These linked essays form a memoir exploring the American outback from eastern Oregon horse trails to the arctic and subarctic river towns of Alaska. In Mostly Water, Alaska-based journalist and nature writer Mary Odden shares a series of personal essays celebrating the beauty and independent spirit of America’s remote and rural Northern spaces. In these landscapes, human dwellers are entwined in histories and anecdotes as loopy as northern rivers. Odden invites the reader to a vivid patchwork of characters and seldom-seen places, with a soundtrack from fiddle dances and a menu that is “half potlatch and half potluck.” Each essay features a recipe for a traditional regional dish, such as mincemeat, creamed salmon, and lingonberry sauce. As the stories unfold, events of the churning twenty-first century rise like the sea—as does a love of human togetherness and the precious otherness of nature.

The little-known story of the systems that bring us our drinking water, how they were developed, the problems they are facing, and how they will be reinvented in the near future

In Mostly Water, essays form a linked memoir that explores the American outback from eastern Oregon horse trails to the arctic and subarctic river towns of Alaska. In these landscapes, Native people and later-comers are entwined in histories as loopy as northern rivers. Odden invites the reader to a vivid patchwork of characters and seldom-seen places, with a soundtrack from fiddle dances and a menu "half-potlatch and half-potluck." In Mostly Water, readers will hear dance music ring through little towns and watch as friends conspire to stoke the fires and fading memories of an old pioneer. The danger of giving birth takes a crooked path through a mystical elk hunt on its way to the miracle of holding a child. Casual meetings with passengers on an Inside Passage ferry open to intimacy with a Tlingit grandmother and the dignified depths of an ocean-going hobo. Bush town storefronts forsake their rivers to welcome the airplane. The falling of the Twin Towers on 9/11 silences the sky over a remote Alaskan village. Short takes on a vivid personal cuisine divide the longer essays of Mostly Water. In these interludes, dead grandmothers mix it up over turkey gravy and ripe berries are sweet and dangerous after Chernobyl's radioactive winds blow around the top of the Earth. Events of the churning twenty-first century rise like the sea in these stories--but so do music and love and hope in the precious otherness of nature.

Obi Kaufmann, author of the best-selling California Field Atlas, turns his artful yet analytical attention to the Golden State's single most complex and controversial resource: water. In this new book, full-color maps unravel the braided knot of California's water infrastructure and ecosystems, exposing a history of unlimited growth in spite of finite natural resources--a history that has led to its current precarious circumstances. Yet this built world depends upon the biosphere, and in The State of Water Kaufmann argues that environmental conservation and restoration efforts are necessary not only for ethical reasons but also as a matter of human survival. Offering nine perspectives to illustrate the most pressing challenges facing California's water infrastructure, from dams to species revitalization, Kaufmann reveals pragmatic yet inspiring solutions to how water in the West can continue to support agriculture, municipalities, and the environment. Interspersed throughout with trail paintings of animals that might yet survive under a caring and careful water ethic, Kaufmann shows how California can usher in a new era of responsible water conservation, and--perhaps most importantly--how we may do so together.

In the last century water policies relied on the construction of massive infrastructure in the form of dams, pipelines, and complex centralized treatment plants to meet human demands. These facilities brought tremendous benefits, but they also had serious and often unanticipated social, economic and environmental costs. Demand for water is one of the major challenges of the current century, but past approaches are no longer sufficient.

A Journey Through Water: A Scientific Exploration of The Most Anomalous Liquid on Earth, is a monograph about water at molecular level. The monograph explores how its peculiar properties are related to its molecular structure. Readers are introduced to water through information about water in a wider perspective, properties of its liquid state, experimental techniques for molecular level investigations of liquid water, and computer simulation techniques. This is followed by chapters explaining the structural properties and principal applications of various phases of water (water as a normal liquid, supercooled water, ice and supercritical water). Key features of this reference include: - easy to understand, sequential and structured text making this reference ideal for readers with limited scientific knowledge of water physics - a list of institutions where water research is promoted in larger scales - 130 figures which supplement the text - an explanation of ten principal anomalies of water and associated theories The book is an excellent resource for novice researchers (physicists, chemists and chemical engineers) working on water and laymen who are interested in furthering their understanding of this precious liquid.