Overview

"When Henry David Thoreau went for his daily walk, he would consult his instincts on which direction to follow. More often than not his inner compass pointed west or southwest. ""The future lies that way to me,"" he explained, ""and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side."" In his own imaginative way, Thoreau was imitating the countless young pioneers, prospectors, and entrepreneurs who were zealously following Horace Greeley's famous advice to ""go west."" Yet while the epic chapter in American history opened by these adventurous men and women is filled with stories of frontier hardship, we rarely think of one of their greatest problems--the lack of water resources. And the same difficulty that made life so troublesome for early settlers remains one of the most pressing concerns in the western states of the late-twentieth century.The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its rivers to produce unlimited wealth and power. In Rivers of Empire, award-winning historian Donald Worster tells the story of this dream and its outcome. He shows how, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were the first attempting to make that dream a reality, damming and diverting rivers to irrigate their land. He follows this intriguing history through the 1930s, when the federal government built hundreds of dams on every major western river, thereby laying the foundation for the cities and farms, money and power of today's West. Yet while these cities have become paradigms of modern American urban centers, and the farms successful high-tech enterprises, Worster reminds us that the costs have been extremely high. Along with the wealth has come massive ecological damage, a redistribution of power to bureaucratic and economic elites, and a class conflict still on the upswing. As a result, the future of this ""hydraulic West"" is increasingly uncertain, as water continues to be a scarce resource, inadequate to the demand, and declining in quality.Rivers of Empire represents a radically new vision of the American West and its historical significance. Showing how ecological change is inextricably intertwined with social evolution, and reevaluating the old mythic and celebratory approach to the development of the West, Worster offers the most probing, critical analysis of the region to date. He shows how the vast region encompassing our western states, while founded essentially as colonies, have since become the true seat of the American ""Empire."" How this imperial West rose out of desert, how it altered the course of nature there, and what it has meant for Thoreau's (and our own) mythic search for freedom and the American Dream, are the central themes of this eloquent and thought-provoking story--a story that begins and ends with water."

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9780195078060

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Reviews

Classic. --New Internationalist Extremely wonderful and well-written. --Thomas G. Alexander, Brigham Young University Worster is an eloquent, often passionate historian....This important book, sure to be furiously debated, is a history of the West in terms of its most essential resource, water....It examines how manipulation of water has combined with frontier myths, expectations, and illusions, some of them carefully cultivated by interested parties, to create the ambiguous modern West. --Wallace Stegner Worster is capable of making the most prosaic facts come alive through his mastery of the language, his imagery, and his ability to weave his ideas with events and personalities into a fascinating historical record. --The Los Angeles Times Book Review Many readers will disagree with [Worster's] conclusions, but they are so forcefully presented that they cannot be dismissed, and will likely shape the discussions for years to come....A language of exceptional poetry and power....He takes his place in a tradition of awed affectionate writing about the West that includes John Muir and Edward Abbey, Bernard De Voto and Wallace Stegner. That is distinguished company indeed, and Donald Worster stands tall in it. --The New York Times Book Review A brilliant book, clear in its argument, exceptional in its literary qualities. --The Los Angeles Times Book Review Impassioned and lyrical. --The New York Times Book Review An excellent choice for courses that include readings from the New Western History interpretations. --Thomas L. Charlton, Baylor University

An iconoclastic look at the history of the American West. While the cowboy and his wide-open range are the symbols of the mythical West, according to Worster the irrigation ditch is far more representative of the real one. He shows how the West has become the greatest hydraulic society in human history, one shaped by and completely dependent upon its dams, reservoirs and canals. The 1902 National Reclamation Act was supposed to be a triumph of democracy, providing water for small homesteaders. Instead, it entrenched an agribusiness elite and an underclass of exploited farm workers, creating a social order as hierarchical as those of Egypt and other hydraulic empires of the past. Reclamation helped make America a global power. But the system is already breaking down as dams age, reservoirs silt up, water quality declines and Americans increasingly question the system's moral legitimacy. Worster's thesis is armed with the theoretical baggage of the professional historian: Karl Wittfogel's notion of the hydraulic society: Max Horkheimer's view that civilization's skewed relationship with nature is the central problem of our time; French social theorist Andre Gorz's contention that the total domination of nature inevitably entails the domination of people by the techniques of domination. Worster's brief blueprint for a more democratic and ecological West owes a great deal to contemporary bioregionalists' vernacular vision of decentralized, locally oriented communities cognizant of their environments' natural limits. His theory may be familiar and his alternative West utopian, but Worster's scholarship is solid, as is his assertion that Americans must face the fact that they cannot continue to maximize wealth and empire and maximize democracy and freedom, too. (Kirkus Reviews)

<br> Classic. --New Internationalist<p><br> Extremely wonderful and well-written. --Thomas G. Alexander, Brigham Young University<p><br> Worster is an eloquent, often passionate historian....This important book, sure to be furiously debated, is a history of the West in terms of its most essential resource, water....It examines how manipulation of water has combined with frontier myths, expectations, and illusions, some of them carefully cultivated by interested parties, to create the ambiguous modern West. --Wallace Stegner<p><br> Worster is capable of making the most prosaic facts come alive through his mastery of the language, his imagery, and his ability to weave his ideas with events and personalities into a fascinating historical record. --The Los Angeles Times Book Review<p><br> Many readers will disagree with [Worster's] conclusions, but they are so forcefully presented that they cannot be dismissed, and will likely shape the discussions for years to come....A language of exceptional poetry and power....He takes his place in a tradition of awed affectionate writing about the West that includes John Muir and Edward Abbey, Bernard De Voto and Wallace Stegner. That is distinguished company indeed, and Donald Worster stands tall in it. --The New York Times Book Review<p><br> A brilliant book, clear in its argument, exceptional in its literary qualities. --The Los Angeles Times Book Review<p><br> Impassioned and lyrical. --The New York Times Book Review<p><br> An excellent choice for courses that include readings from the New Western History interpretations. --Thomas L. Charlton, Baylor University<p><br>

Author Information

Donald Worster, who won the Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, is Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is also the author of The Ends of the Earth, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, and the forthcoming Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West.

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