Erica Gies is an independent journalist who covers science and the environment from Victoria, British Columbia, and San Francisco, California. Her work appears in The New York Times , Scientific American and National Geographic , among others. She is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (2022).
Walking across spongy tundra, among bonsai shrubs on fire with autumn colours, I came upon a river too wide to cross. Gazing up the valley from which it flowed, I saw that the obstacle blocking my path was just one strand of a broad, braided system spread languidly across a floodplain in Denali National Park in Alaska. I watched the McKinley River’s fluid columns shift apart, then twine together. Although at that time I knew little about hydrology, the science of water, on some instinctual level I understood that this was a free river. Every other river I’d known was markedly subdued.
What does it mean for a river to be free? Today, most water is not in its natural state, especially in industrialised countries. It sounds obvious, but I hadn’t before given it much thought. Humans have filled in or drained 87 per cent […]
Full article and “slow water”: What does water want? Most humans seem to have forgotten