Overview

"""Poignant but animated by a stubborn hope.""--Christianity Today For years, Ryan Schnurr, editor at Belt Magazine, watched media coverage of Lake Erie algae blooms with a growing sense of unease. An Indiana native, he wanted to learn more about the role the Maumee River--Lake Erie's largest tributary and the center of the region's largest watershed--played in the lake's environmental woes. So in the summer of 2016, he walked and canoed the length of the river from its headwaters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to its mouth in Toledo, Ohio. As he traverses the waters and banks like a modern-day Thoreau, Schnurr walks us through: - The history of the river, including its formation by glaciers - Its function in Native American and American history - How industrialization changed it - How current economic and environmental forces are still shaping it today. Part cultural history, part nature writing, and part personal narrative, In the Watershed is a lyrical work of nonfiction in the vein of John McPhee, Edward Abbey, and Ian Frazier with a timely and important warning at the core. ""What is happening in Lake Erie,"" Schnurr tells us, ""is a disaster by nearly any measure?ecologically, economically, socially, culturally."" A slim but pressing travelogue for readers who are interested in nature writing at its most local level."

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Reviews

Ryan Schnurr is a keeper of the spirit of John McPhee, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard -- he writes about nature intimately and with a sense of wonder, but he's forever alert to the ways our environment is wounded and reshaped by our greed and neglect. The Maumee River may be relatively small and unknown, but reading this book it'll feel as big and important as the Mississippi: In the Watershed stretches from the glaciers of eons past to this year's algae blooms, from wars with Native Americans to Midwest industrial history. It's a rich, complex, and fragile place, and Schnurr is a superb guide through it. -- Mark Athitakis, author, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt I am entranced by this slender, luminous volume. Ryan Schnurr has created a subtle monument to a place that we overlook, yet glows with sacredness under his measured gaze. Delightful. -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author, The Devil's Highway and Into the Beautiful North The land surface of Earth is a quilt of watersheds, each one gathering runoff that reveals what humans have been doing in the catchment area. All the poisons we spray or dump on the ground, all the soils we expose to erosion, eventually wind up in creeks and rivers, lakes and oceans. Every watershed needs observers who monitor its health, who care about the quality of wild and human life it supports. The Maumee Valley now has a new and keen-eyed caretaker in Ryan Schnurr, who has written an engaging narrative about a journey downriver from the headwaters to Lake Erie, braiding together his personal observations with history, science, and folklore. --Scott Russell Sanders, author, Earth Works: Selected Essays and A Conservationist Manifesto

The land surface of Earth is a quilt of watersheds, each one gathering runoff that reveals what humans have been doing in the catchment area. All the poisons we spray or dump on the ground, all the soils we expose to erosion, eventually wind up in creeks and rivers, lakes and oceans. Every watershed needs observers who monitor its health, who care about the quality of wild and human life it supports. The Maumee Valley now has a new and keen-eyed caretaker in Ryan Schnurr, who has written an engaging narrative about a journey downriver from the headwaters to Lake Erie, braiding together his personal observations with history, science, and folklore. --Scott Russell Sanders, author, Earth Works: Selected Essays and A Conservationist Manifesto Ryan Schnurr is a keeper of the spirit of John McPhee, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard -- he writes about nature intimately and with a sense of wonder, but he's forever alert to the ways our environment is wounded and reshaped by our greed and neglect. The Maumee River may be relatively small and unknown, but reading this book it'll feel as big and important as the Mississippi: In the Watershed stretches from the glaciers of eons past to this year's algae blooms, from wars with Native Americans to Midwest industrial history. It's a rich, complex, and fragile place, and Schnurr is a superb guide through it. -- Mark Athitakis, author, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt I am entranced by this slender, luminous volume. Ryan Schnurr has created a subtle monument to a place that we overlook, yet glows with sacredness under his measured gaze. Delightful. -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author, The Devil's Highway and Into the Beautiful North

Ryan Schnurr is a keeper of the spirit of John McPhee, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard -- he writes about nature intimately and with a sense of wonder, but he's forever alert to the ways our environment is wounded and reshaped by our greed and neglect. The Maumee River may be relatively small and unknown, but reading this book it'll feel as big and important as the Mississippi: In the Watershed stretches from the glaciers of eons past to this year's algae blooms, from wars with Native Americans to Midwest industrial history. It's a rich, complex, and fragile place, and Schnurr is a superb guide through it. -- Mark Athitakis, author, The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt I am entranced by this slender, luminous volume. Ryan Schnurr has created a subtle monument to a place that we overlook, yet glows with sacredness under his measured gaze. Delightful. -- Luis Alberto Urrea, author, The Devil's Highway and Into the Beautiful North

Author Information

Ryan Schnurr is a writer and photographer from northeast Indiana. His work has been published by Midwestern Gothic, Old Northwest Review, and Belt Magazine, and has been selected for two regional anthologies. In the Watershed is his first book.

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