The Great Lakes Water Wars

Book Description

The Great Lakes are the largest collection of fresh surface water on earth, and more than 40 million Americans and Canadians live in their basin. Will we divert water from the Great Lakes, causing them to end up like Central Asia's Aral Sea, which has lost 90 percent of its surface area and 75 percent of its volume since 1960? Or will we come to see that unregulated water withdrawals are ultimately catastrophic?

Peter Annin writes a fast-paced account of the people and stories behind these battles. Destined to be the definitive story for the general public as well as policymakers, The Great Lakes Water Wars is a balanced, comprehensive look behind the scenes at the conflicts and compromises that are the past-and future-of this globally significant resource.

Customer Reviews:

Great Lakes Water Wars is an excellent read.......2007-08-08

I started out to skim Peter Annin's book, determine what to say, and decide how to write a requested review. I had no trouble becoming completely engrossed at the start of the Author's Note and Prologue, and read the whole thing. Cover to cover. I do not need to abridge all its contents in great detail, nor could I begin to accomplish that task as eloquently, chronologically, and thoroughly as does the author anyway. What's more, the stories presented are fascinating and rapidly ensnare the reader. It will be of value to active professionals, students, politicians, NGO participants, and elected officials as well as to residents of the Great Lakes Basin, and to those who think they can tap into its abundant waters. What's more, it is informative and fun to read.

The Great Lakes aren't bottomless.......2007-05-25

As a former resident of northeastern Ohio, growing up near the shores of Lake Erie, I expected to be captivated by Peter Annin's treatise on the water resources issues of the Great Lakes, and it did not disappoint. But I think there's plenty here for anyone interested in the expanding issue of water resource diversion, as it spreads from the notoriously thirsty southwest to the Great Lakes, which house 20% of the world's fresh surface waters.

The five lakes in the Great Lakes surface water drainage basin seem inexhaustible and have, for centuries, been treated that way by neighboring states and provinces. Massive pollution identified in the 1960s raised the first indication of the Lakes' vulnerability. Annin tackles the issues of water resource allocation in three sections. The first sets the stage by talking about surface water resource challenges generally, from the difference between water rights assumptions in the eastern and western US, to the disastrous overuse of the Aral Sea in the former USSR, to the unknown problems that will result from global warming.

The second section uses stories to articulate the political and economic challenges surrounding six specific water diversion cases in the Great Lakes basin. The third explains the attempts by the eight states and two provinces within the Great Lakes basin to agree on political and legal mechanisms for protecting and preserving this enormous resource. His book ends with a cliffhanger; in late 2005, an historic regional agreement was signed by all the states and provinces in the basin but it must be codified into law by each state and US Congress. His website tracks its progress: [..]

A cautionary tale.......2007-04-01

"Today, when I stand on the shores of Lake Superior, I don't see a lake. I see a sprawling deep blue battleground that stretches from Duluth, Minnesota to Trois Rivières, Québec--and I wonder, who will win the war?" With these ominous words, Peter Anin launches into his account of the history of water issues in the Great Lakes.

Anin begins with a cautionary tale: the destruction of the Aral Sea in central Asia. Through government bungling and hubris, this once thriving ecosystem has lost 75% of its surface in the past 50 years. His message is clear; this could happen again, it could happen here.

What follows is a detailed account of the history of water issues and governmental policy in the Great Lakes region. There's enough analysis here to satisfy any policy wonk. But the true strength of Anin's book are the fascinating stories he tells of the diversion of mighty rivers, the desperate searches for safe drinking water, and the commercial exploitation of this precious resource.

Why this book, why now? The governors of the eight Great Lakes States have recently negotiated an agreement to protect this resource. The Great Lakes Compact must now be ratified by the legislatures of each state and the U.S. Congress. With this book, Anin makes an important contribution to the public understanding of the issues and urgency behind this legislation.

