Irrigated Eden

Irrigation came to the arid West in a wave of optimism about the power of water to make the desert bloom. Mark Fiege's fascinating and innovative study of irrigation in southern Idaho's Snake River valley describes a complex interplay of human and natural systems. Using vast quantities of labor, irrigators built dams, excavated canals, laid out farms, and brought millions of acres into cultivation. But at each step, nature rebounded and compromised their intended agricultural order. The result was a new and richly textured landscape made of layer upon layer of technology and intractable natural forces -- one that engineers and farmers did not control with the precision they had anticipated.Irrigated Eden vividly portrays how human actions inadvertently helped to create a strange and sometimes baffling ecology. Pioneer farmers, government officials, and businessmen harnessed streams in their quest to make the land produce wealth, but clearing the desert and diverting water to fields had unforeseen repercussions. Aquatic plants and burrowing rodents disrupted the flow of water through canals; weeds and harmful insects spread through crops. The Snake River dwindled, slowed, and warmed; species that thrived in cold, fast-flowing water gave way to those suited to the changed habitat. And irrigators soon realized that in spite of their efforts to control the hydrologic cycle, nature's unceasing round of water movement had resisted and undermined their hydraulic systems.The myth of the garden, which symbolized the irrigators' highest aspirations, proved as changeable as the landscape itself. In poems and pictures, advertising and fiction, the garden of plenty took on the trappings ofindustry and became the industrial Eden, where technology, so the tale went, would ease the farmer's labor and offset the vagaries of nature.In Irrigated Eden Mark Fiege has burst the bounds of historical scholarship; this i