Killing the Hidden Waters

I came across Charles Bowden's name while reading "God's Middle Finger" and decided to track down some of his works. Started out with The Secret Forest, moved on to Desierto: Memories of the Future, and next to Killing the Hidden Waters. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the American Southwest, its indigenous peoples, the politics of water and development past and future, conservation, or ecology in general. As the cover quote from Edward Abbey states, "Charles Bowden is the best social critic and environmental journalist now working in the American Southwest."

Although Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" is the most encyclopedic book about the West and its problems with water, this book actually gets closer to the bone of what's wrong with the way we in the US live in our desert climes. The book focuses first on how the O'odham and Pima indian cultures managed to live sustainably in the Sonoran Desert with its unpredictable and rare water flows. While I doubt that many of us but the most idealistic and romantic would want to live the life of these peoples, there is a certain genius in the ways they made the land and its water work for them that we could do well to learn from. Bowden contrasts this with the civilization the European cultures came and built during the last 150 years, a civilization built on "mining" the ice-age aquifers so rapidly that they will soon be drained once and for all. Having turned the plains to a dust bowl, will we just pack up and move on as we always have in the past? In his later books, Bowden's bitter spleen often spills uncontrollably from his pen, but his tone here is much more restrained. In "Waters," his voice is almost scholarly scholarly and tinged with sad wisdom. This is a great book, and one that deserves far more readers.