Fresh Waters

An urgent and immersive work from a bestselling, award-winning writer, Watershed traces the threats facing freshwater habitats—where vertebrate populations have declined by 85% since 1970—while illuminating the enchantment of these vital “lifeworlds” and celebrating those who protect them

Freshwater—found in glaciers, lakes, rivers, wetlands, and groundwater—accounts for less than 3% of Earth’s water, yet it is essential to all life. These fragile ecosystems are often overlooked and increasingly imperiled. With exquisite immediacy, Jessica J. Lee traces the convergence of historical and contemporary forces shaping freshwater environments around the world, revealing how seemingly disparate places and problems are connected.

Lee immerses us in freshwaters, from Lake Stechlin in Germany—famous for its clarity, now erupting in algae—to High Arctic ice, to British rivers, where citizen scientists get up close with insect larvae to monitor water health. In Ontario, Canada, she follows researchers experimenting on 58 lakes to understand the effects of climate change and pollution. She joins Polish activists campaigning to rebrand a neglected wetland into a national park and meets a group of conservationists trying to save the world's rarest duck in Madagascar. She freedives Norwegian lakes in search of relict species, restores "Zombie" ponds in England, and, in her ancestral homeland of Taiwan, visits a tiny population of landlocked salmon—a cultural symbol of perseverance—and examines the genetic challenges to its survival.

Throughout these journeys, Lee evokes the joy of diving into a lake, the delicate beauty of a caddisfly, and the hidden vitality of a glacier. At once intimate and expansive, joyful and elegiac, Watershed invites us to imagine new ways of living with—and caring for—the waters that sustain us.