Download or read book Running Out written by Lucas Bessire and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.
Download or read book High Plains Farm written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After thirty-three years, Paula Chamlee returned home to photograph and write about the farm where she grew up on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle. This document provides a look at her home place and reveals a way of life and value system that are quickly vanishing. It attempts to evoke the flavour of farm life in the twentieth century.
Download or read book This Place These People written by David Stark and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The numbers of farms and farmers on the Great Plains are dwindling. Disappearing even faster are the farm places—the houses, barns, and outbuildings that made the rural landscape a place of habitation. Nancy Warner's photographs tell the stories of buildings that were once loved yet have now been abandoned. Her evocative images are juxtaposed with the voices of Nebraska farm people, lovingly recorded by sociologist David Stark. These plainspoken recollections tell of a way of life that continues to evolve in the face of wrenching change. Warner's spare, formal photographs invite readers to listen to the cadences and tough-minded humor of everyday speech in the Great Plains. Stark's afterword grounds the project in the historical relationship between people and their land. In the tradition of Wright Morris, this combination of words and images is both art and document, evoking memories, emotions, and questions for anyone with rural American roots.
Download or read book Great Plains written by Ian Frazier and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2001-05-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller Most travelers only fly over the Great Plains--but Ian Frazier, ever the intrepid and wide-eyed wanderer, is not your average traveler. A hilarious and fascinating look at the great middle of our nation. With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.
Download or read book Chokecherry Places written by Merrill Gilfillan and published by Big Earth Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book detailing his travels through the American Great Plains, author Merrill Gilfillan continues to elucidate for us, and add to our appreciation of, one of the most ignored and misunderstood areas of our vast American landscape. Like few American writers, Gilfillan has a deep feeling for, and understanding of the western grasslands, which give both dignity and a deep historical sense to our sometimes forgotten heartland.Gilfillan's sense of the land encompasses the plants, wildflowers, and small creatures; the birds that he writes such wonderfully detailed descriptions about; the rivers, watering holes, and butteframed vistas; and, very importantly, the legacy of the Plains tribes of Native Americans who loved this land and fashioned myth and legend about it. By overlaying these myths onto the modern plains landscape, Gilfillan invokes a poignant sense of loss, yet we are also ennobled by the profound sense of the landscape that his vision imparts to us. Gilfillan is a tour guide like no other. His readers are given lovely, lingering descriptions of the overlooked and forgotten, the out-of-the-way and underfoot.
Download or read book Archeology of the High Plains written by James H. Gunnerson and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book High Plains Tango written by Robert James Waller and published by Crown. This book was released on 2005-06-28 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With over 10 million copies sold, bestselling author Robert James Waller returns with the haunting, evocative story of a small town, a beautiful and mysterious woman, and the man forever changed by both. The wild places are where no one is looking anymore. Out there on the high plains, among the Sioux reservations and the silent buttes, among the small towns dying and the people with them, you can hear the wind. And on the back of the wind is the sound of an old accordion—tangos—mingling with the lonely thump of a single drum in the nighttime and a far-off warrior’s cry. On the back of the wind is the smell of worn saddle leather and sawdust, of sandalwood, and smoke from ancient ceremonial fires. To this, to a town called Salamander, comes Carlisle McMillan, a traveler and master carpenter seeking a place of quiet amid the grinding roar of progress. Near Wolf Butte, a strange and apparently haunted monolith, he finds his quiet, or so he believes, and begins rebuilding a decrepit house as a tribute to the gruff old man who taught him a carpenter’s skills, rebuilding his life at the same time. He finds two very different, independent women: Gally Deveraux, who works at a diner in Salamander and longs for something more than she is, and Susanna Benteen, beautiful and enigmatic, who was drawn to Salamander for mysterious reasons of her own, a woman the town has labeled a witch. The women and his carpenter’s trade and an old Indian known as Flute Player bring Carlisle a sense of contentment for a while. But his quiet is shattered as bulldozer treads begin to turn and the Yerkes County War commences. Run or stand your ground, that is Carlisle’s dilemma, Gally on one side, Susanna on the other. Robert James Waller’s fully imagined characters become people we know and care for deeply. High Plains Tango is the hauntingly lyrical story of a small town in the middle of nowhere, a town that forever changed—and was forever changed by—one man.