The real fight begins.......2007-02-26

On May 8, 1892, a gang of workmen hired by Chicago entrepreneur Mr. McElroy invaded the town of Waukesha, Wisconsin. This gang was intent on laying a pipeline from Waukesha's Hygeia Spring to a suburb of Chicago. They were turned back by the citizens of that city in one of the few (to date) physical confrontations over water east of the Mississippi river.
In 2006, with their wells dry or contaminated, Waukesha, which lies just outside the edge of the Great Lakes basin, insisted on exemption from the return clause of the water compact signed the year before. The compact was the latest evolution of agreements between the 8 Great Lakes states and 2 provinces of Canada. The latest agreement was so troubled that only two governors attended the signing. As with all the other agreements, it stood on bog of technical and legal details that could easily be upset by the smallest challenge. "Waukesha is a poster child," admits Dan Duchniak, the embattled head of the Waukesha Water Utility, adding that the debate over Waukesha is "almost like a cyst that has grown into a cancerous tumor, and we need to figure out a way to treat it." (pg. 245)

With this and other examples, such as an attempt to ship a tanker of Great Lakes water to China, the author explains the difficulties in protecting this great natural resource. The chapter on the Aral Sea foretells the future of the lakes if governments can't find a way to appease industry while maintaining the lakes for future generations.

Anyone trying understand what we, those of us blessed to grow up along their shores, must do to protect the Great Lakes should read this book. Although the material is fairly complex, the author presents several anecdotal stories that are readable.

As the author says, the fight has only just begun. Over the past 20 years, the states and provinces around the Great Lakes have produced a basic framework. Unfortunately, companies like Nestle have fought in court for the right to export bottle water from the Great Lakes basin; as one official asked,what is the difference between a tanker of bottle water and a tanker of water? --Damn good point! Although they are fighting a losing battle, other challenges are on the horizon in a world running short of clean, fresh water.

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At War Over Great Lakes Water.......2006-11-29

Schemes to keep Great Lakes waters in the Great Lakes may look good on paper, but how they actually work or do not work is shown in The Great Lakes Water Wars. It is a practical book thoroughly researched by a veteran investigative reporter, Peter Annin and published by Island Press.

According to Annin, the key to keeping these freshwater lakes viable is to return the water to the lakes: that is to keep the waters in the Great Lakes watersheds and to take measures to conserve water. Diversions outside of these watersheds will deplete the lakes of water. Although the Great Lakes are large, they are fragile. Annin shows the consequences of unwise uses of water on other parts of the planet, for example the Aral Sea that has been depleted of most of its water.

This is an important book with words of caution for those who live in the Great Lakes watersheds.

The Great Thirst: Californians and Water-A History, Revised Edition

Average customer rating:

You will like it if you like romanticized history
A bit too long, but a nice compliment to Reisner' s book
The Single Tome on California Water History
An excellent and underrated treatment of a complex subject

The Great Thirst: Californians and Water-A History, Revised Edition
Norris Hundley Jr.
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520224566

Book Description

The story of "the great thirst" is brought up to date in this revised edition of Norris Hundley's outstanding history, with additional photographs and incisive descriptions of the major water-policy issues facing California now: accelerating urbanization of farmland and open spaces, persisting despoliation of water supplies, and demands for equity in water allocation for an exploding population. People the world over confront these problems, and Hundley examines them with clarity and eloquence in the unruly laboratory of California.
The obsession with water has shaped California to a remarkable extent, literally as well as politically and culturally. Hundley tells how aboriginal Americans and then early Spanish and Mexican immigrants contrived to use and share the available water and how American settlers, arriving in ever-increasing numbers after the Gold Rush, transformed California into the home of the nation's preeminent water seekers. The desire to use, profit from, manipulate, and control water drives the people and events in this fascinating narrative until, by the end of the twentieth century, a large, colorful cast of characters and communities has wheeled and dealed, built, diverted, and connived its way to an entirely different statewide waterscape.

Customer Reviews:

You will like it if you like romanticized history.......2006-05-16

The book is well written, but the way the author romanticizes ancient people living in California and demonizes its modern inhabitants puts me off.

I do not mind an author's biases creeping in his writing but then he should be able to carry if off with readers who dont disagree with him. For example, I read Reisner's Cadillac Desert which is a totally biased commentary on California's water and I rarely agreed with his viewpoint, but he puts it in such an interesting manner that it makes good reading nevertheless and I loved that book. The author of this book not only makes preposterous statements (for example, saying that the Indian inhabitants of America lived lives in harmony in nature because they were wiser than us) but makes them without constructing a strong intellectual platform that might engage someone who thinks differently.

Any new information the book provides is lost in the lengthy and tedious literary style that the author adopts. I am a fairly keen reader, and I must say that I dozed off reading this book more often than with others of this genre.

