Marc Reisner’s classic, Cadillac Desert, takes us for a walk on the wet side, revealing far more than you ever wanted to know about dams, flood control, irrigation, and municipal water systems — and the serious long-term drawbacks that came along with building thousands of water projects in the f...
To Bonnifield, it was a natural event that would have happened even if the plains hadn’t been overgrazed and plowed up; to Worster, it was almost entirely a man-made disaster. Paul Sears’s Deserts on the March is still the classic book on the subject, and Sears’s conclusions land much closer to W...