Running Out

Running Out

Author: Lucas Bessire

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-10-04

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0691216436

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Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.


Ogallala Blue

Ogallala Blue

Author: William Ashworth

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2007-07-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0881507369

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A story of a crucial, dwindling natural resource: an invisible ocean of fresh water under the High Plains. The Ogallala Aquifer that lies deep beneath the Great Plains from Texas to Colorado contains enough water to fill Lake Erie nine times! Every year five trillion gallons are pumped out for irrigation, and if (or when) the aquifer goes dry, $20 billion worth of food and fiber grown with that irrigation will disappear. William Ashforth tells the fascinating history of the Ogallala from its formation millions of years ago to glimpses of the future when the Great Plains could return to their Sahara Desert-like past.


Groundwater Exploitation in the High Plains

Groundwater Exploitation in the High Plains

Author: David E. Kromm

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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In the forty years since the invention of center pivot irrigation, the Nigh Plains aquifer system has been depleted at an astonishing rate. Is the region now in danger of becoming the Great American Desert? In this volume eleven of the most knowledgeable scholars and water professionals in the Great Plains insightfully examine the dilemmas of groundwater use. They address both the technical problems and the politics of water management, providing a badly needed analysis of the implications of large-scale irrigation.


The Great Plains

The Great Plains

Author: Walter Prescott Webb

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1959-01-01

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 9780803297029

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A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers


The Ogallala Road

The Ogallala Road

Author: Julene Bair

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-08-04

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0143127071

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A memoir of love and reckoning. A story of love, family, and the fight to keep the great plains from running dry. Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment, 'Hang on to your land!' But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family--like other irrigators--pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family's role in its depletion haunts her. As traditional ways of life collide with industrial realities, Bair must dramatically change course.


Where the Water Goes

Where the Water Goes

Author: David Owen

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0698189906

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“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.


Aquatic and Wetland Vascular Plants of the Northern Great Plains

Aquatic and Wetland Vascular Plants of the Northern Great Plains

Author: Gary Eugene Larson

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 692

ISBN-13:

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A taxonomic treatment of aquatic and wetland vascular plants has been developed as a tool for identifying over 500 plant species inhabiting wetlands of the northern Great Plains region. The treatment provides dichotomous keys and botanical descriptions to facilitate identification of all included taxa. Illustrations are also provided for selected species. Geographical ranges and habitat preferences are described for each species, and a map is provided for each plant showing its documented occurrences by counties within the region. Additional information provided with species descriptions includes common name(s), flowering/fruiting periods, and nomenclatural synonyms. A glossary of botanical terms is also provided.