"Water is the blood of a land. It courses through the internal seams and passageways of a continent, cleansing and carrying nutrients to all its farthest reaches, from the mountaintops to the deltas. Water defines the boundaries of life on Earth in every range – in bogs and forests and even, especially, in deserts.

"Still waters may run shallow or deep, but they hold the roots of floating marsh plants in undulating, upside-down forests that create the complex filtering system of a swamp. A river contains the chemical vocabularies that drive the intricate plot – as heartrending as any novel – that is the life story of a salmon. Water is ancient and endless: The immortality of molecules, the originality of a tadpole, a history of the world in the eye of an alligator. Beneath all else, water is the thing we cannot live without."

– Barbara Kingsolver
Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands published by National Geographic