Description
When Henry David Thoreau went for his daily walk, he would
consult his instincts on which direction to follow. More
often than not his inner compass pointed
west or southwest.
"The future lies that way to me," he explained, "and the
earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side." In
his own imaginative way, Thoreau was imitating the countless
young pioneers, prospectors, and entrepreneurs who were
zealously following Horace Greeley's famous advice to "go
west." Yet while the epic chapter in American
history opened
by these adventurous men and women is filled with stories of
frontier hardship, we rarely think of one of their greatest
problems--the lack of water resources. And the same
difficulty that made life so troublesome for early settlers
remains one of the most pressing concerns in the
western states of the late-twentieth century.
About the Author(s)
Donald Worster, who won the Bancroft Prize for his book Dust
Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford, 1975), is
Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the
University of Kansas. He is also the author of The Ends of
the Earth,
Nature's Economy: A History of
Ecological Ideas,
and the forthcoming Under Western Skies: Nature and History
in the American West (Oxford, 1992).
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.
Rivers of Empire represents a radically new vision of the
American West and its historical significance. Showing how
ecological change is inextricably intertwined with social
evolution, and reevaluating the old mythic and celebratory
approach to the development of the West, Worster offers the
most probing, critical analysis of the region to date. He
shows how the vast region encompassing our western states,
while founded essentially as colonies, have since become the
true seat of the American "Empire." How this imperial West
rose out of desert, how it altered the course of nature
there, and what it has meant for Thoreau's (and our own)
mythic search for freedom and the American Dream, are the
central themes of this eloquent and thought-provoking
story--a story that begins and ends with water.
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