Killing the Hidden Waters
1978
First Published
4.33
Average Rating
206
Number of Pages
In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity's relationship with the land. Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, "What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down," Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example—water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey's words, "the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere."
Avg Rating
4.33
Number of Ratings
72
5 STARS
49%
4 STARS
36%
3 STARS
15%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
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Author
Charles Bowden
Author · 21 books
Charles Bowden was an American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His journalism appeared regularly in Harper’s GQ, and other national publications. He was the author of several books of nonfiction, including Down by the River. In more than a dozen groundbreaking books and many articles, Charles Bowden blazed a trail of fire from the deserts of the Southwest to the centers of power where abstract ideas of human nature hold sway—and to the roiling places that give such ideas the lie. He claimed as his turf "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America" (Jim Harrison, on Blood Orchid ).
