A View of the
River
Luna B. Leopold. Harvard
University Press, 1994. 298 pages. $39.95 plus $3.50 postage and
shipping; Customer Service Dept., Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass. 02138
(800/448-2242).
Review by C.L.
Rawlins
Anyone concerned with
flowing water – river rats, lawyers, architects, irrigators, fly
fishers and land managers – will learn to love this small,
blue-backed book.
With photos and graphs which
illuminate its course, and complete references, A View of the River
will be an instant standard as a text. But tech-haters and poets
shouldn’t be turned away. There are a few equations (very few for
this kind of book) and you don’t have to know what ‘ means to reach
an understanding. Luna Leopold’s grave and rhythmic prose floats
the reader on, and it will change forever the way you look at
flowing water.
Streams are as various as the
human personality, but there are definite themes and continuities,
based on gravity and water and rock, which form the logic of this
book. Since Leopold has achieved his understanding by observation,
A View of the River is more a book of experience than of
theory.
After his father, Aldo Leopold, died in
1948, while fighting a fire near his home, Luna, a Harvard doctoral
student, edited his draft essays and saw them into print. The
resulting book, A Sand County Almanac, is a
touchstone.
Luna Leopold then pursued his own
great work: to understand the marriage of streams and their
landscapes. Starting as an engineer with the U.S. Geological
Survey, he measured channels across the nation, slogging in waders
with a tripod and level and building a formidable set of field data
as he worked his way up to chief
hydrologist.
Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology
(1964) changed the practice of hydrology for good. Retiring from
the USGS, he taught at Berkeley in the 1970s and studied urban
watersheds. Water in Environmental Planning (written with Thomas
Dunne in 1978) was another benchmark book. In all, Leopold headed
up a quiet but complete revolution in his
field.
Recently, he’s been pressing the Forest
Service to move hydrologists out of their offices, where they
calculate the sizes of culverts needed for logging roads and drink
too much coffee. Leopold would rather see them collect primary data
on streamflows and the condition of channels, which is mostly
lacking for the national forest system.
Seeing in
ruined stream channels, excessive diversions, porkbarrel dams,
silted fish habitat, and disastrous floods our nation’s fundamental
misunderstanding of how rivers act, he has distilled a life’s
painstaking work into one clear dram. Rather than addressing the
front benches of hydrology, he’s trying to pass his understanding
to as many readers as possible, without watering it down.
n
Chip Rawlins is HCN’s poetry
editor.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Leopold floats us to an understanding.
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