A bit too long, but a nice compliment to Reisner' s book.......2003-07-03

Reisner's book "Cadillac Desert" is much more readible, but this book is a data dump of the above and more of a primary reference.

Recommended if you are a pedant or just like more raw unfiltered data.

The Single Tome on California Water History.......2003-02-16

The Great Thirst is as long and detailed as the subject matter it tackles, a complete history of Californians and water. The revised edition came out in 2001 and addresses the recent developments in the Bay-Delta program (formally know as CALFED) and important water policy changes at Mono Lake and in the Owens Valley. The book consists of 8 chapters covering the early, pre-European settlement, the role water development played in the growth of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the development of large state and inter-state water projects, the recent changes in water policy brought on largely by shortages, and environment concerns, and the author's summary.

To give you a feel for the detailed scope of the work, the author includes over 100 pages of notes to supplement the text, and a bibliography of nearly the same length! I have yet to find anything the matches The Great Thirst in its unbiased depiction of the complex history, water policies, competing interests, and future challenges that have and will come to shape California.

The author, an American History professor at UCLA, presents the reader with the single most important fact facing California, "Californian's are currently using more water than well be available on a long-term basis. The deficit is 1.6 million acre-feet annually, which can rise to more than 5.1 million acre-feet during drought years..." The public appetite for new water development has come to a halt given the high cost to state budgets and more importantly the surrounding landscape. But the growth of development and population continues marching on, leaving you to wonder how the final chapter of this important story will be written.

An excellent and underrated treatment of a complex subject.......2001-10-14

I was pleasantly surprised by the first edition of this book, which was much shorter than the new one. It is broader in range than any other account that I know on this absolutely central issue for California, and its depth doesn't seem to be compromised at all in spite of its comprehensibility. It isn't exactly lively writing, but it's clear nonetheless. I think Hundley's book offers lay readers a fuller picture of why water is so important in California and the west, and how people have tried to manage it, than any other single volume.

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia

Average customer rating:

The River Doesn't Run Through It Anymore
So much good information
Wonderful writing. Interesting points of view.
Wonderful writing. Interesting points of view.
An eye opener.

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia
Blaine Harden
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0393316904

Book Description

After a two-decade absence, Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden returned to his small-town birthplace in the Pacific Northwest to follow the rise and fall of the West's most thoroughly conquered river. Harden's hometown, Moses Lake, Washington, could not have existed without massive irrigation schemes. His father, a Depression migrant trained as a welder, helped build dams and later worked at the secret Hanford plutonium plant. Now he and his neighbors, once considered patriots, stand accused of killing the river. As Blaine Harden traveled the Columbia--by barge, car, and sometimes on foot--his past seemed both foreign and familiar. A personal narrative of rediscovery joined a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans, of endangered salmon, of nuclear waste, and of a once-wild river now tamed to puddled remains. Part history, part memoir, part lament, "this is a brave and precise book," according to the New York Times Book Review. "It must not have been easy for Blaine Harden to find himself turning his journalistic weapons against his own heritage, but he has done the conscience of his homeland a great service."

Amazon.com

A century ago the place where the Columbia River flows into the Pacific Ocean was a violent cauldron of churning water, all but unnavigable. But the mighty river was tamed by the building of a series of dams, including the colossal Grand Coulee, to provide cheap hydroelectric power and irrigation water. Farms bloomed in the desert; nuclear reactors mushroomed on the river bank. Today barges ply the river, and Lewiston, Idaho, is an inland port. But the negative aspects of human impact are also apparent--the depletion of salmon stocks and the destruction of Native American cultures dependent on the salmon. Washington Post journalist Harden, a Northwest native, returns to examine the changes man has wrought. Harden's enthralling account is balanced and thorough.

Customer Reviews:

The River Doesn't Run Through It Anymore.......2005-03-17

This journalistic narrative, written when Blain Harden returned to his Columbia River Basin hometown during a mid-1990s sabbatical from the Washington Post, summarizes the history of the massive U.S. Government funded hydroelectric, irrigation and nuclear energy development of the Columbia River system in eastern Washington and adjacent parts of Idaho and Oregon. Harden's approach is a well crafted, articulate chronology of events interspersed among interviews with then-still-living civil engineers and workers who built the dams (including the author's father), self-described redneck barge crews, American Indians, irrigator farmers, nuclear engineers, supposed "downwind" victims of nuclear engineers, wildlife management officials and environmental activists. Oddly, he never interviews any significant politician, and he describes the actions of civil service engineers and bureaucrats as if they built this multi-billion dollar project over forty years on their own fanatic authority, sort of like renegade CIA agents supposedly taking over a jungle-clad third world country without anyone telling them to.

