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The West Without Water
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Book Synopsis The West Without Water by : B. Lynn Ingram
Download or read book The West Without Water written by B. Lynn Ingram and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty thousand years, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources."--Back cover.
Book Synopsis The West without Water by : B. Lynn Ingram
Download or read book The West without Water written by B. Lynn Ingram and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources. Looking at the region’s current water crisis from the perspective of its climate history, the authors ask the central question of what is "normal" climate for the West, and whether the relatively benign climate of the past century will continue into the future. The West without Water merges climate and paleoclimate research from a wide variety of sources as it introduces readers to key discoveries in cracking the secrets of the region’s climatic past. It demonstrates that extended droughts and catastrophic floods have plagued the West with regularity over the past two millennia and recounts the most disastrous flood in the history of California and the West, which occurred in 1861–62. The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the future climate changes that are predicted to beset the region. They warn that it is time to face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable.
Book Synopsis The West Without Water by : B. Lynn Ingram
Download or read book The West Without Water written by B. Lynn Ingram and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty thousand years, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources."--Back cover.
Book Synopsis Water is for Fighting Over by : John Fleck
Download or read book Water is for Fighting Over written by John Fleck and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2016-09 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Illuminating." --New York Times WIRED's Required Science Reading 2016 When we think of water in the West, we think of conflict and crisis. Yet despite decades of headlines warning of mega-droughts, the death of agriculture, and the collapse of cities, the Colorado River basin has thrived in the face of water scarcity. John Fleck shows how western communities, whether farmers and city-dwellers or U.S. environmentalists and Mexican water managers, actually have a promising record of conservation and cooperation. Rather than perpetuate the myth "Whiskey's for drinkin', water's for fightin' over," Fleck urges readers to embrace a new, more optimistic narrative--a future where the Colorado continues to flow.
Download or read book Cadillac Desert written by Marc Reisner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1993-06-01 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I’ve been thinking a lot about Cadillac Desert in the past few weeks, as the rain fell and fell and kept falling over California, much of which, despite the pouring heavens, seems likely to remain in the grip of a severe drought. Reisner anticipated this moment. He worried that the West’s success with irrigation could be a mirage — that it took water for granted and didn’t appreciate the precariousness of our capacity to control it.” – Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times, January 20,2023 "The definitive work on the West's water crisis." --Newsweek The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West. Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden--an Eden that may only be a mirage. This edition includes a new postscript by Lawrie Mott, a former staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, that updates Western water issues over the last two decades, including the long-term impact of climate change and how the region can prepare for the future.
Download or read book Downriver written by Heather Hansman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green River, the most significant tributary of the Colorado River, runs 730 miles from the glaciers of Wyoming to the desert canyons of Utah. Over its course it meanders through ranches, cities, national parks, endangered fish habitats, and some of the most significant natural gas fields in the country, as it provides water for 33 million people. Stopped up by dams, slaked off by irrigation, and dried up by cities, the Green is crucial, overused, and at risk, now more than ever. Fights over the river’s water, and what’s going to happen to it in the future, are longstanding, intractable, and only getting worse as the West gets hotter and drier and more people depend on the river with each passing year. As a former raft guide and an environmental reporter, Heather Hansman knew these fights were happening, but she felt driven to see them from a different perspective—from the river itself. So she set out on a journey, in a one-person inflatable pack raft, to paddle the river from source to confluence and see what the experience might teach her. Mixing lyrical accounts of quiet paddling through breathtaking beauty with nights spent camping solo and lively discussions with farmers, city officials, and other people met along the way, Downriver is the story of that journey, a foray into the present—and future—of water in the West.
Download or read book Dam Nation written by Stephen Grace and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the scramble to claim water rights in the West during the fevered days of early emigration and expansion, running out of water was rarely a concern, and the dam building fever that transformed the West in the 19th and 20th centuries created a map of the region that may be unsustainable. Throughout the arid American West, metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver need water. These cities are growing, but water supplies are dwindling. Scientists agree that the West is heating up and drying out, leading to future water shortages that will pose a challenge to existing laws. Dam Nation looks first to the past, to the stories of the California gold rush and the earliest attempts by men to shape the landscape and tame it, takes us to the “Great American Desert” and the settlement of the west under the theory that "rain follows the plow," and then takes on the ongoing legal and moral battles in the West. Author Stephen Grace, is a novelist, a storyteller, and the author of several non-fiction books on Colorado. He weaves the facts into a compelling narrative that informs, entertains, and tells an important story.
Download or read book Replenish written by Sandra Postel and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nothing is more important to life than water, and no one knows water better than Sandra Postel. Replenish is a wise, sobering, but ultimately hopeful book." --Elizabeth Kolbert "Remarkable." --New York Times Book Review "Clear-eyed treatise...Postel makes her case eloquently." --Booklist, starred review "An informative, purposeful argument." --Kirkus We spend billions of dollars on irrigation, dams, sanitation plants, and other feats of engineering to control water for our own prosperity. What if the answer was not control, but replenishment? Sandra Postel takes readers around the world to explore water projects that work with, rather than against, nature's rhythms. Forest rehabilitation is safeguarding drinking water, farmers are planting cover crops to reduce polluted runoff, and "sponge cities" are capturing rainwater to curb urban flooding. Postel argues that efforts like these will be essential as we adjust to a hotter, wilder climate. Will we continue to fight the water cycle, endangering ourselves and the planet, or recognize our place in it and take advantage of the inherent services nature offers?
