Some
books are like the Bible, the first and the last word on the subject. Some books are so well written, so well done,
so complete, that they defy emulation, though so many others try. The following books are, in my opinion, the
classics, the best and the brightest of the western water world, and
metaphorically of our natural resources economics and environment. I catalog them here for the old and the young,
so that we may remember, and they will not forget.
Cadillac Desert -
Marc Reisner - 1986.
The
battles between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers are
recounted as government dam builders fight for political dominance while the
environment takes a back seat. Huge
water projects are subsidized by ‘Cash Register Dams’ until the price and the
worth of water becomes secondary to rights, priorities and corrupt
contracts. This book is still relevant
today as drought and climate-change magnify the value of water and the precariousness
of our priorities. Despite it all, this
is a fun read and a rollicking good time.
The Emerald Mile - Kevin Fedarko –
2013.
Some would call this
book Cadilac Desert Lite or Western Water - 101, but this is an enjoyable lark
for the masses. Kevin Fedarko’s book was
first published in the summer of 2013 and became an instant hit with river rats
and water geeks alike. It is basically
the story of the spring of 1983 when the winter snowpack continued to build
unexpectedly in the Rocky Mountains until Memorial Day weekend when it started
to melt all at once. This snow melt
runoff caused unprecedented flooding along the Colorado River systems that
stressed the Bureau of Reclamation on-stream dams, their engineers and their
operators. The Colorado river is the
poster boy of western rivers, and this is a summation of the problems
associated with the river and the region.
From this adversity came
an opportunity for a select, almost mythical, group of river runners and
guides. They seized the moment in 83, as
well as the high water, and attempted to break the fastest rowing record through
the Grand Canyon. These stories are
seamlessly woven together in this book to provide an enlightening and
entertaining story of the various, often competing, special interest groups,
and stakeholders of the rivers and the water in the west. The Colorado River is the model for the
exploitation of the waters and the resources of the American West, and this
book is a revelation of the complex consequences that arise when you mess with
mother nature, for thrills or for profit.
Beyond the 100th
Meridian – Wallace Stegner – 1954.
From
the Dean of Western writers, Pulitzer Prize winning Wallace Stegner accurately recounts
the trial and tribulations of the first descent of the Green and Colorado Rivers
in 1869 in leaky rowboats, by the one-armed civil war veteran John Wesley Powell
and his rag-tag crew. From Green River Wyoming
to the Virgin - Colorado river’s confluence, Powell led his man thru munity and
mayhem in the countless rapids, harsh climate and variable geology of the
canyons. After the trip Powell predicted
the economic exploitation of the west with water being the limiting factor in
this vast dry region. He recommended forming
state boundaries along sustainable drainage basins instead of the unwieldly box
states that promote competition and conflict in the distribution of water. The second part of the book prosaically details
Powell’s formation of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution and
his term as the second director of the U.S. Geologic Survey. Powell unsuccessfully fought Washington politics
and bad water policy before having the Colorado’s largest lake ignominiously
named after him in 1963.
Wallace
Stegner is the king-pin of western writers, linking Emmerson and Thoreau
through Robert Frost at Harvard to modern writers such as Bernard DeVoto,
Vardis Fischer at the University of Utah.
He taught the likes of Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry, Thomas
McGuane, C.L.Rawlins and Sandra Day O’Conner at Stanford. His other great non-fiction classic is “The
Sounds of Mountain Water” – 1969 a description of the west in the 1930-60s
with tales of running the soft rocks and smooth water of Glen Canyon before the
dam was built. Again, the second part of this book drifts into an account on
how to become a western writer but can easily be skipped if you are
uninterested.
Desert Solitaire –
Edward Abbey – 1968.
Even
though Abbeys popular fictious work “The Monkey Wrench Gang”, ribaldly details
an audacious plan by several desert rats to blow up Glen Canyon Dam and was the
inspiration for the formation of Earth First, “Desert Solitaire” is his
best, non-fiction effort at environmental writing and the dangers of ecotourism. Abbey details his term as a Park Ranger
living in a dilapidated trailer in Arches National Monument near Moab Utah in
1956-57. This desert landscape, near the
confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers, was an empty wilderness at the
time. This was after the post-war Uranium
miners left and before Arches and Canyonlands National parks were created and
the place became a Disneyland for boaters, bikers, Jeeps and ATVs.