The gist of A River Lost is that beginning in 1933 and ending in the 1970s, Federal and quasi-Federal agencies, acting under the direction of six presidents, converted one of the world's largest and wildest rivers into an all-but-completely tamed series of lakes behind hydroelectric dams. The result is a massive amount of inexpensive electricity, irrigation for more than 500,000 acres of farmland, an economical means to transport commodities from an interior desert toward Asian markets and, totally unplanned by its originators, a means to produce plutonium for atomic bombs that ended World War II and armed the U.S. in the Cold War. The most negative side effect was the virtual destruction of the Columbia's unimaginably immense migrating salmon population along with a traumatically negative impact on remnant groups of American Indians dependent on the salmon for sustenance and culture.

Harden makes a pretty good case that farmers and industries who benefited from the Columbia River industrialization only repaid a small fraction of the cost, Indians were not consulted, respected or compensated, billions of dollars were lost on an ill-conceived nuclear power project and there's been a lot of environmental damage, primarily to salmon and other fish populations, as well as possible damage to human health. As unpleasant as it may be for some of the "bad guys" in this saga to acknowledge I think the basic story is accurate. But as for Harden's exposé of unfairness, corruption, self dealing and unforeseen or unconsidered negative impacts... and from a government program!... how shocking!

Well, not really. A similar narrative could be constructed about virtually every large-scale government economic development and social engineering project since the 1930s: other river development schemes, so-called urban renewal, interstate highways, War on Poverty, public education system, etc., etc., etc. All of those programs have winners, losers and, typically, unintended, unacknowledged or uncompensated environmental, health or social costs. Such is the nature of government programs, but nobody seems able to resist them.

To me the most interesting aspect of this book is how Harden characterizes, or declines to characterize, the political affiliation of key players.

The initial Grande Coulee project and its unthinking destruction of salmon runs and Indian culture in the name of New Deal progress, and later the atomic city at Hanford, all occurred under President Franklin Roosevelt. Harden tells us that after WWII the remainder of the dam building, salmon and Indian destruction, sweetheart deals for farmers, barge operators, electrical utilities, et al, were driven through Congress, no matter who was president, by two powerful Washington senators, Magnuson and Jackson. The two senators were each in office about 40 years, and Harden refers to them ten times, asserting they abetted much sweetheart dealing, environmental damage and so forth. But Harden doesn't identify Roosevelt, Magnuson or Jackson as Democrats.

Then, with all the dams built, all the subsidies enshrined, all the salmon dying and Magnuson and Jackson gone from the scene, an environmentalist-led "Salmon War" heats up in the early 1980s. That's when newly elected Washington Senator Gorton appears in the same paragraph where Harden refers to "evil... political games" and - finally! - Harden fearlessly dares put a name to regressive forces that refuse to right wrongs wrought by half a century of dam, irrigation and atomic energy programs. We learn Senator Gorton is a... a... a... Republican!!!!! And when Gorton reappears in the story Harden tells us once again, in case we missed it, that Gorton is (still!) a Republican.

Things get worse again for salmon because, as Harden tells it, a mean Republican is elected to replace a nice Democrat as governor of neighboring Idaho. Apparently it's no problem, because its unmentioned by Harden, that Democrats almost always governed much larger Washington where most of the salmon's problem is located. Anyway, we learn that although Democrats controlled congress for about 56 of the first 60 years of the Columbia River development things only become hopeless for the fish when, just before Harden completes the book, Republicans take control of Congress in 1994. Did I mention Harden is a Washington Post reporter?

My own postscript is that in the ten years since Harden wrote A River Lost irrigators' fortunes declined as foreign producers undercut even their subsidized costs. The aluminum industry imploded. Communities Harden characterizes as terminally whitebread are increasingly dominated by Mexican immigrants. The Colville Indians who lost prime fishing grounds to Grand Coulee Dam now benefit from its cheap electricity because they own the largest lumber processing mill in Okanogan County as well as three well-lit casinos in the Columbia Basin. And some Eastern Washington counties now spend more on fish habitat restoration than human health care.

