Fountain Creek: Big Lessons from a Little River
“Every stream in the American West deserves a biographer as affectionate, thorough, and lyrical as Jim O’Donnell.”
— BEN GOLDFARB, author of Crossings
Fountain Creek Colorado is one of the most human-dominated water systems I know of. Over the years, Fountain Creek Colorado has been dammed, diverted, poisoned, re-routed, mapped, named, channelized, filled with physical and human debris, reduced, augmented, confused, litigated, studied, stolen, replaced, known, unknown, forgotten, misunderstood, blamed, monitored, sampled, screen, broken and tamed. More than anything else, humans have altered the very nature of the Fountain, pumping water from Colorado’s western slope into the Fountain watershed, making what once was a creek into a river, and threatening to make it a dry creek yet again. Fountain Creek is the poster child Anthropocene watershed.
“In his affecting, prismatic, and beautifully-wrought exploration of the past, present, and possible future of Fountain Creek, O’Donnell reminds us that we have a chance at healing the world at large, if only we look first to places closest to home.”
—AMY BRADY, Ice
This book is a work of contemporary ‘nature writing’ sporting a healthy mix of historical, geologic, economic, literary and anthropological ponderings. The book will explore and engage with the complexity of needs, values, and desires facing urban and post-pastoral waterways in the American West. The goal of this book is to place Coloado’s Fountain Creek in its full ecological, historical and socio-cultural context while looking both to the past and the future for creative solutions to the problems faced by river and human alike. I see this book as thought-provoking, envelope-pushing and hopefully controversial, something to be argued over. I’m looking to “shift the Overton Window” when it comes to our relationship with Western waters.
Fountain Creek Colorado
Reviews of Fountain Creek
Fountain Creek is ‘the poster child of the Anthropocene’: Author Jim O’Donnell on water, society and the nature of rivers – Colorado Public Radio
What a River Can Teach Us: A New Work of Riparian Activism – Taos News
What We Are Reading: Fountain Creek – New Mexico Magazine
Fountain Creek: Big Lessons from a Little River – Water Education Colorado
“Fountain Creek” traces history, environmental challenges of a unique waterway – Colorado Sun
Broken, but still a river with a life of its own – Rocky Mountain Reader
For Jim O’Donnell, this Colorado creek’s story is, in many ways, his own – SunLit
There’s a River in Our Creek: How Colorado Springs’ Growth is Eroding the Fountain Creek Watershed. – Colorado Springs Independent