Running Out
In Search of Water on the High Plains
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Book Award
An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.
Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future.
An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Anthropologist Lucas Bessire isn’t here to preach about environmental activism or offer any quick fixes to the complex problem of the depleting Ogallala Aquifer—the vast ocean of groundwater that lies beneath America’s heartlands and is on the verge of drying up. Instead, he paints a larger picture of resource mismanagement, personal politics, and true grit—and he doesn’t shy away from the history of genocidal violence surrounding water rights. A born-and-raised Kansan, Bessire is a masterful storyteller who travels across the High Plains with his father (whom we first meet in SpongeBob pajamas and a Stetson hat) to interview farmers, bankers, and ranch hands who present both solutions and elegies for the land they call home. Running Out is vast in its historical scope but feels intensely personal. Bessire’s own memories tie into universal tales of hardship and struggle in a time where everything feels uncertain. As in a classic western, there are good guys and bad guys here—but we may not agree on who’s who.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anthropologist Bessire (Behold the Black Caiman) combines ethnography and memoir in this deeply personal look at the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which lies partially in his "ancestral homelands in southwest Kansas." Many of the farmers and ranchers Bessire speaks with are acutely aware of the dropping water levels in their local wells, but have not changed their unsustainable farming practices, assuming that authorities would step in before it was too late. However, Bessire writes, some of the officials tasked with overseeing the aquifer have stakes in agribusiness and prioritize their own short-term profit over the long-term stability of the aquifer. Bessire links the destruction of the High Plains aquifer system, the historical slaughter of the region's buffalo herds, and genocidal campaigns against Indigenous tribes to a depletionist mindset, in which "dignity and rights artificially appear as if they were zero-sum games." Along the way, troubling details emerge about Bessire's great-grandfather RW, who pioneered groundwater-draining irrigation practices and set a legacy of toxic masculinity that affected Bessire, his father, and his grandmother Fern, a leader of the county historical society, whose notes and research on the history of the region form the beating heart of the book. This is a devastating portrait of how shortsighted decisions lead to devastating losses.
