Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: A Little Bit of Seoul
Next story: Lit City Literary Events

Book review: Living Waters by Margaret Wooster

Living Waters: Reading the Rivers of the Lower Great Lakes

by Margaret Wooster
(SUNY Press, February 2009)

By almost any measure Margaret Wooster should be celebrated as a hero of our planet. For a couple of decades, she has been one of the most outspoken and out front environmental advocates in our region. Her professional and personal brilliance shines very brightly in her newest book, Living Waters: Reading the Rivers of the Lower Great Lakes, published by the State University of New York Press.

As the title implies, the focus of the book is in the bioregion centering on the lower Great Lakes. Buffalo, Niagara, and the St. Lawrence areas are epicenters of her research and knowledge. This book is an easy-to-read tour de force of the complex issues, people, and cultures that have shaped our current ecological conditions. On display is Wooster’s unabashed passion and love of one of the primeval forces of our existence—that of water and its influence on the life and health. The stories are told with a studied, energetic, and intuitive knowledge of human history and the fragile conditions of our ecological standing here on mother earth.

Wooster’s background as community activist and leader, mother, spouse, neighbor, and friend serves her well as she explores her lifelong dedication to revealing nature and human and natural history. Her examination of culture and her pointed portrayal of related ecological conditions tells a critical story that is sad, consequential, and instructive. She is an authority of persistent toxic substances. She is an authority on local place. She knows water as well as anyone.

The stories of the Cattaraugus, Scajaquada, Niagara, and Buffalo rivers, the Zoar and Genesee valleys, and the St. Lawrence are the meat of this book. The stories are told gracefully and yet impart a great deal of discomfort as she lays bare the horrific truths of how we have been significantly less than ideal stewards in the Great Lakes basin which embraces nearly one fifth of the fresh surface water on the earth. Essentially, this book is a powerful chronicle of humanity’s war upon itself.

Throughout the book Wooster refers to others who have influenced her thinking. These include Aldo Leopold, the great Wisconsin conservationist; Theo Colburn, author of Our Stolen Future; Seneca scholar John Mohawk; West Valley Activist Ray Vaughan; Cayuga Faithkeeper Allan Jamieson; and literally dozens of others. These voices ring authentic and all reflect both her wide circle of friends and her long-held trust in giving credit to local experience and wisdom.

She tells us stories that made me sit up and pay attention. Her stories of people that have come before us, her encounter with a family of chattering Beluga whales near the mouth of the St. Lawrence, the story of the dark trace of the “Indian cave” (near the present day nudist colony) in Zoar Valley, her canoe journeys with her husband Neil on the Buffalo River, her magical encounter with the soon thereafter demolished Scajaquada embryonic headwater spring bubbling up from deep beneath the earth, and the stories of her own ancestral homeland in Central New York as both powerful pre-European human habitat and, in more recent times, the victim of a horrific salt mine collapse are absorbing.

And there is so much more. There are stories of pollutions and despairs, development and generations of bad decisions involving how we treat our most precious assets. There are stories of politics and international treaties. Margaret has a long professional history, including several years as the executive director of Great Lakes United, a binational environmental organization located in Buffalo. Besides being a favorite Buffalo daughter, Margaret is known and even sometimes welcomed in the halls of Congress and Parliament. She is a keeper.

A favorite passage involves the memory of Stan Spisiak, one of Buffalo’s most outspoken “water keepers” from the early 1960s. This local business and family man became concerned about the condition of the Buffalo River and was able to go all the way to the White House. Spisiak’s efforts on behalf of the river were embryonic and led to worldwide recognition of environmental issues.

Another favorite passage involves science, of which one will find plenty in this book. Science can tell us how little we know about nature, and how difficult it is to “restore” or “remediate” environmental damage. Our culture gives lip service to this when we must “take” an ecological community for something that we determine is for the greater good—for instance, some sort of prioritized economic benefit like a shopping center or a shipping channel. To my way of thinking, we don’t come close to understanding the true economic consequences of environmental destructions which are in our economic system still mostly considered “externalities.”

Some excerpts:

Most of us know comparatively little about the natural processes that sustain Earth’s creeks, rivers, lakes, and groundwater. Most of us think that someone else is minding the water. Based on my own explorations of these Great Lakes Waters, I would say that this is a dangerous delusion.

Within the last two decades, research on aquatic ecosystems…challenges our most basic views of how rivers work- though this remains unknown to the engineers in charge of our waterways. These studies reveal that every stream is actually two interacting waterbodies; one above the ground and one below. The groundwater does all of the invisible housework of cleaning and providing storage, recharge, and nutrients to the waters above. Groundwater systems…also serve as a refuge for creatures during all parts of their life cycles and assist...in recovery after floods or droughts.

Finally, I think that Wooster leaves us with a feeling of hope. The last chapter, “Leopold Revisited,” reminds us that we can still think of a land ethic. Whether it is trying to understand the potential for unintended consequences, or pushing what Leopold called “intelligent consumption,” this book leaves me gazing joyfully at the final image of the book. It is a red-headed woodpecker hammering away at a dead pine. That is life. That may be a hopeful vision of a future that works.

blog comments powered by Disqus