Of Rock and Rivers: Seeking a Sense of Place in the American West

Abstract

Beginning with her childhood in northern Ohio, Ellen Wohl recounts the experiences that took her from revering a mythic American West of untrammeled wilderness to understanding the region's altered ecosystems as a river geomorphologist studying western watersheds. The result is a book, in the tradition of Rachel Carson, combining readable science, a personal passion for nature, and environmental advocacy. Whereas Carson's Silent Spring focused on the urban environment and industrial chemicals, Of Rock and Rivers argues that human alteration of the environment reaches into the most remote recesses of America's least inhabited landscapes. From southwestern canyons to the Rocky Mountains, Wohl draws upon a career of research findings to show that human land use practices “have the effect of simplifying and homogenizing landscapes,” thus diminishing “the ability of the landscape to support diverse life-forms” (xvii–xviii). In the book's first half, Wohl begins her exploration of this diminution through forays into the Grand Canyon as an eager geology student. These essays express Wohl's emotional attachment and aesthetic appreciation, as well as her growing realization of how dams, non-native species, and irrigation influence the natural dynamics of geology and hydrology. Investigating the slack water beneath the Glen Canyon Dam, Wohl makes the connections between halting the millennia-old process of massive floods on the Colorado River and the near extinction of native chub (fish), river channel constriction, and introduction of invasive, water-sucking plants. In the book's second half, Wohl recalls researching rivers from their snow-fed headwaters to their meanderings along Colorado's Front Range. Through the lens of the Poudre River, Wohl observes the intensity of human impacts on western water beyond massive dams. Therein, with the maturity of her career and with the elation of her initial years in the West honed to the power of careful observation, Wohl writes most effectively about both her love of place and the historical consequences of municipal water use, stream channelization, logging, fire, and mining (as well as the less obvious impacts associated with the ski industry, predator extirpation, and fly-fishing) on watershed ecosystems.