Running Dry is John Waterman's account of his 1,450-mile trip down the overtaxed and drying Colorado River to reveal a pending ecological calamity and find ways to avert it. Waterman's book will relate the story of the Colorado, the most diverted and litigated River in the world. Siphoned, tunneled, forced into countless canals, and harnessed for electricity, the River is so dammed up that more water evaporates from its reservoirs each year than is found in most major U.S. rivers. His book will shed light on forces exacerbating the River's threatened state, such as population pressures and a drought caused by climate change. This pending crisis is behind Waterman's trip downriver. His journey follows John Wesley Powell (a founder of the NGS) and creates an adventure narrative steeped in history, investigated in present time, and revealing potential solutions for avoiding future disaster in the west. Waterman uses the intimacy of first-person narrative to chronicle his journey--historically never completed--as he paddles and walks hundreds of miles and sleeps on banks above the roaring length of "the American Nile."

Jonathan Waterman is the author of nine books, has made four television films, and works as a freelance author and filmmaker. In 2004, his writing about the Arctic won the prestigious National Endowment of the Arts Literary Fellowship.