A River Lost has excellent sketch maps throughout each section that help place people and events. There are nine pages of footnotes and sources and thirteen pages of index. But as far as I can tell there's no mention to which political party Franklin Roosevelt, the guy who started the whole thing, belonged.

So much good information.......2003-10-10

A full and complete modern history of the Columbia River. At times sad, always intriging. Harden has done an excellent job of combining interviews with research that makes an excellent read.

Highly recommmended.

Wonderful writing. Interesting points of view........2002-04-06

Once in a great while a book comes along that is so beautifully written, with stories so well told, that the subject matter seems secondary to the writer's ability to sustain interest. For me, with little interest in the northwest (I've been there twice), this was such a book. It is from Harden's exceptional skill as a writer and narrator of stories that the Columbia River suddenly became of great interest as I turned his pages.

"A River Lost" tells the story and history of the Columbia River and the environmental, economic and aesthetic impact of daming that river in the first half of the last century. Especially interesting are the stories and points of view of those who work and live on its shores, the fate of the native indians who have lived in the region for hundreds of years and the differences in culture between the Starbucks yuppies west of the Cascades and the blue collar workers so dependant on the water and its billions in federally subsidized benefits to the east.

Highly praised in reviews by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, the Village Voice, The Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, it is a great read for the information, for the writing, for a piece of American history.

Wonderful writing. Interesting points of view........2002-04-06

"A River Lost" tells the story and history of the Columbia River and the environmental, economic and aesthetic impact of daming that river in the first half of the last century. Especially interesting are the stories and points of view of those who work and live on its shores, the fate of the native indians who have lived in the region for hundreds of years and the differences in culture between the Starbucks yuppies east of the Cascades and the blue collar workers so dependant on the water and its billions in federally subsidized benefits to the west.

An eye opener........2002-03-06

I grew up in the Tri-Cities and spent the first 19 years of my life living just blocks away from the Columbia River and there was a lot of information told in this book that I never knew. Harden does a wonderful job of relating the history of the Columbia River and the effects that the many dams built on the river had on the land, the people, the nation, and the economy. I thoroughly enjoyed his story and felt he handled well the many issues important to preservationists, politicians, and farmers.

Book Description

This book examines the application of fish community characteristics to evaluate the sustainability and biological integrity of freshwaters. Topics include perspectives on use of fish communities as environmental indicators in program development, collaboration, and partnership forming; influence of specific taxa on assessment of the IBI; regional applications for areas where the IBI had not previously been developed; and specific applications of the IBI developed for coldwater streams, inland lakes, Great Lakes, reservoirs, and tailwaters.

Evolution of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (Dave Dempsey Environmental)

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An excellent reference, as accessible to lay readers as well as students and professionals in environmental studies

Evolution of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (Dave Dempsey Environmental)
Lee Botts , and Paul R. Muldoon
Manufacturer: Michigan State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0870137522

Customer Reviews:

An excellent reference, as accessible to lay readers as well as students and professionals in environmental studies.......2006-04-03

Written by the founder of the Lake Michigan Federation and the Executive Director at the Canadian Environmental Law Association, Evolution Of The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is a scholarly discussion of the Canadian- American partnership regarding the Great Lakes, the negotiation behind the Great Lakes Agreement and its evolution, the transformation of the Great Lakes Regime, and more. In addition to the detailed and heavily researched survey of history that forms the main text, the entire Great Lakes Agreement of 1972 and its 1978 revision, along with copious notes, round out this down-to-earth environmental history. An excellent reference, as accessible to lay readers as well as students and professionals in environmental studies.

Negotiating Tribal Water Rights: Fulfilling Promises In The Arid West

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Negotiating Tribal Water Rights: Fulfilling Promises In The Arid West
Bonnie G. Colby , John E. Thorson , and Sarah Britton
Manufacturer: University of Arizona Press
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Binding: Paperback

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Tribal Water Rights: Essays in Contemporary Law, Policy And Economics

ASIN: 0816524556

Book Description

Negotiations and litigation over tribal water rights shape the future of both Indian and non-Indian communities throughout the West, and intense competition for limited water supplies have increased pressure to address tribal water claims. By providing a comprehensive synthesis of western water issues, tribal water disputes, and alternative approaches to dispute resolution, this book offers a valuable source for all--tribal councils, legislators, water professionals, attorneys--who need a basic understanding of the complexities of the situation.

