Rivers of Empire

Rivers of Empire
Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 624
Release: 1992
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780195078060


Download Rivers of Empire Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its rivers to produce unlimited wealth and power. In Rivers of Empire, award-winning historian Donald Worster tells the story of this dream and its outcome. He shows how, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were the first attempting to make that dream a reality, damming and diverting rivers to irrigate their land. He follows this intriguing history through the 1930s, when the federal government built hundreds of dams on every major western river, thereby laying the foundation for the cities and farms, money and power of today's West. Yet while these cities have become paradigms of modern American urban centers, and the farms successful high-tech enterprises, Worster reminds us that the costs have been extremely high. Along with the wealth has come massive ecological damage, a redistribution of power to bureaucratic and economic elites, and a class conflict still on the upswing. As a result, the future of this "hydraulic West" is increasingly uncertain, as water continues to be a scarce resource, inadequate to the demand, and declining in quality.


Rivers of Empire
Language: en
Pages: 624
Authors: Donald Worster
Categories: Business & Economics
Type: BOOK - Published: 1992 - Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

GET EBOOK

The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its
Under Western Skies
Language: en
Pages: 305
Authors: Donald Worster
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1992 - Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

GET EBOOK

ns explore our environmental history, uncover the role of nature and the land in the western past, and examine the West as the world's first multicultural socie
Rivers of the Sultan
Language: en
Pages: 264
Authors: Faisal H. Husain
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-03-05 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

GET EBOOK

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers run through the heart of the Middle East and merge in the area of Mesopotamia known as the "cradle of civilization." In their lo
River of Dark Dreams
Language: en
Pages: 561
Authors: Walter Johnson
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-02-26 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

GET EBOOK

River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable
Rivers of Power
Language: en
Pages: 368
Authors: Laurence C. Smith
Categories: Nature
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-04-21 - Publisher: Penguin UK

GET EBOOK

'As fascinating as it is beautifully written' JARED DIAMOND, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel Rivers, more than any road, technology or po