Idaho Librarian

Reviews

Editor's Note:  Irrigated Eden won the ILA Book Award for 1999.

Perhaps the last person to make hydrology interesting to the layperson was the late Marc Reisner in his classic book Cadillac Desert. However, Reisner’s book was principally about the politics of water in the West and not about moving it around.

In Irrigated Eden: The making of an agricultural landscape in the American West,  Mark Fiege reshapes the man-versus-nature dichotomy to posit a view of a hybrid environment where neither man nor nature controls the other. This environment is neither wild nor tamed, and new, unforeseen emergent structures are encountered repeatedly due to the “improving” hand of man on the arid Idaho landscape of the Snake River plain.

At its essence Irrigated Eden is indeed a book about moving water: about irrigating dry land to make something more profitable than sagebrush or cheat grass grow. Beyond that, however, it is also a look into the heart of our own myth making, grandiose beyond any of our limited capacities to influence our landscapes even as common perception suggests we are destroying them.

This myth and metaphor of irrigation transforming a howling desert into a bounteous Eden is one that has been seen previously in works such as the aforementioned Cadillac Desert and Charles F. Wilkinson’s  Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, water, and the future of the West. In Irrigated Eden, Fiege addresses the myth, but focuses much of his energy on habitats and hydrological realities that often mocked the rosy turn-of-the-century brochures depicting moist, bounteous Edens displacing parched desert. 

Fiege is a subtle and engaging writer, and he makes the case that the taming and conquering of our natural resources for the sake of dependable irrigation is itself a myth, and that the process has been far messier, wasteful, and complex than any engineer or farmer could ever have imagined. In his view, our attempts at harnessing water have only been marginally successful while creating new environmental realities, some good, some bad, some neutral, but hardly any that fully conform to our expectations.

Fiege notes how several factors muddled the efforts of engineers and assorted technocrats to provide dependable water to farmers, and also created problems that went beyond the technical sphere and into the communal.  For example, in creating new pathways for water that would allow for dependable storage and subsequent use, seepage--the loss of stored water into the ground-- became a significant problem that not only depleted water, but also often saturated low-lying farmland, which subsequently required extensive drainage systems for which all farmers, low and high-lying, had to share the cost and burden.

Attempts to stabilize and indeed minimize water use by attempting to establish a “duty of water” (the amount necessary to irrigate specific crops) not only acknowledged that no irrigated Eden was forthcoming, but itself foundered on the reality that far too many variables were at play outdoors and outside controlled laboratory environments to ever make a useable duty of water a reality.

Ultimately, Fiege is intrigued by the obscuring nature of our myths and how they reveal more about ourselves than the landscape.  As he observes the meshing of constructed and natural landscapes that have been intertwined to create new environmental forms neither pristine nor entirely corrupted, he recognizes that we have not tamed a bleak and howling desert wilderness during our century plus of irrigation efforts, but have merely been a contributor to an evolving and unruly landscape, molding it as it both thwarts and molds us.  Fiege’s book is an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on irrigation in the West and a satisfying read as well. 

Irrigated Eden is suitable and recommended for both public and academic libraries.