Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

The story David Owen tells in Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert—and the disastrous consequences faced when any part of this tenuous system fails.

The Colorado River is an essential freshwater resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, as snowmelt, to its parched terminus, the Colorado River Delta, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns and RV parks to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border past the Morelos Dam where the river runs dry.

Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more beguiling than the headlines let on.

Paperback and 274 pages.