World's Great Rivers Only Vestiges of Former Selves

Geoffrey Lean records the dismal perpective offered by a close look at where the world’s rivers are headed &nmdash; that is, literally, nowhere. “The writer Fred Pearce, who has published a groundbreaking book on the crisis of the world’s rivers, says: ‘The maps in an atlas no longer accord with reality. The old geography lessons about how rivers emerged from mountains, gathered water from tributaries and finally disgorged their bloated flows into the oceans are now fiction.'” In the U.K. Independent.