Review of Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Desert Southwest, by David N. Cassuto
Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Concentrating primarily on the environmental history of the last 100 years in the American Southwest, David N. Cassuto examines what he suggests is the nexus of political dispute regarding water in the region: the intractable tension between the ideologies of reclamation and restoration. After an initial chapter on John Wesley Powell and the 19th century origins of the hydraulic West, the book proceeds with an exploration of four representative texts in order to demonstrate what Cassuto has identified as the successive stages of the reclamation movement: "At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mary Austin believed in spite of herself that Reclamation would work to the good of both humans and the land. In the 1930s, John Steinbeck portrayed Reclamation’s horrific social and ecological effects while still hoping that it could be retailored to benefit yeoman farmers. The 1970s find Edward Abbey raging against the desecration of the canyonlands and advocating the forcible destruction of Reclamation and all its trappings. By 1990, Barbara Kingsolver seeks to articulate a vision of a post-Reclamation West" (97). The book ends with a speculative foray into the potential of systems theory as a model for a new form of environmentalism, one which might supplant the entrenched forces of reclamation and correct the idealism of restoration.
Repository Citation
Shaman, Cory. "Review of Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Desert Southwest, by David N. Cassuto." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 3, 2006, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss3/19
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