Results by title

Finding hope in a small farm, an engaged community, and an age-old connection to the earth

After half a lifetime spent moving from place to place, Alexis Lathem at last settled down with her husband on a small farm near Vermont’s largest city. The lyric essays of Lambs in Winter take readers through the seasonal cycles of raising sheep and hens and growing fruits and vegetables while confronting the challenges of winter storms, summer floods, invasive weeds, and pests and diseases.

Ever conscious of her place in a historically colonized and ecologically degraded landscape, Lathem wrestles with ethical questions that come to many rural dwellers who—following Thoreau—set out to “live deliberately,” in a time of climate crisis, persistent racial inequity, and growing economic inequality. Likewise, she grapples with the moral complexities of small-scale animal husbandry. Through her efforts at self-provisioning, without holding illusions of the self-reliant individual, Lathem finds herself deeply embedded in the community and reliant on others, especially as her region deals with repeated catastrophic flooding brought on by climate change.

Through elegant prose and insightful investigations into pressing contemporary issues, Lathem evokes the world of her farm and the surrounding countryside with a spiritual awareness of the human journey on this earth. Living in place, attuned to the unfolding changes in the world around her, gives her much to grieve, but the pages of Lambs in Winter are luminous with moments of joy and beauty.

The scarcity of surface water which has so marked the Great Plains is even more characteristic of its subdivision, the Texas High Plains. Settlers on the plateau were forced to use pump technology to tap the vast ground water resources—the underground rain—beneath its flat surface.

The evolution from windmills to the modern high-speed irrigation pumps took place over several decades. Three phases characterized the movement toward irrigation. In the period from 1910 to 1920, large-volume pumping plants first appeared in the region, but, due to national and regional circumstances, these premature efforts were largely abortive. The second phase began as a response to the drouth of the Dust Bowl and continued into the 1950s. By 1959, irrigation had become an important aspect of the flourishing High Plains economy. The decade of the 1960s was characterized chiefly by a growing alarm over the declining ground water table caused by massive pumping, and by investigations of other water sources.

Land of the Underground Rain is a study in human use and threatened exhaustion of the High Plains' most valuable natural resource. Ground water was so plentiful that settlers believed it flowed inexhaustibly from some faraway place or mysteriously from a giant underground river. Whatever the source, they believed that it was being constantly replenished, and until the 1950s they generally opposed effective conservation of ground water. A growing number of weak and dry wells then made it apparent that Plains residents were "mining" an exhaustible resource.

The Texas High Plains region has been far more successful in exploiting its resource than in conserving it. The very success of its pump technology has produced its environmental crisis. The problem brought about by the threatened exhaustion of this resource still awaits a solution.

This study is the first comprehensive history of irrigation on the Texas High Plains, and it is the first comprehensive treatment of the development of twentieth-century pump irrigation in any area of the United States.