EVOLUTION 



What the Fo&sJls Say ahd Why -it -Mattel s ';• . 



the 1970s over the decline of the Ogal- 

 lala aquifer in the central United States, 

 which supplies water to the High Plains. 

 At the bidding of concerned plains- 

 state legislators, the U.S. Army Corps 

 of Engineers investigated the feasibility 

 of transporting water to Kansas, Ne- 

 braska, and Colorado from what the 

 Corps study euphemistically called "ad- 

 jacent areas," sparking another heated 

 reaction from the Great Lakes states. 



Those episodes and others confirmed 

 what was already pretty obvious: to 

 the people in the eight states and two 

 Canadian provinces that border the 

 Great Lakes, the smallest diversion 

 of water outside the watershed is to 

 be vigilantly avoided. Even a trickle, 

 they fear, would eventually open the 

 floodgates of diversion and suck the 

 lakes dry. Having seen the damage 

 wreaked by mismanagement, they are 

 not about to submit their lakes to the 

 same fate as that of Russia's great Aral 

 Sea [see "Blue Planet Blues," by Eleanor 

 J. Sterling on page 29]. 



Peter Annin, a former correspondent 

 for Newsweek, describes the envi- 

 ronmental and legislative turmoil that 

 engulfs the Great Lakes today. Since 

 the 1980s, the states and provinces 

 bordering the Great Lakes have enacted 

 a series of protocols and agreements 

 on water management that have met 

 with varying degrees of success in 

 preventing unsound diversions. But 

 water-management difficulties stem 

 not merely from outside threats, but 

 also from the challenge of defining and 

 reconciling the often clashing interests 

 of multiple governments, residents, and 

 industrial communities in the waters 

 they each claim but must share. The 

 Great Lakes drainage does not respect 

 political boundaries. 



Case in point: Waukesha, Wisconsin, 

 a western neighbor and now suburb of 

 Milwaukee, wants to replace its current 

 system of wells with a connection to the 

 bigger city's water mains, which draw 

 from Lake Michigan. The proposal 

 looks like a straightforward matter 

 of plumbing. Yet Waukesha's effluent 

 goes into the nearby Fox River, which 



drains into the Mississippi — not into 

 the Great Lakes — so even the simple 

 joining of pipes represents a diversion 

 with international repercussions. 



Does that seem far-fetched? Shouldn't 

 tap water for a bedroom community 

 remain a matter for local politicians, 

 particularly in a region as rich in wa- 

 ter as the Great Lakes? Perhaps, but 

 Waukesha and the other cases Annin 

 recounts are emblematic of one of the 

 central issues of our century, as popu- 

 lation growth, expanding economies, 

 and limited resources bring the water 

 wars to everyone's doorstep. 



Dry: Life Without Water 

 edited by Ehsan Masood 

 and Daniel Schaffer 

 Harvard University Press; $29.95 



Most of us who read this magazine 

 (or write for it, for that matter) 

 scarcely have to think about where our 

 next glass of water is coming from: it's 

 just a matter of turning a tap. Yet for 

 roughly a billion people, dwellers in the 

 arid and semi-arid regions that make up 

 40 percent of the Earth's landmasses, 

 every drop is a serious concern. Be- 

 cause water is so critical to economic 

 development, arid lands are among 

 the poorest places on Earth — with the 

 notable exceptions of Las Vegas, Dubai, 

 and other highly subsidized anomalies 

 of the developed world. 



Desert lands, not surprisingly, are 

 also among the most threatened eco- 

 logically, because the delicate balance 

 of their scanty resources is so read- 

 ily upset. Dry, a collection ot short 

 vignettes about life in some of the 

 planet's most arid places, written by 

 scientists and science journalists and 

 illustrated with vivid photography, 

 describes a recent attempt to address 

 the economic and environmental 

 problems of those lands. The chapters 

 report on a variety of practices, identi- 

 fied by a multiyear scientific program, 

 that both utilize and conserve the 

 water resources and biodiversity of 

 the developing world. 



Some of the practices are straight- 

 November 2007 NATURAL HISTORY 67 



Donald R. Prothero 



Evolution 



What the Fossils Say 

 and Why It Matters 



Donald R. Prothero 



Illustrated by Carl Buell 



"Donald R. Prothero is not 

 only one of the leading 

 evolutionary scientists of our 

 time, he writes with clarity and 

 his prose sparkles. Prothero's 

 book is more thorough and 

 comprehensive than any other 

 book for the general public on 

 the evolution versus creationism 

 controversy." 



— Michael Shermer, author of 

 Why Darwin Matters: The Case 

 Against Intelligent Design 



NOVEMBER • cloth • $29.50 • 408 pages 



COLUMBIA 



Read book excerpts at \ 



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