersheds work with pleanty of real world examples, mostly from the Pacific Northwest. What looks "normal" to us now is not the natural state of rivers. The book has a Northwest focus but should be useful in any area. If you want to understand more about how rivers interact with their surroundings and how man has changed that over the last 100 to 200 years, this is a good book to read.

If you are intersted in learning more about rivers and watersheds, this is a good place to start. Without being too technical, Valerie Rapp conveys a lot of information on how watersheds work. I bought this book as a gift for my husband, but couldn't put it down when I started to look though it before wrapping it up.

This book has a Pacific Northwest focus and is the result of a lot of research by the author into river ecology. Salmon are discussed throughout as an indicator of river health. I was struck by the descriptions of what the regional rivers looked like prior to development and why they were much more productive historically. The author has a nice writing style and I wanted to keep reading once I started. She often uses descriptive analogies to help us picture a situation (e.g., road construction is like a "loaded gun" in a watershed, waiting for a flood to trigger a disaster). I have been interested in this topic for a long time but feel that I now have a better picture of the problem. The solutions are not easy which is why there are not yet many success stories to point to, but the author does point out a path to restoration and some who are going down it.