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inside each of 16 concrete bays hangs a rack of vertical tubes stuffed with 15,000 polypropylene fibers the thickness of dental floss. The fibers are stippled with holes 1/300th the size of a human hair. Pumps pull water into the fibers, leaving behind anything larger than 0.2 microns, stuff like bacteria, protozoa and the dread “suspended solids.”

The excitement and the bubbles were backwash: every 21 minutes, air is injected into the microfibers to blast them clean. The schmutz goes back to the sewage-treatment plant, and the cleaner water, now the color of chamomile tea, is pumped toward reverse-osmosis filters in another building.

The process isn’t risk-free. Some scientists are concerned that dangerous compounds or undetectable viruses will escape the multiple physical and chemical filters at the plant. And others suggest that the potential for human error or mechanical failure — clogged filters or torn membranes that let pathogens through, for example — is too great to risk something as basic to public health as drinking water.

Recycled water should be used only as nondrinking water, says Philip Singer, the Daniel Okun Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of North Carolina. “It may contain trace amounts of contaminants. Reverse osmosis and UV disinfection are very good, but there are still uncertainties.”

If everything in the Fountain Valley plant is in perfect working order, its finished water will contain no detectable levels of bacteria, pharmaceuticals or agricultural and industrial chemicals. The same can be said of very few water sources in this country. But once the Fountain Valley water mingles with the county’s other sources, its purity goes downhill. Filtering it through sand and gravel removes some contaminants, but it also adds bacteria (not necessarily harmful, and local utilities will eventually knock them out them with chlorine) and possibly pharmaceuticals.

In other words, nature messes up the expensively reclaimed water. So why stick it back into the ground? “We do it for psychological reasons,” says Adam Hutchinson, director of recharge operations for the water district. “In the future, people will laugh at us for putting it back in, instead of just drinking it.”

As New York City grew through the 1800s, it reached far up the Hudson for its very life. The river was lined with railroad tracks, sawmills, paper mills, ice houses, brick yards, iron foundries and other industrial sites, all feeding the metropolis.

Right now there are at least four great places where you can plunge into the Hudson: Croton Point Park in Croton-on-Hudson (Westchester County), Kingston Point Park in Kingston (Ulster County) and Ulster Landing Park in the Town of Ulster (also Ulster County). While there also are informal swimming spots, these venues not only offer sandy beaches for sunbathing (and castle-making) but qualified lifeguards.

For something a little different, take a dip in the River Pool at Beacon in Dutchess County. A throwback to the floating bathhouses common in American and European riverfront cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the pool provides an enclosed space surrounded by netting through which the river flows

when roads or bridges are expanded, offering what appears to be greater ease in commuting, they actually generate increased development and, as a result, more traffic, straining new infrastructure much more quickly than expected.

The Freedom Lawn consists of grass mixed with whatever else happens to seed itself, which, the authors note, might include:

I'm not the only fan of rail. James Howard Kunstler, he of The Long Emergency, has long argued that reviving America's passenger rail network would be the single-most valuable thing we could do to get this country off oil. That's a worthy goal, one that would offer enormous benefits for national security, as well as the obvious advantages from a climate change mitigation point of view.