Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains Hardcover – May 18, 2021 by Lucas Bessire

Description

Author: Bessire Lucas

Brand: Princeton University Press

Package Dimensions: 29x221x458

Number Of Pages: 264

Release Date: 18-05-2021

Details: Product Description
Finalist for the National Book AwardAn intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America’s heartlandThe 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.
Review
“Finalist for the National Book Award”

“[
Running Out] bursts with passages that linger after reading. . . . haunting.”
—Christopher Flavelle, New York Times

“A moving, melancholy, environment-focused memoir.” ―
Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“A short beauty of a book.”
—M.J. Andersen, Boston Globe

”
Anthropologist Bessire (Behold the Black Caiman) combines ethnography and memoir in this deeply personal look at the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer. . . . A devastating portrait of how shortsighted decisions lead to devastating losses.” ―
Publishers Weekly

“Lucas Bessire’s poignant critique of dramatic groundwater decline in southwest Kansas and resistance to addressing it offers perspective on our failure to confront climate change. . . . This tale on the ebbing of the Ogallala Aquifer is a valuable addition to the literature of aquifer depletion, compelling for its insider’s perspective and probing of contradictory human decisions that discount the future for immediate reward.”
—Dennis Dimick, Cleveland Review of Books

“To try to get a grip on the cultural forces behind the [aquifer] depletion, [Bessire] began interviewing stakeholders in the vicinity of his family’s property and wrote this very personal account, which includes both analysis of complicity and elegiac passages about his homeland’s history and our dry future. . . . Stirring.”
—Flora Taylor, American Scientist

“Running Out is a book for our times – it should have an impact on policy, and become a classic.”
—John Miles, National Parks Traveler

“Highly recommended . . . Bessire’s achievement in Running Out lies in his ability to open to the reader the water-consciousness of the people of the region. . . . Reading [Running Out] is time well spent.”
—Michael J. Smith, Nebraska History

”
Eminently readable. . . .The sense of loss that necessarily pervades Running Out is balanced is by Bessire’s lyrical prose, whose consistently crisp beauty serves as a welcome respite.”
—Ed Meek, The Arts Fuse

“[Running Out] should be required reading for every environmental scientist.”
—David Dent, International Journal of Environmental Studies
Review
“Bessire’s
Running Out masterfully shifts among scales and genres and in doing so lets the personal, the historic, and the geologic reveal their intimacies and competing urgencies. A beautiful and unusual book, and wholly original.”
―Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

“Lucas