Well written and illustrated book about papyrus, including history, biology, uses, wetland functioning and water/sewage filtering. The book covers important topics and should be read by anyone even vaguely interested in the environment and water use. ( )

Papyrus provides a delightful theme that ties together times and places of East Africa, all along the Great Rift. The civilization of ancient Egypt arose out of the swamps. The fluted columns of Greece grew out of the bundled papyrus that housed the ancient swamp dwellers in Egypt's earliest days? Stranger things have happened, I guess!

Most of the book is a collection of stories about various swamps, from Israel to Botswana. Agricultural, industrial, and urban development threaten these swamps. But the swamps provide vital services, buffering and cleaning water. Swamps and wetlands in general provide a very stark window into how we humans are destroying the ecological systems that allow us to survive. Gaudet provides some examples of projects that have reversed the trend, and where people have become aware of the vital role of swamps.

One major way that swamps can pay for themselves is by drawing in tourists and their money. A lot of the draw of the swamps is the bird life. But I wonder - given ecological constraints, will tourism continue to grow or even maintain its present intensity? Will the swamps disappear with the tourists? Perhaps the tourists can be a mere transition, where the local people can come to see the benefits of the swamps beyond the tourists' money.

This was not so much an exercise in nature writing like Dillard or McPhee. Gaudet is an ecologist more than a writer. The writing gets a bit repetitive or disorganized sometimes. There is a bit of the feel of a collection of separate papers here. But Gaudet knows his stuff and communicates it effectively. I learned an enormous amount about the Great Rift. I had no idea many major lakes, such as Lake Chad, had no outlets, for example! Papyrus itself is fascinating but the story told here is really global. ( )

In 1960, Flanders & Swann had a song in their review At The Drop Of A Hat, called The Wom-Pom Song. It praised a miracle plant, all of which could be used and which solved basically every problem of mankind (Chorus: “There is nothing that the Wom-Pom cannot do”). They might have been inspired by the papyrus plant, as explained and examined by John Gaudet.

From rope to paper to clothing to flooring to boats, papyrus ruled. For four thousand years, Egypt was the sole source for paper in the western world, which led empires to crave it – Egypt, that is. It wasn’t until 1000 AD that papyrus began to fade as the paper of record.

I particularly liked the way delta-living Egyptians built houseboats out of papyrus, which floated during the flood season, and beached during the dry season, allowing the papyrus to dry out over a few months before the waters rose again. By bundling papyrus tightly, the Egyptians created air tanks that formed the hulls of their boats and rafts, giving them high buoyancy and long life.

On the paper front, the wild, uncultivated, 18 ft tall plant and the stunningly simple process to make paper from it, led Egypt to supply the known world. Gaudet says the bureaucratic Roman Empire would have ground to a halt if Egypt had stopped shipping boatloads of paper.

Unavoidably, I suppose, the story deteriorates from the upbeat to the disastrous, as papyrus has disappeared from Egypt. We have drained the swamps they need, abandoned the water purification they provide, poisoned the ground with artificial fertilizers and dumped raw sewage into the Nile in the billions of gallons – per day. No surprise then that the Nile doesn’t support such idyllic scenes and beneficial species any more. Egyptians can literally smell fish caught in the Nile, and back away.

The most horrible story comes from Israel, much more recently, and therefore much more thoroughly documented. Developers in the north drained a papyrus swamp, which ruined their business, caused massive pollution for 20 years as far south as Galilee, and stopped virtually all development as people moved out in droves. All because the papyrus was not left to do the job it had been silently and effectively performing for thousands of years.

So Papyrus isn’t really the story of the plant that changed the world. It’s about the human species that changed the world, and not really for the better.

Remarkably, and uniquely in my limited experience, this ecology book ends on upbeat notes. The Israelis came to realize that costly patches to the mess they made only add more problems. They decided to reflood the area and let nature take its course. They also went much farther, creating a strict nature reserve, in partnership with Jordan. The results are overwhelmingly spectacular, and the reserve is a huge tourist attraction as hundreds of thousands of birds have returned to this ancient pit stop. In Egypt, the greens are starting to have an effect as well, with natural filtration plants, and yes, the re-emergence of papyrus.

There is actually hope. ( )