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Ruling the Waters - California's Kern River, the Environment, and the Making of Western Water Law (Paperback)
Loot Price: R867
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Ruling the Waters - California's Kern River, the Environment, and the Making of Western Water Law (Paperback)
Series: The Environment in Modern North America
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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When Europeans first arrived at what is now California's San
Joaquin Valley, they found a vast landscape of wetlands, small
ponds, riparian forests, and grasslands surrounding three large
swampland lakes. What greets a visitor to the region today is a
dramatically different view of mile after mile of row crops,
vineyards, orchards, and grazing acreage-some of the most fertile
and productive agricultural land in the world. This remarkable
transformation, with its enduring consequences, is at the center of
Ruling the Waters, a legal, social, and environmental history of
how western water law shaped, and was shaped by, the subjugation of
the largest freshwater wetlands wildlife habitat in the West. At
the heart of efforts to wrest arable land from the region was the
Kern River, which rises in the Sierra Nevada and carries snowmelt
to what was once a great network of lakes, sloughs, and marshes at
the southern end of California's Central Valley. In Ruling the
Waters Douglas R. Littlefield describes how, over the course of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pioneers and
entrepreneurs diverted water out of this network of waterways to
extract gold in the mountains and irrigate farms lower down the
river, and how the law was made to accommodate these practices.
Struggles over the Kern River's water established one of the most
important concepts in water law in some parts of the United
States-that prior appropriation, dependent on the chronological
order of diversions from waterways, could legally coexist with
riparian rights, which restrict water usage to landownership
directly next to a river or stream. Littlefield traces this concept
to the 1886 California Supreme Court case of Lux v. Haggin-which
pitted the giant farming and cattle company of Miller & Lux
against a prominent land baron, James B. Haggin-and shows how the
lawsuit profoundly shaped future waters issues, which in turn
influenced water laws in other western states that were grappling
with similar questions. Far from a dry legal history, Ruling the
Waters tells a story with world-wide historical environmental
ramifications, a tale of competing personalities and values and
visions that forever changed both the economy and the ecology of
the American West.
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