Alice Outwater
BOOKS by Alice Outwater
Alice Outwater is the author of Water: A Natural History, The Cartoon Guide to the Environment, and Reuse of Sludge and Minor Wastewater Residuals. Her most recent book is Wild at Heart: America's Turbulent Relationship with Nature from Exploitation to Redemption for St. Martin's Press on how American attitudes towards nature have changed in the last 500 years, release April 2, 2019. Wild at Heart is listed for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
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Wild at Heart:
America's Turbulent Relationship with Nature, from Exploitation to Redemption
Nature on the brink? Maybe not! With so much bad news in the world, we forget how much environmental progress has been made. In a narrative that reaches from Native American tribal practices to public health and commercial hunting, Wild at Heart shows that western attitudes towards nature have changed dramatically in the past 500 years.
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Water: A Natural History
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Water: A Natural History shows how nature's engineers—beavers, prairie dogs, and buffalo—built dams, canals, tunnels and wallows that cleaned the water. By removing these animals from the landscape, the waterways are no longer able to clean themselves, and we have ended up with dirty water. Moving from the reservoir to the modern toliet, from the grasslands of the Midwest to the Everglades of Florida, through the guts of a wastewater treatment plant and out to the waterways again, Outwater makes clear what should have always been obvious: while engineering can depollute water, only ecologically interacting systems can create healthy waterways.
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The Cartoon Guide to the Environment
coauthored with Larry Gonick
Using the fate of Easter Island as a metaphor for Island Earth, this book covers forests and water, chemical cycles, communities of life on land and in water, food and energy webs, populations, agriculture, commercial hunting, extractive energy processes, urbanization, pollution, environmental action, and appropriate technologies.
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Reuse of Sludge and Minor Wastewater Residuals
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Starting with sludge and scum characterization, this practical guide provides least cost methods of improving the quality of biosolids, options for beneficial reuse, and case studies of biosolids reuse programs around the country. This is a comprehensive resource for anyone working to establish a successful sludge reuse program.