Water has always been one of the American West’s most precious and limited resources. The earliest inhabitants—Native Americans and later Hispanics—learned to share the region’s scant rainfall and snowmelt. When Euro-Americans arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, they brought with them not only an interest in large-scale commercial agriculture but also new practices and laws about access to, and control of, the water essential for their survival and success. This included the concept of private rights to water, a critical resource that had previously been regarded as a communal asset.

David Stiller’s thoughtful study focuses on the history of agricultural water use of the Rio Grande in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. After surveying the practices of early farmers in the region, he focuses on the impacts of Euro-American settlement and the ways these new agrarians endeavored to control the river. Using the Rio Grande as a case study, Stiller offers an informed and accessible history of the development of practices and technologies to store, distribute, and exploit water in Colorado and other western states, as well as an account of the creation of water rights and laws that govern this essential commodity throughout the West to this day. Stiller’s work ranges from meticulously monitored fields of irrigated alfalfa and potatoes to the local and state water agencies and halls of Congress. He also includes perceptive comments on the future of western water as these arid states become increasingly urbanized during a period of worsening drought and climate change.

An excellent read for anyone curious about important issues in the West, Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West offers a succinct summary and analysis of Colorado’s use of water by agricultural interests, in addition to a valuable discussion of the past, present, and future of struggles over this necessary and endangered resource.

Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book aims to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes and also to combine them in what we term “watery thinking.” Water and Cognition brings together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking. The collection explores how water — as element, as environment, and as part of our bodies — affects the way early modern and contemporary discourses understand cognition.

In the southern Maya lowlands, rainfall provided the primary and, in some areas, the only source of water for people and crops. Classic Maya kings sponsored elaborate public rituals that affirmed their close ties to the supernatural world and their ability to intercede with deities and ancestors to ensure an adequate amount of rain, which was then stored to provide water during the four-to-five-month dry season. As long as the rains came, Maya kings supplied their subjects with water and exacted tribute in labor and goods in return. But when the rains failed at the end of the Classic period (AD 850-950), the Maya rulers lost both their claim to supernatural power and their temporal authority. Maya commoners continued to supplicate gods and ancestors for rain in household rituals, but they stopped paying tribute to rulers whom the gods had forsaken.

In this paradigm-shifting book, Lisa Lucero investigates the central role of water and ritual in the rise, dominance, and fall of Classic Maya rulers. She documents commoner, elite, and royal ritual histories in the southern Maya lowlands from the Late Preclassic through the Terminal Classic periods to show how elites and rulers gained political power through the public replication and elaboration of household-level rituals. At the same time, Lucero demonstrates that political power rested equally on material conditions that the Maya rulers could only partially control. Offering a new, more nuanced understanding of these dual bases of power, Lucero makes a compelling case for spiritual and material factors intermingling in the development and demise of Maya political complexity.

Winner of the Asia Society's Bernard Schwartz 2012 Book Award

The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow may be over water. Nowhere is that danger greater than in water-distressed Asia.

Water stress is set to become Asia’s defining crisis of the twenty-first century, creating obstacles to continued rapid economic growth, stoking interstate tensions over shared resources, exacerbating long-time territorial disputes, and imposing further hardships on the poor. Asia is home to many of the world's great rivers and lakes, but its huge population and exploding economic and agricultural demand for water make it the most water-scarce continent on a per capita basis. Many of Asia’s water sources cross national boundaries, and as less and less water is available, international tensions will rise. The potential for conflict is further underscored by China’s unrivaled global status as the source of transboundary river flows to the largest number of countries, ranging from India and Vietnam to Russia and Kazakhstan; yet a fast-rising China has declined to enter into water-sharing or cooperative treaties with these states, even as it taps the resources of international rivers.

Water: Asia’s New Battleground is a pioneering study of Asia’s murky water politics and the relationships between fresh water, peace, and security. In this unique and highly readable book, Brahma Chellaney expertly paints a larger picture of water across Asia, highlights the security implications of resource-linked territorial disputes, and proposes real strategies to avoid conflict and more equitably share Asia’s water resources.

No natural resource issue has greater significance for the future of Texas than water. The state's demand for water for municipal, industrial, agricultural, and recreational uses continues to grow exponentially, while the supply from rivers, lakes, aquifers, and reservoirs is limited. To help Texans manage their water resources today and plan for future needs, one of Texas's top water experts has compiled this authoritative overview of water issues in Texas.

Water in Texas covers all the major themes in water management and conservation:

• Living with a Limited Resource
• The Molecule that Moves Mountains
• A Texas Water Journey
• The Gulf Shores of Texas
• Who's Who in Water
• Texas Water Law: A Blend of Two Cultures
• Does Texas Have Enough Water?
• Planning for the Future
• What's in Your Water?
• How Much is Water Worth?
• Water is Our Legacy

Illustrated with color photographs and maps, Water in Texas will be the essential resource for landowners, citizen activists, policymakers, and city planners.

This set of eleven essays addresses the tightening water resource problems of the Arab region’s twenty countries. The authors discuss themes of water conflict and provide detailed looks at four sub-areas: the Maghreb, the Nile countries, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Mashrek.

This century has seen a technological drive to enlarge traditional surface and groundwater supplies and to expand irrigated farming for rapidly growing and progressively more prosperous populations. But now the region is facing absolute limits on its fresh water. Water in the Arab World focuses on today’s need to move toward rationalized new patterns of using water within the national economies, a transition often described as moving from supply to demand management. The change calls for intensified national legislative and planning efforts concerning water, with serious consideration of desalination and conservation, as well as of pricing and market approaches to the allocation of a very constrained supply.

