Confluence: A River, the Environment, Politics, and the Fate of All Humanity Hardback - 2005

"Short, elegant, and engagingly personal . . . deserves to be read in an afternoon and thought about long afterward."
— New York Review of Books

“This is a powerful book....it will work on your psyche the way a really good poem does...it will haunt, evoke, remind, return...mainly what will stick with you though is the author's powerful, articulate voice, at times kind and humorous, at times outraged....Tripp's writing is both down to earth and eloquent, the very best of combinations.”
—Valley News

“Nat knows a lot. He knows a lot about fishing. He knows a lot about canoeing. He knows people all along the Upper Connecticut. . . . Nat is an environmentalist, but he is a country environmentalist. He knows and coexists with the farmers, loggers and hunters who make their living in the beautiful land we saw by summer. . . . The trip down the Connecticut wasn’t just about fun and spending time with our kids. For Nat it was about the whole world . . . a whole world of rivers that didn’t flow straight to the sea anymore because of huge dams built to keep people comfortable in cities hundreds of miles away. People who would never see what they had done to the rivers Nat knew.”
—Howard Dean (from the foreword)

“Not since I canoed down the Noatak in Alaska have I enjoyed a river trip as much as this one, though vicariously, of Tripp doing the Connecticut with Howard Dean and friends – it is an engaging account that seamlessly braids history, politics, the law, and ecology, not to mention a baby bunny, into one hell of a fine read.”
—Bernd Heinrich, author of Winter World

“This is an important book about seeing the main current amid the frothy rapids. Its author is not just sharp, he’s wise, and therefore often troubled, but also always redeemed. Staring into one body of water he sees reflected back the world, as it is and as it ought to be.”
— Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home