Book Synopsis Crossing the Next Meridian by : Charles F. Wilkinson
Download or read book Crossing the Next Meridian written by Charles F. Wilkinson and published by . This book was released on 1992-09 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Crossing the Next Meridian, Wilkinson explains to a general audience some of the core problems that face the American West, both now and in the years to come. An expert on federal public lands, Native American issues, and the West's arcane water laws, Wilkinson looks at the outmoded ideas that pervade land use and resource allocation. He argues that significant reform of Western law is needed to combat environmental decline and heal splintered communities. Interweaving legal history with examples of present-day consequences, both intended and unintended, Wilkinson traces the origins and development of Western laws and regulations. He relates stories of Westerners who face these issues on a day-to-day basis and discusses what can and should be done to bring government policies in line with the reality of twentieth-century American life. His examination seeks a middle ground between those who champion unrestricted growth and those who advocate complete preservation.
Book Synopsis Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West by : David Stiller
Download or read book Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West written by David Stiller and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Water has always been one of the American West’s most precious and limited resources. The earliest inhabitants—Native Americans and later Hispanics—learned to share the region’s scant rainfall and snowmelt. When Euro-Americans arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, they brought with them not only an interest in large-scale commercial agriculture but also new practices and laws about access to, and control of, the water essential for their survival and success. This included the concept of private rights to water, a critical resource that had previously been regarded as a communal asset. David Stiller’s thoughtful study focuses on the history of agricultural water use of the Rio Grande in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. After surveying the practices of early farmers in the region, he focuses on the impacts of Euro-American settlement and the ways these new agrarians endeavored to control the river. Using the Rio Grande as a case study, Stiller offers an informed and accessible history of the development of practices and technologies to store, distribute, and exploit water in Colorado and other western states, as well as an account of the creation of water rights and laws that govern this essential commodity throughout the West to this day. Stiller’s work ranges from meticulously monitored fields of irrigated alfalfa and potatoes to the local and state water agencies and halls of Congress. He also includes perceptive comments on the future of western water as these arid states become increasingly urbanized during a period of worsening drought and climate change. An excellent read for anyone curious about important issues in the West, Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West offers a succinct summary and analysis of Colorado’s use of water by agricultural interests, in addition to a valuable discussion of the past, present, and future of struggles over this necessary and endangered resource.
Book Synopsis Water Transfers in the West by : National Research Council
Download or read book Water Transfers in the West written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1992-02-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American West faces many challenges, but none is more important than the challenge of managing its water. This book examines the role that water transfers can play in allocating the region's scarce water resources. It focuses on the variety of third parties, including Native Americans, Hispanic communities, rural communities, and the environment, that can sometimes be harmed when water is moved. The committee presents recommendations to guide states, tribes, and federal agencies toward better regulation. Seven in-depth case studies are presented: Nevada's Carson-Truckee basin, the Colorado Front Range, northern New Mexico, Washington's Yakima River basin, central Arizona, and the Central and Imperial valleys in California. Water Transfers in the West presents background and current information on factors that have encouraged water transfers, typical types of transfers, and their potential negative effects. The book highlights the benefits that water transfers can bring but notes the need for more third-party representation in the processes used to evaluate planned transfers.
Book Synopsis Atmospheric Rivers by : F. Martin Ralph
Download or read book Atmospheric Rivers written by F. Martin Ralph and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the standard reference based on roughly 20 years of research on atmospheric rivers, emphasizing progress made on key research and applications questions and remaining knowledge gaps. The book presents the history of atmospheric-rivers research, the current state of scientific knowledge, tools, and policy-relevant (science-informed) problems that lend themselves to real-world application of the research—and how the topic fits into larger national and global contexts. This book is written by a global team of authors who have conducted and published the majority of critical research on atmospheric rivers over the past years. The book is intended to benefit practitioners in the fields of meteorology, hydrology and related disciplines, including students as well as senior researchers.
Book Synopsis Where the Water Goes by : David Owen
Download or read book Where the Water Goes written by David Owen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wonderfully written…Mr. Owen writes about water, but in these polarized times the lessons he shares spill into other arenas. The world of water rights and wrongs along the Colorado River offers hope for other problems.” —Wall Street Journal An eye-opening account of where our water comes from and where it all goes. The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry. Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on. The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert—and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.
Book Synopsis Waste by : Catherine Coleman Flowers
Download or read book Waste written by Catherine Coleman Flowers and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.
Book Synopsis Rivers of Empire by : Donald Worster
Download or read book Rivers of Empire written by Donald Worster and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Reclamation Managing Water in the West, The Bureau of Reclamation: Origins and Growth to 1945, Vol. 1, 2006 by :
Download or read book Reclamation Managing Water in the West, The Bureau of Reclamation: Origins and Growth to 1945, Vol. 1, 2006 written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Dreamt Land written by Mark Arax and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers—the nut king, grape king and citrus queen—tell their story here for the first time. Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.