He
talks of rustling cattle out to Dead Horse Point and harassing station wagons full
of tourist hell bent on civilized family adventure. His tone is humorous and familiar, inciteful
and more than a little irreverent. It is a similar voice as the outdoor curmudgeon
of our time, Jim Harrison, with his manly prose and a zinger on every
page. Abbey harkens back to simpler
times in a canyon country formed originally by God with wind and water and,
more recently, by the hand of man with good intentions and a bulldozer. “Down
the River” is another notable nonfiction work by Abbey that describes
floating down Glen Canyon in an inner tube and a twelve pack of beer in the
1960’s. Reality is sometimes stranger
than fiction.
Sand
County Almanac – Aldo Leopold – 1949.
Like the father of glaciation John
Muir surmised, Aldo Leopold,
the father of wildlife ecology believed in the interconnections between all things
in the natural world, including humans. He fostered a development of a land
ethic that included a conservationist conscience and personal responsibility. Broken into three main sections written over
twelve years, this book’s first section is divided into twelve segments
representing each month on his played out southwest Wisconsin farm. His great
discovery occurs when he watches the fierce green light fade from the eyes of a
mother wolf he has just shot and the implications on the nearby grazing deer
and the over grazed landscape of his farm.
Dying a year before publication, when putting out a fire on a neighbor’s
farm, Leopold started the modern environmental movement without even knowing
it. While not exactly water centric,
this book was a turning point in environmental writing and thinking.
Silent Spring - Rachel
Carson – 1962.
Given
this book to read for high school in 1971 I did not know what to think of
it. It was over my head for sure, but I
had participated in the first Earth Day the year before and had a germinating
environmental ethic before it was unfashionable. Rachel Carson, the mother of environmental
regulation, continued the tome that we, like all living things, are part of the
vast ecosystem of earth and sparked a national debate on the indiscriminate use
of chemical pesticides, the responsibility of science and the limitations and
costs of technological progress. During
the heyday of open air nuclear testing, Napalm bombing in Vietnam and ‘Better
Living Through Chemistry’ textbooks Carson started a movement that resulted in
the ban of DDT and alerted us to the slow poisoning of the earth and
ourselves. Chemical corruption affects
us all, for we too are permeable. She
introduced us to the perils of the unintended consequences of our technological
advancement. Dying also only a year
after its publication, Carson never saw the results of her work leading up to
the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act of the 1970’s. Peter Matthiessen
rated her for Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the
Century. Carson continued to advance the
advocacy of the environment by suggesting we regulate our scientific
advancement and technological arrogance to protect our natural resources.
Sky’s Witness - C.
L. Rawlins – 1993.
This
one is a personal guilty pleasure. Rawlins is a back-country skiing hydrologist,
traversing the Wind River Mountains in all seasons and storms, measuring snow-pack
and water quality for air pollution affects from hundreds of miles away. Thoreau claimed that he was a "self-appointed inspector of
snowstorms and rainstorms," but now there is Chip Rawlins from Utah State
University. The writing has the prose quality of Steinbeck or McPhee,
balancing powder skiing with scientific observation and introspection with natural
history. Sometimes it is not so much
what you say, but how you say it.
Others – Optional
The Secret
Knowledge of Water - Craig Childs - 2000. The personality of water becomes fully
animated in this remarkable book. Also: This
House of Rain - 2008 amalgamates scientific facts and historical conjecture
about the Anasazi culture of the Southwest.
This is a human story of drought, war and migration.
Rising From the Plains – John McPhee – 1986. The third of
four McPhee geology books, this tome entwines the geology of Wyoming and
the story of its primary USGS mapper, David Love, and his pioneering family history. McPhee takes billions of years of geology and
a complicated family history and seamlessly translates it for the layman and the
reluctant enthusiast. That is his skill.
The Great Aridness - William DuBuys – 2011. DuBuys offers
an unflinching yet poetic look at the dramatic effects of climate change
occurring right now in our own backyards and around the world.
Where the Water Goes - David Owens – 2017. Owens writes about the Colorado River as the best
example for limited water, archaic water rights, byzantine agreements, outdated
infrastructure and the future of the west.
More
Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Muir, Frost, Harrison, Lindon. These
go without saying. Happy Reading.
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