Cadillac Desert The American West and its Disappearing Water - Livres de poche

Cadillac Desert is a weighty history of how the West was won--not with six-guns and lassos, but with steam shovels and cement that moved "water from where it is, and presumably isn't needed, to where it isn't, and presumably is needed". California, Marc Reisner writes, was the chief beneficiary of the great hydrological projects that remade the West; transplanted water allowed it to grow to boast a population now larger than Canada's, and to create an economy richer than all but seven nations', a condition not "remotely conceivable within the pre-existing natural order". Reisner's careful, thoughtful history of the West's great water projects, with notes on similar projects in Central Asia and the Middle East, is essential reading for students of desert ecology.--Christine Buttery