Erica Gies

Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge and an independent journalist who covers water, climate change, critters, and more from Victoria, British Columbia, and San Francisco, California. Her work appears in Scientific AmericanNational Geographic, the New York TimesNaturebioGraphic, Ensia, The Economist, and other outlets.

Slow Water

Welcome to Selsey, a community that welcomed back the marsh.

In letting go, in providing space for coastal ecosystems, we acknowledge the power of waterlands—to hold water, to hold carbon, to hold life, including us.

May 26, 2022

Grizzly bear fishing

How to Decolonize Conservation

Given the documented superiority of stewardship on Indigenous-managed lands around the world, Housty and his colleagues argue that the place-based, values-based approach to conservation outlined in the paper should be emulated elsewhere. It’s time to “go back to what works,” he says, “because we’re going in the wrong direction.”

April 29, 2022

California Towns Tackle Nitrate Pollution With Local Solutions

The state started to get serious about cleaning up nitrates a decade ago. It is now working with growers to stop new pollution and is considering how it might clean up old contamination. But it’s costly to clean an entire aquifer, and even extraordinary efforts would take several decades to pay off. So the state is also focused on funding interim local solutions to supply people with safe drinking water.

September 26, 2017

Cities are Finally Treating Water as a Resource, not a Nuisance

Memorial Day barbecues and parades were thwarted this year in Houston when a massive storm dumped more than 10 inches of rain in two days, creating a Waterworld of flooded freeways, cars, houses and businesses, leaving several people dead and hundreds in need of rescue.

September 3, 2015

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