The Nature Pages from OUTRIDER

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	Killing the Hidden Waters by Charles Bowden University of Texas Press, 2003
	"The only time we truly learn something is when we are wrong, and so in the quarter-century since this book was published, I've been treated to a first-class education," writes Charles Bowden in the introduction to this new edition of his classic critique of resource management and water consumption in the American West.
	Bowden's wise and scholarly book, first published in 1977, suggested that water consumption in the West would be curbed by rising water rates and that resource scarcity would eventually limit the region's population growth. But just as consumers have responded to higher gas prices by shifting to large gas-guzzling SUVs, the American culture seems determined to devour as much as it can as quickly as possible.		Groundwater is essentially nonrenewable in the arid west because the economies that exploit it cannot abide a low rate of use. By combusting nonrenewable coal and nonrenewable oil and nonrenewable natural gas, they have managed to lift nonrenewable water at incredible rates. By using water with abandon they can compete with more humid regions, where it is basically a free good. This extractive process... is the machinery behind the expression "conquest of nature"...
	"I think over time this small tract will prove accurate, regardless of my own misbegotten hopes in the past," Bowden explains. "And by this claim I mean that the finite nature of resources will come increasingly into play and limit our ambitions and appetites."
Browse our selection of new, used and out of print birding books.	Focused on the arid Southwest, the book contrasts the European cultures of the last 150 years that have based their civilizations on the ability to "mine" the aquifers with the O'odham and Pima Indian cultures that have managed to live sustainably in the Sonoran Desert with its unpredictable and rare water flows for centuries. What will become of these cultures when the aquifers are finally drained? Will the Europeans pack up and move on as they have in the past?
	Bowden, an important figure in environmental writing in the West, has recently explored border region drug trafficking in Down By The River and the headwaters of the sickness in America's soul in Blood Orchid. Killing the Hidden Waters was the first of nearly two dozen works of environmental and social commentary.