Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains - Hardcover

Bessire, Lucas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691212643 ISBN 13: 9780691212647

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lucas Bessire is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• ISBN 10: 0691212643
• ISBN 13: 9780691212647
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar