Any place where water and land join together is where an alchemical sort of magic occurs. So says Stephen Rutt, author of The Waterlands.
It's a lyrical, poetic work of non-fiction that gives us a grateful pause from everyday life.
The Waterlands centres on the fascinating story of the water cycle. Water is timeless, forever water: never destroyed, only transformed.
"Each droplet is forever trapped in the water cycle, repeating each step for eternity, like Sisyphus; becoming vapour, circling the world on atmospheric currents, condensing and falling back to the earth's surface."
The book explores the natural rhythms and miraculous power of water, following a raindrop as it falls to the ground in the Lowther Hills of Scotland and travels through the landscape down to the Firth of Clyde.
Throughout the book we follow the progress of a droplet which falls from the sky and splashes into the sodden soil of the hillside. Rutt uses real-life locations starting with the sources of three majestic Scottish rivers: the Annan, Tweed and Clyde.
The wetlands are under threat: 87% have been lost around the world in the last 300 years – reclaimed, built upon, polluted, diverted, dammed. We have affected water’s form, flow and health to the extent that some might say all water on Earth now bears our fingerprints. As scarcity and water conflicts loom, it is more important now than ever that we protect this shared and essential resource.
Exploring geography, ecology, climate change, natural history and social history, Rutt's graceful writing makes chemistry and physics compelling.
It's a book to dip in and out of, a restful place to savour when the demands and ugliness of our world gets too much.
No comments
Post a Comment