Western Water A to Z is the first ever field guide to Western water. Reinventing this twentieth-century genre for a twenty-first-century audience, Robert R. Crifasi answers questions about rivers, water projects, the culture of water, the ecosystems water projects have created or destroyed, and the reliance of cities, farms, and industries on this critical resource. Organized as a collection of terms, the book addresses the most salient water issues and provides helpful background information regarding their origins and implications. Photographs serve a vital role in the cultural dialogue on water and stand as an equal partner to the text. Each subject is covered in about one page and is accompanied by one or two striking images from famous photographers like Margaret Bourke-White, Carleton E. Watkins, Arthur Rothstein, William Henry Jackson, and Dorothea Lang as well as Crifasi’s own work. Water often finds itself at the center of our cultural discourse in art, cinema, and literature, which play essential roles in shaping our understanding and experience of Western water. Crifasi also engages personalities that are nearly synonymous with Western water—John Wesley Powell, Elwood Mead, and Floyd Dominy, among others—to show how their lives intertwined with and often influenced the course of water development across the region. Travelers, adventurers, students, and anyone interested in water will find Western Water A to Z a handy and entertaining reference guide.

Complete instructions for growing over 190 vegetables, herbs, berries, fruits, nuts, and tropical fruits in the ground and in containers. Plans and design ideas for kitchen gardens of all sizes, as well as easy-to-follow guidelines for composting, building raised beds, and more. Growing season details for all regions of the West, including Alaska and Hawaii. Timely tips from edibles experts around the West-British Columbia to New Mexico. More than 300 pages of color photographs, practical advice, and inspiration from the editors of Sunset magazine, the West's authority on gardening.

A Land Made from Water chronicles how the appropriation and development of water and riparian resources in Colorado changed the face of the Front Range—an area that was once a desert and is now an irrigated oasis suitable for the habitation and support of millions of people. This comprehensive history of human intervention in the Boulder Creek and Lefthand Creek valleys explores the complex interactions between environmental and historical factors to show how thoroughly the environment along the Front Range is a product of human influence. Author Robert Crifasi examines the events that took place in nineteenth-century Boulder County, Colorado, and set the stage for much of the water development that occurred throughout Colorado and the American West over the following century. Settlers planned and constructed ditches, irrigation systems, and reservoirs; initiated the seminal court decisions establishing the appropriation doctrine; and instigated war to wrest control of the region from the local Native American population. Additionally, Crifasi places these river valleys in the context of a continent-wide historical perspective. By examining the complex interaction of people and the environment over time, A Land Made from Water links contemporary issues facing Front Range water users to the historical evolution of the current water management system and demonstrates the critical role people have played in creating ecosystems that are often presented to the public as “natural” or “native.” It will appeal to students, scholars, professionals, and general readers interested in water history, water management, water law, environmental management, political ecology, or local natural history.

In the American West, water adjudication lawsuits are adversarial, expensive, and lengthy. Unsettled Waters is the first detailed study of water adjudications in New Mexico. The state envisioned adjudication as a straightforward accounting of water rights as private property. However, adjudication resurfaced tensions and created conflicts among water sovereigns at multiple scales. Based on more than ten years of fieldwork, this book tells a fascinating story of resistance involving communal water cultures, Native rights and cleaved identities, clashing experts, and unintended outcomes. Whether the state can alter adjudications to meet the water demands in the twenty-first century will have serious consequences.

Shallow groundwater systems are important as a source of water, for sustenance of stream baseflow, and for wetland and riparian ecosystems. They are also central to waterlogging, and dryland and irrigation salinity problems. Response time to hydrologic change and pollutant loadings is fast among shallow aquifiers, and it is important that hydrogeologists and natural resource managers understand the unsaturated zone processes which links human activity at the soil surface and the underlying groundwater, and vice versa. This volume of papers explores practical aspects of soil and surface water interactions with groundwater, including modelling of flow and contaminant transport in the unsaturated and saturated zones.

The American West faces many challenges, but none is more important than the challenge of managing its water. This book examines the role that water transfers can play in allocating the region's scarce water resources. It focuses on the variety of third parties, including Native Americans, Hispanic communities, rural communities, and the environment, that can sometimes be harmed when water is moved. The committee presents recommendations to guide states, tribes, and federal agencies toward better regulation. Seven in-depth case studies are presented: Nevada's Carson-Truckee basin, the Colorado Front Range, northern New Mexico, Washington's Yakima River basin, central Arizona, and the Central and Imperial valleys in California. Water Transfers in the West presents background and current information on factors that have encouraged water transfers, typical types of transfers, and their potential negative effects. The book highlights the benefits that water transfers can bring but notes the need for more third-party representation in the processes used to evaluate planned transfers.

Many countries in the world have made great efforts, to remedy the water shortage, by providing financial and technical backing, for water desalination, treatment of wastewater and improved management and conservation techniques. Water ministries, universities and research centres have supported scientific research, and applied the most recent technologies, in search of new and alternative water supplies. Laws have been promulgated, economic and public relation campaigns developed, to promote and encourage the practice of efficient water use and the conservation of this scarce commodity. This book covers water resources and management and provides a new vision of water resources management, water conservation and legislations, water law, and modern techniques of water resources investigation.