Description:
A breathtaking journey down the lifeblood of the American West.
Brief description:
Pete McBride is an award-winning photographer, filmmaker, writer, and speaker known for his powerful storytelling at the intersection of adventure and environmental conservation. Raised in Colorado, McBride has spent over two decades documenting remote corners of the globe, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the depths of the Grand Canyon.
A National Geographic Explorer, Adventurer of the Year, and Sony Artisan of Imagery, McBride has worked in more than 75 countries, combining his skills in photojournalism and filmmaking to spotlight pressing environmental issues, particularly those involving water scarcity, wilderness protection, and climate change.
His 750-mile trek through the length of the Grand Canyon became the basis for the Emmy-nominated documentary Into the Canyon and his celebrated book The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim, which won a National Outdoor Book Award.
His later books, Seeing Silence and Chasing Water, also won national book awards, and his photography and writing have appeared in National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and the New York Times, among others. He is a frequent speaker at global conferences and conservation events.
Review Quotes:
"This book feels like standing on a riverbank and finally paying attention. Witness to Water is stunning, honest, and quietly devastating in the best way."
--Paul Nicklen, National Geographic photographer and co-founder of SeaLegacy
"Witness to Water is breathtaking and deeply moving--a powerful reminder that water is the thread that holds life, culture, and wild places together. Pete McBride's work is both beautiful and urgent, and this book is a gift."
--Cristina Mittermeier, Sony Artisan of Imagery and co-founder of SeaLegacy
"With Witness to Water, Pete McBride brings to life his three-decade odyssey from adventure photographer to conservation storyteller and freshwater advocate. He's an engaging writer about what he's seen from the ground, paddling a boat or flying a small plane. Rivers like the Colorado break your heart when they're overused and disappear into muck. What's better for people, land and wildlife, he writes, is a river that's wet."
-- Betsy Marston, editor of Writers on the Range
"Witness to Water is a blueprint for how we can engage with big, messy environmental problems--starting at home, and rippling our understanding, and actions, out into the wider world. Read and enjoy this book; then use it as inspiration for your own story."
-- Auden Schendler, author of Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul
"By masterfully blending hard-hitting scientific evidence with a deeply personal narrative, this book opened my eyes to so much. While I learned about the every day "plumbing" that nourishes the American southwest, the author also removed the scales from my eyes and taught me the fact that rivers also lead lives of birth and death just like us humans. And if that's true, then we need to find a way to hear the Colorado's voice so that we can awaken to its plea to survive. In this memoir-- I would prefer to call it a many-threaded love song-- McBride takes us on a his own personal journey from globe-trotting objective photojournalist to passionate local advocate, all complementing his lifetime of telling us moving stories through his expert command of the visual medium that he usually relies on. McBride invites us along as he heads off on trips to the source of the Ganges to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, allowing us to experience his own adventurous (and quite dangerous) life while we witness the unfolding gravitational pull of home and family and activism that eventually pushes him to become a voice for this threatened river and to hold a mirror up to us for how we have threatened it, existentially. As I read, I couldn't help but think of other famous rivers and how they've been elemental to birth of vibrant civilizations, from the Nile to the Yangtze to the Danube to the Mississippi. McBride's book teaches us that, should we choose to willfully keep punishing the life-giving Colorado, we are also punishing ourselves not just economically, but also spiritually. As he tells us, "In reducing the Colorado to a crop-watering, turbine-spinning machine, we had erased a central aspect of our own humanity. We couldn't turn our rivers into enormous plumbing systems without mechanizing ourselves, or dry up their riverbeds without parching our own souls." 5 stars."
-- Gustav Peebles, PhD, author of The First and Last Bank