The Fountain: How Humans Use, Misuse and Manipulate Water and the Creek That Became a River
will be published by Torrey House Press in October 2024
Colorado’s Fountain Creek is one of the most human-dominated water systems I know of. Over the years, the Fountain has been dammed, diverted, poisoned, re-routed, mapped, named, channelized, filled with physical and human debris, reduced, augmented, confused, litigated, studied, stolen, replaced, known, unknown, forgotten, misunderstood, blamed, monitored, sampled, screen, broken and tamed. More than anything else, humans have altered the very nature of the Fountain, pumping water from Colorado’s western slope into the Fountain watershed, making what once was a creek into a river, and threatening to make it a dry creek yet again. The Fountain is the poster child Anthropocene watershed.
This book will be a work of contemporary ‘nature writing’ sporting a healthy mix of historical, geologic, economic, literary and anthropological ponderings. The book will explore and engage with the complexity of needs, values, and desires facing urban and post-pastoral waterways in the American West. The goal of this book is to place the Fountain Creek in its full ecological, historical and socio-cultural context while looking both to the past and the future for creative solutions to the problems faced by river and human alike. I see this book as thought-provoking, envelope-pushing and hopefully controversial, something to be argued over. I’m looking to “shift the Overton Window” when it comes to our relationship with Western waters.
LOOK FOR THE FOUNTAIN IN October 2024!