Geo Offers Total Immersion in Earth’s Water Dilemma

A special edition of National Geographic arrived in mailboxes last week like a cruel taunt. As orange flames desiccated greenery and hydrants sputtered air, the issue’s uncharacteristically blue cover burbled: “Water.”

Now, before the rains start, Southern Californians may want to ponder how the primal elements of earth, air, fire and water interconnect, and how vital understanding water is to survive in harmony with the others.

“Fresh water is the blood of our land,” Geographic says.

And the world’s veins are in trouble.

This issue, which took a team of writers and photographers a year to produce, is divided into four parts: Supply, Development, Pollution and Restoration. The photographs, graphics and maps (readers may want to get two issues, since each side of a fold-out map is a keeper) are interesting in themselves. In combination with the text, they fascinate.

The stories are more personal and better told than the typically homogenized Geographic article. Exhaustive at first glance, the stories quickly reveal that their main function is merely to point fingers at the immensity and complexity of the world’s fresh water problems. By focusing on human players and interesting pieces of the monumental water puzzle, the writers keep the narrative flowing, sometimes wringing magic from hard facts and hard science.

In the lead article, author Michael Parfit flies his Cessna--he says he logged 25,000 miles during the year-long project--from within the blinding roil of clouds formed by evaporation from the Gulf of Alaska and transpiration from nearby forests, down to where he can see a watery landscape of bogs, lakes and the Yukon River, which pours 145 billion gallons of water into the Bering Sea each day.

From this moment of birth in the endless water cycle, Parfit tracks water through irrigation channels, into collapsing aquifers and out of sprinklers that wet the lawns and-- Red alert! Red alert! --sidewalks of Tucson.

The part of the fine package that hits closest to home is Richard Conniff’s “California, Desert in Disguise,” in which farmers, urbanites, industrialists, foresters and even deep-sea fishermen square off in a chaotic battle for increasingly problematic water rights.

Meanwhile, developers continue to push up new and environmentally dubious projects, as evidenced by a photo of a Moreno Valley construction worker slaking his thirst from a cooler--as yet more homes rise in the desert.

National Geographic teaches that 97% of the world’s water is salt, and ice is two-thirds of what remains. Given the misuse of that remaining 1%, you can’t blame the magazine for a touch of gloom.

Still, Parfit tries to wrap things up on an encouraging note. In running down projects and people who are helping repair the damage, he quotes a line from author Hermann Hesse: “ . . . It seemed to him that whoever understood this river and its secrets, would understand much more, many secrets, all secrets.”

In the December Audubon magazine, author Thomas McGuane and photographer Galen Rowell celebrate the 25th anniversary of the federal Wild and Scenic River Act by writing about and photographing four stretches of wild water that have been saved from the litany of horrors people inflict.

Rowell’s photographs of California’s Tuolumne River offer a mesmerizing study of the river John Muir called a “glorious abundance of rock and falling, gliding, tossing water.”

Early in the century, though, Muir’s nascent environmental movement lost part of the Tuolumne to a dam, and now the Clavey, a large and gorgeous tributary to that river, is similarly threatened.

McGuane, writing of a family trip down the North Fork of the Flathead in Montana, writes: “I suppose many American families have had such days on our Wild and Scenic Rivers, days that are restorative not just to our beleaguered constitutions but to our idealism as a people, to our capacity to dream.”

The November Outside magazine, meanwhile, offers a first-hand account of a major wildfire near Spokane, and warns those who ignore how the elements interconnect.

Describing dry, overgrown wildland created by encroaching civilization, John Keeble writes: “It’s like water behind a dam, a reservoir of potential energy stored for the day the fire comes.”

And then, “like a flooding river, swirling around obstructions and filling side chutes, the fire began a run, chasing the courses outlined by topography, fuel, and wind.”

Elsewhere in the magazine, Toby Thompson visits Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder at his home, up the range a ways from the Tuolumne, in a place Snyder describes as “the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, in the Yuba River watershed, north of the south fork . . . “

Snyder is a father of bioregionalism, the movement whose credo might be abbreviated: Know where your water comes from--and we don’t mean the tap--and use it respectfully.

In the magazine’s “Between the Lines” column, Thompson says of Snyder: “When he writes of living in concert with nature, he’s not talking about the past, but laying a blueprint for America’s future.”

Alas, as the late Times book editor Robert Kirsch wrote, shortly after the 1965 Watts riots: “Southern California is notoriously the land of short memory . . . “

By the time of this autumn’s fires, the drought was fading from memory; by the time TV screens fill with images of mudslides, the fires likely will be forgotten.

Required Reading: Time also has a special issue out this week, an excellent report on diversity in America. Chock full of charts and other graphics, it explores every conceivable aspect of the important topic, from a spicy essay on “the Politics of Separation,” complete with Doonesbury reprints, to a powerful essay by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison on how new immigrant groups view resident blacks: “whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African-American.”

New on Newsstands: Imagine that someone slipped ecstasy into the water cooler at McKinsey & Co., cranked up the Pearl Jam and told the freshman crop of consultants to concoct a ‘zine. They’d probably come up with something like Fast Company. With snappy typefaces staggering over the page, cartoony illustrations and lots of irreverent art, this Roger Black-designed bimonthly is a blast to look at. It’s also fun to read.

Whether it actually has any utility to the “knowledge workers, management innovators, and idea merchants who are leading the business revolution”--other than to bolster egos of those who think that’s them--remains to be seen.

In the biff-bam-boom prose of newly minted junior ad execs, the premiere issue talks the MBA talk that seems to entrance befuddled executives these days: the New Economy! new paradigm start-ups! the interactive dynamic! healthy tension!

After all, “the values of life infuse the meaning of work!” There are few flow charts and figures here. Lots of talk about Zen, Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi, Zen, Zen, and flexibility! But then, as Fast Company tells us, in the Oxymoronic Economy, “as ideas get louder, reality gets thinner.”

(One year, $29.95: Subscription Dept., 49 Richmondville Ave., Westport, CT 06880-9649.)

Bob Sipchen’s Magazines column is published every other Thursday.