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

Bessire, Lucas

  • 3.84 out of 5 stars
    680 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780691212647: Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0691212643 ISBN 13: 9780691212647
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2021

Synopsis

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.

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About the Author

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.

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Publisher
Princeton University Press
Publication date
2021
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0691212643
ISBN 13 
9780691212647
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
264
Rating
  • 3.84 out of 5 stars
    680 ratings by Goodreads

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780691216430: Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  0691216436 ISBN 13:  9780691216430
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2022
Softcover