Journeys Through the Vanishing Worlds that Sustain Us

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.

An invigorating cross-pollination of memoir and natural history, both beautifully phrased and delicately structured – this book deserves your time and attention

At once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life

Jessica J. Lee is a bestselling British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and Dispersals, the children’s book A Garden Called Home, co-author (with fieldnotes collective) of the collaborative work this too is a glistening, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted and the eco-poetry collection Tendrils. Her work has received numerous awards internationally, including the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, a Banff Mountain Book Award, the Taiwan Open Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College. She lives in Berlin.

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.

Jessica J. Lee

A stunning record of inheritance, memory and belonging . . . In Lee's writing, you feel the radical potential of the essay form; at once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life

Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water

Profound, poetic, illuminating and moving, Dispersals' deep knowledge, sensitivity and research (worn so lightly) addresses just how entwined our fortunes, migration and language are with plants; how much we are part of nature. Important and vivid

Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down

Contemplative, elegant, neatly structured . . . In a series of concise, interlocking essays, she entwines her personal story with the political history of different plants

The author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection. An insightful meditation on nature and identity within 'a world in motion

Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline . . . This deserves a wide audience

A beautiful book about belonging—plant and human. A work that will make you look at the orange in your hand, the moss underfoot, the tea that you sip a little more closely. Lee turns her careful gaze to the easy stories we tell ourselves about foreign and native, and leaves us with a vision of the world simultaneously more nuanced and more precious

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of 'Starling Days'

Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings — by people and by plants — to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration

Dispersals is a beautifully written and complex book . . . [Lee] shows us with stunning prose, tenderness and precision the unexpected ways that we all connect and are connected by the plants around us

Amanda Thomson, author of ''Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home'

One of the most interesting and celebrated contemporary writers of nature, identity and place . . . her work deftly interweaves personal memoir and family history with botany, cultural criticism and first-hand observations of the natural world

Lee’s lyrical prose sprouts from a fertile ground of intensive research and intimate memories — memories that are by turns sharply vivid and pleasantly hazy with the distance of time . . . She moves seamlessly from seaweed to soybeans to citrus . . . Jessica J. Lee will make you stop and smell the weeds

Richly textured . . . These essays critically probe the native/nonnative paradigm of invasive-species ecology. Lee’s voice will stay with readers long after they finish this book

[A] lyrical essay collection . . . Lee writes intimately about her own oscillating cravings for movement and rootedness . . . Dispersals shows us that we cannot view the trajectory of a plant without bumping into trajectories of human power

A brilliant, thoughtful, and thought-provoking collection of essays, which expertly blend personal reflection and natural history . . . you will not look at the plants around you in the same way again

Polly Atkin, author of 'Some of Us Just Fall'

Exquisite, haunting . . . Lee continues her insistent, clear-eyed quest for nourishment and vitality, even when both are complicated, and encourages readers to do the same

Dispersals draws a gorgeous, sprawling map of the diaspora of flora . . . The themes in these fourteen essays become invigorating and intimate in Lee's hand

On Plants, Borders and Belonging

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? 
 
Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion. 
 
In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them. 
 
Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being "out of place"- whether weeds, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by our hand. 
 
Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in precise and poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they border cross, and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

Jessica J. Lee

Books by Jessica J. Lee

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