American Indian Water Rights and the Limits of Law

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American Indian Water Rights and the Limits of Law
Lloyd Burton
Manufacturer: University Press of Kansas
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Binding: Paperback

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Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law (American Casebook Series)

ASIN: 0700606017

Book Description

Gold is no longer the most precious treasure of the American West. Water is.

In the arid western half of the United States, the unquenchable thirsts of industry, agriculture, and growing urban areas have nearly drained the region dry. There is no longer enough water to satisfy the conflicting claims of the many groups fighting over it.

Among the claimants are American Indian tribes. They hold water rights dating back to treaty obligations of the U.S. government--rights that often conflict with state water-rights allocation doctrines. Currently they are locked in legal combat with non-Indian adversaries in about fifty major water-rights disputes throughout the western United States. The amounts of water involved are huge, as are the potential economic benefits for the victors.

In this thorough, timely study, Lloyd Burton traces the history of American Indian water rights. Focusing on the years following the 1908 Supreme Court decision in Winters v. United States, he dissects the irreconcilable conflict of interest within the Interior Department (between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs) that dates from that decision.

But Burton is not content simply to record and analyze history. He also examines methods of managing disputes in contemporary cases and offers original policy recommendations that include establishing an Indian Water Rights Commission to help with the paradoxical task now facing the federal government--restoring to the tribes the water resources it earlier helped give away.

Book Description

From reviews of the first edition:

"This slender book brims with wisdom and scholarship."

—Harold Scarlett, Houston Post

"Charles Bowden's Killing the Hidden Waters is the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urbanindustrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence but also the vital, sustaining basis of all life everywhere. This one little book tells the whole story. In my opinion, Charles Bowden is the bcst social critic and environmental journalist now working in the Amcrican southwest, a sharp and engaging writer who never lets his cool disgust at our collective stupidity erode his fundamental sympathy for thc actual living, breathing, still hopeful human beings who inhabit this besieged land. I salute him, and I wish him a million readers."

—Edward Abbey, author of Beyond the Wall and other books

From the introduction to the new edition:

"I'll tell you where I went wrong. The faucet in the kitchen always becomes the reality we believe, and the periodic droughts, one of which for much of the nineties savaged the West, remain a fantasy. This happens each and every day as the water roars from the faucet and the skies remain dangerously blue."

—Charles Bowden

In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity's relationship with the land.

Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, "What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down," Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example—water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey's words, "the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere."

Customer Reviews:

Best book about the West and its troubles with water.......2002-06-19

Although Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" is the most encyclopedic book about the West and its problems with water, this book actually gets closer to the bone of what's wrong with the way we in the US live in our desert climes. The book focuses first on how the O'odham and Pima indian cultures managed to live sustainably in the Sonoran Desert with its unpredictable and rare water flows. While I doubt that many of us but the most idealistic and romantic would want to live the life of these peoples, there is a certain genius in the ways they made the land and its water work for them that we could do well to learn from. Bowden contrasts this with the civilization the European cultures came and built during the last 150 years, a civilization built on "mining" the ice-age aquifers so rapidly that they will soon be drained once and for all. Having turned the plains to a dust bowl, will we just pack up and move on as we always have in the past?

In his later books, Bowden's bitter spleen often spills uncontrollably from his pen, but his tone here is much more restrained. In "Waters," his voice is almost scholarly scholarly and tinged with sad wisdom. This is a great book, and one that deserves far more readers.

Best book about.......2002-06-19

killing the hidden waters.......1999-04-13

7-306 Sanup Utong Center 129 Songhuy-dong Dong-gu Inchon, Korea. post no. 401-040

killing the hidden waters.......1999-04-13

7-306 Sanup Utong Center 129 Songhuy-dong Dong-gu Inchon, Korea. post no. 401-040

Command of the Waters: Iron Triangles, Federal Water Development, and Indian Water

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Command of the Waters: Iron Triangles, Federal Water Development, and Indian Water
Daniel McCool
Manufacturer: University of Arizona Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0816515026

Aboriginal Water Rights in Canada: A Study of Aboriginal Title to Water and Indian Water Rights

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Aboriginal Water Rights in Canada: A Study of Aboriginal Title to Water and Indian Water Rights
Richard H. Bartlett
Manufacturer: Univ of Calgary Faculty of Law
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0919269230

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