August 1, 2013

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Book Review: The West without Water

By Lee Billings

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The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climate Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow
Lynn Ingram Frances Malamud-Roam
University of California Press, 2013 ($29.95)

In this masterful portrait of how water has shaped the American West, paleoclimatologists Ingram and Malamud-Roam place the region's booming cities in the context of the past 20 millennia. Using forensic clues from gnarled trees, layered sediments and abandoned ancient settlements, they reveal the West's past century as an anomalous period of hydrological stability against a darker prehistoric background of century-long civilization-destroying “mega droughts.” When the West's waters rebel again, they warn, we must be ready. Part detective story, part call to action, this book offers vital advice on how to fix the West's looming water crisis.

Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight and is senior desk editor for physical science at Scientific American. He is author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science and many other publications. Billings joined Scientific American in 2014 and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

More by Lee Billings
Scientific American Magazine Vol 309 Issue 2This article was published with the title “The West without Water” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 309 No. 2 (), p. 96
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0813-96a
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