Finding "streams in the desert" has never been more urgent for the peoples of the Middle East. Rapid population growth and a rising standard of living are driving water demand inexorably upward, while the natural supply has not increased since Biblical times. Ensuring a fair and adequate distribution of water in the region is vitally important for building a lasting peace among the nations of the Middle East.

Addressing water needs from a geographical perspective, the contributors to this book analyze and assess the impact of scarce water resources in the Jordan River basin countries and territories (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria) as these long-time antagonists work toward peace. After geographical and historical overviews, the authors envision the future-what the water issues may be when Israel and Syria begin negotiating, the "hydro-security" needs of each nation, and the difficulties of planning for uncertainty. Without proposing any one ideal scheme, they discuss the possibilities for cooperative sharing of water resources, while honestly acknowledging the political constraints that may limit such projects. The final essay speaks to the needs of the one party so rarely represented at the negotiating table—the Jordan River itself.

This book on water and climate change goes beyond the usual and predictable analyses, by bringing religion and values into a discussion that is often dominated by technocratic solutions. The three case studies of Jakarta, Cape Town, and Amsterdam demonstrate the challenges of water management in urban areas and the role religion can play in addressing them. With representatives from science, politics, economics, and religion, as well as young voices, the book stimulates a values-driven dialogue on issues of water in times of climate change.

The poems of Water the Rocks Make commit into words the turbulence of emotion and thought stirred up by life’s events: family trauma, psychiatric instability, the legal system, the death of a loved one, identity, cultural displacement, work, loss, creativity, and through everything, love.
 
Set primarily in Alaska, where author David McElroy has lived most of his life, the real action in these poems is in thought—the mind coming to terms (words) with consciousness, the mixing and rendering of reality and imagination. McElroy delves down the many rapid turns toward meaning through these contemplations on personification of a long-tailed boat in Asia; Adam tasked with naming the creatures; synthesizing the agony of accident, disease, and death; Descartes musing about an oilfield bridge; the excitement of sensual love; or the history and creativity emerging from a landfill.
 
There is sadness here, but through the rigorous manipulation of imagery, rhythm, and sound, Water the Rocks Make strives to “…contribute their daily/ details in our remarkable trick of happiness…to rise from the mulch/ of dreams like seedling teak goofy with life/ and floppy leaves.”
 

A study of The Travels of Lao Can through an environmental lens.

When the Yellow River Floods explores the relationship between environmental degradation, hydraulic engineering, and nation-building in the context of Liu E’s The Travels of Lao Can. This book provides a unique perspective on modern Chinese literary history that goes beyond conventional narratives that focus solely on political and cultural factors. The main areas covered include the role of water management in literary nation-building and the connections between the novel’s various themes, such as river engineering, medical and political discourses, national sentiment, and landscape description.

By offering a comprehensive analysis of The Travels of Lao Can, this book broadens the understanding of nation-building in early twentieth-century China, highlighting the impact of environmental crises and hydraulics on the formation of national literature and consciousness. When the Yellow River Floods provides a new perspective on the environmental roots of modern Chinese literature, making it an essential read for those seeking to understand the complex interplay between literature, the environment, and national identity in China. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese literature, history, and environmental studies.

Wilderness, Water, and Rust: A Journey toward Great Lakes Resilience asks us to consider what we value about life in the Great Lakes region and how caring for its remarkable ecosystems might help us imagine new, whole futures. Weaving together memories from her life in the upper Midwest with nearly fifty years of environmental policy advocacy work, Jane Elder provides a uniquely moving insider’s perspective into the quest to protect the Great Lakes and surrounding public lands, from past battles to protect Michigan wilderness and shape early management strategies for the national lakeshores to present fights against toxic pollution and climate change. She argues that endless cycles of resource exploitation and boom and bust created a ‘rust belt’ legacy that still threatens our capacity for resilience. The author lays out the challenges that lie ahead and invites us to imagine bold new strategies through which we might thrive.

Healing roles and rituals involving alcohol are a major source of power and identity for women and men in Highland Chiapas, Mexico, where abstention from alcohol can bring a loss of meaningful roles and of a sense of community. Yet, as in other parts of the world, alcohol use sometimes leads to abuse, whose effects must then be combated by individuals and the community.

In this pioneering ethnography, Christine Eber looks at women and drinking in the community of San Pedro Chenalhó to address the issues of women’s identities, roles, relationships, and sources of power. She explores various personal and social strategies women use to avoid problem drinking, including conversion to Protestant religions, membership in cooperatives or Catholic Action, and modification of ritual forms with substitute beverages.

The book’s women-centered perspective reveals important data on women and drinking not reported in earlier ethnographies of Highland Chiapas communities. Eber’s reflexive approach, blending the women’s stories, analyses, songs, and prayers with her own and other ethnographers’ views, shows how Western, individualistic approaches to the problems of alcohol abuse are inadequate for understanding women’s experiences with problem and ritual drinking in a non-Western culture.

In a new epilogue, Christine Eber describes how events of the last decade, including the Zapatista uprising, have strengthened women's resolve to gain greater control over their lives by controlling the effects of alcohol in the community.

"Water, water, everywhere . . ." Working with Water, the latest in the popular New Badger History series, teaches young readers about the many ways water has shaped Wisconsin’s history, from glaciers to stewardship. It touches on geography and hydrography; transportation networks of Indians and fur traders; the Erie Canal; shipwrecks, lighthouses, shipping, and shipbuilding; fishing, ricing, "pearling" (clamming), and cranberry cultivation; lumbering, milling, and papermaking; recreation, resorts, tourism, and environmentalism.

The companion Teacher’s Guide and Student Materials engages students in hands-on exploration. It highlights historical processes and encourages multiple learning styles.