Download or read book Ogallala Blue written by William Ashworth and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2007-07-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of a crucial, dwindling natural resource: an invisible ocean of fresh water under the High Plains. The Ogallala Aquifer that lies deep beneath the Great Plains from Texas to Colorado contains enough water to fill Lake Erie nine times! Every year five trillion gallons are pumped out for irrigation, and if (or when) the aquifer goes dry, $20 billion worth of food and fiber grown with that irrigation will disappear. William Ashforth tells the fascinating history of the Ogallala from its formation millions of years ago to glimpses of the future when the Great Plains could return to their Sahara Desert-like past.
Download or read book High plains Drifter written by Ernest Tidyman and published by . This book was released on 1973* with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Prehistoric Hunter Gatherers of the High Plains and Rockies written by Marcel Kornfeld and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive revision of the classic prehistory of the North American high plains.
Download or read book Harvesting the High Plains written by H. Craig Miner and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Craig Miner recounts the story of a former field hand whose joint enterprise with Wichita entrepreneur Ray Garvey created an agricultural wheat empire which still operates today. Miner details the daily decisions the men made which led to their success, as well as treating philosophical and historical questions about the relationship between agriculture and nature in a semi-arid region. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Historical Common Names of Great Plains Plants with Scientific Names Index Volume II Scientific Names Index written by Elaine Nowick and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2014-10 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing thousands of entries of both vernacular and scientific names of Great Plains plants, the literature that informs this exhaustive listing spans nearly 300 years. Author Elaine Nowick has drawn from sources as diverse as Linnaeus, Lewis and Clark, and local university extension publications to compile the gamut of practical, and often fanciful, common plant names used over the years. Each common name is accompanied by a definitive scientific name with references and authority information. Interspersed with scientifically-correct botanical line drawings, the entries are written in standard ICBN format, making this a useful volume for scholars as well as lay enthusiasts alike. Volume 2 indexes the scientific names of those species, followed by listings of all the common names applied to them. Both volumes refer the common and scientific names back to a list of 190 pertinent authoritative sources.
Download or read book Groundwater Exploitation in the High Plains written by David E. Kromm and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the forty years since the invention of center pivot irrigation, the Nigh Plains aquifer system has been depleted at an astonishing rate. Is the region now in danger of becoming the Great American Desert? In this volume eleven of the most knowledgeable scholars and water professionals in the Great Plains insightfully examine the dilemmas of groundwater use. They address both the technical problems and the politics of water management, providing a badly needed analysis of the implications of large-scale irrigation.
Download or read book Home on the Range written by James R. Dickenson and published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's a moving and exciting portrait - including shootouts over land rights, lynchings, the chicanery of land agents, the adventures of bootleggers (Kansas was a dry state until 1948) - but also one of faith and community, with life revolving around the local school and church and the cycle of the harvest.
Download or read book Gone written by Steve Fitch and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abandoned buildings in the West are the subjects of these haunting photographs depicting the daily life and melancholy beauty of what was left behind. The seventy-four color photos are a reminder of the American West as it used to be.
Download or read book Deep Time and the Texas High Plains written by Paul H. Carlson and published by Grover E. Murray Studies in th. This book was released on 2005 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Surveys the history and geologic past of the Texas High Plains and upper Brazos River region by focusing on human activity and adaptation and on shifting environmental conditions and animal resources on the Llano Estacado and in Yellow House Draw, the site of the current Lubbock Lake Landmark"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book American Serengeti written by Dan Flores and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's Great Plains once possessed one of the grandest wildlife spectacles of the world, equaled only by such places as the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, or the veld of South Africa. Pronghorn antelope, gray wolves, bison, coyotes, wild horses, and grizzly bears: less than two hundred years ago these creatures existed in such abundance that John James Audubon was moved to write, "it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals." In a work that is at once a lyrical evocation of that lost splendor and a detailed natural history of these charismatic species of the historic Great Plains, veteran naturalist and outdoorsman Dan Flores draws a vivid portrait of each of these animals in their glory—and tells the harrowing story of what happened to them at the hands of market hunters and ranchers and ultimately a federal killing program in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Great Plains with its wildlife intact dazzled Americans and Europeans alike, prompting numerous literary tributes. American Serengeti takes its place alongside these celebratory works, showing us the grazers and predators of the plains against the vast opalescent distances, the blue mountains shimmering on the horizon, the great rippling tracts of yellowed grasslands. Far from the empty "flyover country" of recent times, this landscape is alive with a complex ecology at least 20,000 years old—a continental patrimony whose wonders may not be entirely lost, as recent efforts hold out hope of partial restoration of these historic species. Written by an author who has done breakthrough work on the histories of several of these animals—including bison, wild horses, and coyotes—American Serengeti is as rigorous in its research as it is intimate in its sense of wonder—the most deeply informed, closely observed view we have of the Great Plains' wild heritage.
