This publication has been prepared in the interest of a permanent irrigation agriculture. Irrigation has played an important role in the remarkable achievement by farmers in this nation in meeting wartime and postwar production goals. It may play an even greater part in our future agricultural production. The food needs of a growing population and the establishment of desirable trade relations with other nations will require the maintenance of efficient, high-level agricultural production.

Irrigation came to the arid West in a wave of optimism about the power of water to make the desert bloom. Mark Fiege’s fascinating and innovative study of irrigation in southern Idaho’s Snake River valley describes a complex interplay of human and natural systems. Using vast quantities of labor, irrigators built dams, excavated canals, laid out farms, and brought millions of acres into cultivation. But at each step, nature rebounded and compromised the intended agricultural order. The result was a new and richly textured landscape made of layer upon layer of technology and intractable natural forces—one that engineers and farmers did not control with the precision they had anticipated. Irrigated Eden vividly portrays how human actions inadvertently helped to create a strange and sometimes baffling ecology.

Pp. 35.