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Cadillac Desert : The American West and Its Disappearing Water
By Marc Reisner
Cadillac Desert is a weighty history of how the West was won--not with six-guns and lassos, but with steam shovels and cement that moved "water from where it is, and presumably isn't needed, to where it isn't, and presumably is needed." California, Marc Reisner writes, was the chief beneficiary of the great hydrological projects that remade the West; transplanted water allowed it to grow to boast a population now larger than Canada's, and to create an economy richer than all but seven nations', a condition not "remotely conceivable within the pre-existing natural order." Reisner's careful, thoughtful history of the West's great water projects, with notes on similar projects in Central Asia and the Middle East, is essential reading for students of desert ecology.
582 pages, revised edition (June 1993).
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A River No More: The Colorado River and the West
by Philip L. Fradkin
"A River No More makes a statement of the utmost importance and gravity. Though it focuses on the Colorado River and its tributaries, the book's implications reach from the high plains of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico to the Pacific littoral; from federal land and water policies to the survival strategies of the ranches, farms, country towns, and small regional capitals that constitute the west's only permanent and renewable way of life." -- Wallace Stegner, The New Republic .
383 pages (October 1996).
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Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West
by Donald Worster
The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its rivers to produce unlimited wealth and power. In Rivers of Empire, award-winning historian Donald Worster tells the story of this dream and its outcome. He shows how, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were the first attempting to make that dream a reality, damming and diverting rivers to irrigate their land. He follows this intriguing history through the 1930s, when the federal government built hundreds of dams on every major western river, thereby laying the foundation for the cities and farms, money and power of today's West. Yet while these cities have become paradigms of modern American urban centers, and the farms successful high-tech enterprises, Worster reminds us that the costs have been extremely high. Along with the wealth has come massive ecological damage, a redistribution of power to bureaucratic and economic elites, and a class conflict still on the upswing. As a result, the future of this "hydraulic West" is increasingly uncertain, as water continues to be a scarce resource, inadequate to the demand, and declining in quality.
1992.
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Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West
by Charles F. Wilkinson
Showing the history of laws regarding Western development, legal expert Charles F. Wilkinson argues that land-use laws have been become outmoded and must be radically rethought to help the environment, as he searches for a compromise between unhampered development and total preservation.
320 pages, 1993.
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