**ALL STUDENTS, FACULY, STAFF, AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS ARE WELCOME**
September 13. Wednesday 4:30 - 6:30 p.m. Martin Building. Kirby Lecture Hall.
Part 1. CADILLAC DESERT: HOW AND WHY WATER DISAPPEARS IN THE AMERICAN WEST. Meet faculty and students of the Environmental Studies Program at a showing of this most authoritative expose ever made on the relentless quest for precious water. A discussion follows the film. Could you take water for granted again?
see the READING LIST for additional information
September 19. Tuesday 4:30 - 6:30 p.m. Martin Building. Kirby Lecture Hall.
Part 2. CADILLAC DESERT: CREATING THE MOST DELUXE DESERT IN THE WORLD right here in the American West. See and discuss with environmental faculty and students how and why free-flowing rivers are diverted and dammed, learn of bizarre and completely unforeseen and unimagined environmental and ecological consequences. Recognize the difficulty and cost of reestablishing a natural river.
September 26. Tuesday 4:30 - 6:30 p.m. Martin Building. Kirby Lecture Hall.
Part 3. CADILLAC DESERT: TURNING PARADISE INTO DESOLATION and luring settlers with bait-and-switch tactics. With environmental faculty and students, explore how powerful elected and non-elected forces conspire, corrupt and trump each others' plans and schemes in billion-dollar battles financed by taxpayers to put water where it isn't . . . and where it may never do much good again.
October 4. Wednesday 4:30 - 6:30 p.m. Martin Building. Kirby Lecture Hall.
Part 4. CADILLAC DESERT: BOONDOGGLES AND BITTER BUREAUCRATIC RIVALRY between governmental agencies of our civilized nation transmogrifies the West. Hear environmental students and faculty debate whether such changes in water use have been for the better . . . or for the worst. Determine for yourself whether distribution of water will eventually limit growth and ultimately destabilize the American West.
October 24th. Tuesday 4:30 - 6:30 p.m. Martin Building. Kirby Lecture Hall. NOT TO BE MISSED!
POLITICS OF WATER. Focusing on beliefs like "the true value of water occurs when the well runs dry," western water users declare, "use it or lose it to whomever gets it first." With an attitude expressed by "the meek may inherit the earth . . . but, without water rights" the splashes and puddles over surface and ground water deepen to include a high-ranking Colonel of Engineers on one side and a battery of western water lawyers on the other. A full-scale battle takes place where water law favors one state over another state and one government improbably joins forces with conservationists to accomplish its objectives . . . with conservationists getting millions of dollars for themselves in what shows promise of being a "winning hand!"
Reisner, Marc. 1993. Cadillac Desert: the American West and its Disappearing Water. Penguin Books, +582 p. $14.35. ISBN: 0140178244. Two copies on reserve in Cornell Library in the "Honors Reserve" section located just to the right of the front door.
Ball, Philip. 2000. Live's Matrix: a Biography of Water. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. +400 p. $20.00. ISBN: 0374186286. On reserve in Cornell Library in the "Honors Reserve" section.
Postel, Sandra, and Starke, Linda (Eds.). 1997. Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity. Worldwatch Environmental Alert Series. W.W. Norton and Company, +239 p. $11.65. ISBN: 0393317447.
Garreau, J. 1982. The Nine Nations of North America. Avon Books, NY +427 p. (See particularly chapter entitled Mexamerica, pp. 207-244. To a lesser extent see Ecotopia (pp. 245-286) and The Empty Quarter (pp. 287-327).
Gentry, C. 1968. The Last Days of the Late Great State of California. Ballantine Books, NY 10003, +401 p. (See particularly Part Two: The Central Valley, and Part Three: California South, pp. 138-310).
Jaeger, E. 1965. (4th Edition). The California Deserts. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, + 207 p.
Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford Univeristy Press, NY, + 226 p. (See classic essays from the sections Chihuahua and Sonora, particularly The Green Lagoons, which details the Delta of the Colorado River where it discharged in 1922 into the Gulf of California. The Colorado River now rarely reaches the Gulf of California, having been diverted for the use of western cities and agriculture).
Wallace Stegner, Beyond the 100th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the American West. Few authors are as compelling as Wallace Stegner. The book holds up well despite the fact that it is ancient by historical standards (Stegner wrote it in 1953). But it is also informative for its important role that it played in the creation of the modern environmental movement. And it leaves Powell himself open for criticism. At the same time he led the USGS, he headed the Bureau of Ethnology and certain aspects of his outlook at one informed the other.
Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire. Environmentalists love the Jeremiad as argument and nobody has mastered the form better than Worster. His take on dam building connects it to the larger trend of centralized government control he calls "hydraulic society" and its a bad thing. History that the NRA and the Sierra club would love.
Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. White is the US's formost historian of any stripe. HIs forays into environmental history (his original field) are always rewarding but this short book (113 pages of text) is truly remarkable. By staying away from the Southwest and California, White allows us to examine dams and their consequences with new eyes. Of modern environmentalists he writes: "To call for a return to nature is posturing. It is a religious ritual in which the recantation of our sins and a pledge to sin no more promises to restore purity. Some people believe sins go away. History does not go away." Instead he suggests that "To come to terms with the Columbia, we need to come to terms with it a as a whole, as an organic machine, not only as a relflection of our own social divisions but as a site where these divisions play out. If the conversation is not about fish and justice, about electricity and ways of life, about production and nature, about beauty as well as efficiency, and about how these things are inseparable in our own tangled lives, then we have not come to terms with our history on this river." (p112-3).
Finally there is the path breaking work of Donald Pisani. Anyone who wishes to understand the tangled world of water in California must read his numerous volumes on the subject.
Albert, R.C. 1987. Damming the Delaware: the Rise and Fall of Tocks Island Dam. Penn State University Press, University Park, PA, +202 p.
Feiveson, H.A., Sinden, F.W. and Socolow, R.H. 1976. Boundaries of analysis: an Inquiry into the Tocks Island Dam Controversy. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ballinger Publishing Company, Cambridge, MA, +417 p. (There is a companion volume by Tribe, L.H., Schelling, C.S., and Voss, J., Eds., entitled: When Values Conflict: Essays on Environmental Analysis, Discourse and Decision, also in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences series published by Ballinger Books).
Sacchetti, J.A. (Ed.) 1986. Reflections on Water: A Centennial History of the Philadelphia Suburban Water Company, Phila. Suburban Water Co, Bryn Mawr, PA, + 188p. (See particularly Chapter 2, the Swarthmore Connection, pp. 5-10).
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