Running Out in search of water on the high plains by Lucas Bessire

 

Running Out in search of water on the high plains by Lucas Bessire. Princeton University Press, 2021. 236 pages. $19.69.

Review by Ed Meek

If you find  all the current articles, news and books on climate change overwhelming, one place you might want to start is with Running Out by Lucas Bessire. Running Out is an eminently readable nonfiction hybrid narrative about the author’s attempt to go back home again to the plains where his father owns a ranch and farm that sits atop a body of water called the Ogallala Aquifer. This underground source of irrigation runs all the way from South Dakota and Wyoming, through Colorado and Kansas to Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. A fifth of the wheat, corn cattle and cotton in the US comes from farms and ranches in those states. And that source of water is running out.

Bessire traces his own roots five generations back in Kansas and he returns to the family spread to confront what is referred to as the depletion of the aquifer. At the same time, Bessire is patching relations up with his father who accompanies him on investigative visits to those in control of irrigation and those who work the land. On this journey, Bessire explores the region’s history including our shameful dealings with Native Americans and the destruction of what was once a rich environment populated by millions of buffalo, antelope, wolves and birds. He learns that “southwest Kansas is a front line of the global water crisis.” According to Bessire, “most of the major aquifers in the world’s arid or semi-arid zones are rapidly declining.”

Bessire is an anthropologist by training so he examines the roots of the culture that has brought us to this point. It’s “drill baby drill” as Sarah Palin said, until the wells run dry. Our attitude toward water turns out to be similar to our perspectives about fossil fuels and topsoil and animals. Bessire notes that “over a single three-year period between 1871 and 1874, three to seven million bison were killed.” This occurred because 1872 was “the pivotal year for settler colonization in southwest Kansas.” Prior to that, this was Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne territory. US troops were told to “kill every buffalo you can” because “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Once the food source of native tribes was eradicated, they could be herded onto reservations.

Fast-forward to our current era when “corporate profits are a key part of the aquifer depletion puzzle.” Bessire points out that “Southwest Kansas is home to some of the nation’s largest corporate feeders, beef and poultry-packing plants, slaughterhouses, dairies, milk-drying plants, and hog farms.” This includes massive feedlots of cattle, millions of hogs, plants that produce corn ethanol and bio-diesel. Businesses worth billions.

The farmers and ranch owners tend to be libertarians. “People have the right to do what they want with their land” a local rancher says to Bessire. This perspective is exploited by big business and the rich and powerful. Colin Jerolmack delves into this notion in Up to Heaven and Down to Hell about the devastating effects of fracking in Pennsylvania and the resistance of locals to interfere with the decisions of their neighbors even when those decisions hurt the community.

In Kansas the decisions regarding irrigation are made by the Groundwater Management District who, as representatives of the landowners are committed to “a situation of controlled decline.” The emphasis of the GMD, however, is not on conservation but on business, and this emphasis often comes at the expense of water. There are some landowners who are attempting to cut back on water use but they are in the minority.

The sense of loss that pervades the book is balanced is by Bessire’s lyrical writing which serves as a respite for the reader. “I stepped out of the barn in the cool morning…dogs wagged around my legs. Red cattle lazed by green tanks after watering. Songbirds trilled. Irrigation motors droned. The sun hung just above the eastern horizon. I felt its light warmth brush my skin.” There are many such descriptive passages in the book.

Running Out is also about Bessire’s return to his father’s ranch after leaving years before. He feels a sense of responsibility for what has been done to the plains by his antecedents. He realizes that he had little idea of this when he was growing up in the same way that many of us are only now learning of the effects of burning fossil fuels on our environment and our unwitting complicity in the process, or the effects of systemic racism on Black Americans, or the harmful effects of neoliberal trade policies on the working class.

Bessire does not see an easy way out of the mess we’ve made, but he finds inspiration in his grandmother’s struggle to develop as an individual and his father’s acceptance and help with digging for information for his book. As Bessire says, “trying to respond to a planetary crisis begins with a critical reckoning with the terms of my existence, complicit and otherwise.” We may not have caused these problems we are faced with, but we had better figure out how to address them.