I heard about this book on Dan Blanton's board, and ordered a copy on eBay because I'm interested in protecting anadromous fish including stripers, and this book was touted as the source of history of the war on stripers (by the Farm industry).
"Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner Written in 1993!
http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Deser...adillac+Desert
The paperback arrived, read the first few pages and I'm very impressed with his writing style. You can read the first few pages using "Look Inside" on Amazon.
It's about heavy issues--history, and VERY important, and contentious issues of water & fish resources, but this author's writing style is riveting. This is going to be a fun ride!
Ok, a couple of paraphrase nuggets:
'In the New World, Indians had dabbled with irrigation, and the Spanish had improved their techniques, but the Mormons attacked the desert full-bore, flooded it, subverted it's dreadful indifference--moralized it--until they had made a Mesopotamia in America between the valleys of the Green river and the middle Snake. Fifty-six years after the first earth was turned beside City Creek, the Mormons had 6 million acres under full or partial irrigation in several states.'
'Thanks to irrigation, thanks to the Bureau--an agency few people know--states such as Califormia, Arizona and Idaho became populous and wealthy; millions settled in regions where nature, left alone, would have countenanced thousands at best; great valleys and hemispherical basins changed from desert blond to green'
'Only one desert civilization, out of dozens that grew up in antiquity, has survived into modern times. And Egypt's approach to irrigation was fundamentally different from all the rest.'
Dozens of ppl reviewed it in detail on Amazon, and I haven't read it yet, but I'm really looking forward to this read. I recommend the first few pages.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch review:
'The scale of this book is as staggering as Hoover Dam. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, it spans our century-long effort to moisten the arid West...Anyone thinking of moving west of the hundredth meridian should read this book before calling their real estate agent.'
What's YOUR review?
Cheers, Mark
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