A Thirsty Land: The Fight for Water in Texas

by Seamus McGraw

Overview

As a changing climate threatens the whole country with deeper droughts and more furious floods that put ever more people and property at risk, Texas has become a bellwether state for water debates. Will there be enough water for everyone? Is there the will to take the steps necessary to defend ourselves against the sea? Is it in the nature of Americans to adapt to nature in flux?

The most comprehensive—and comprehensible—book on contemporary water issues, A Thirsty Land delves deep into the challenges faced not just by Texas but by the nation as a whole, as we struggle to find a way to balance the changing forces of nature with our own ever-expanding needs. Part history, part science, part adventure story, and part travelogue, this book puts a human face on the struggle to master that most precious and capricious of resources, water. Seamus McGraw goes to the taproots, talking to farmers, ranchers, businesspeople, and citizen activists, as well as to politicians and government employees. Their stories provide chilling evidence that Texas—and indeed the nation—is not ready for the next devastating drought, the next catastrophic flood. Ultimately, however, A Thirsty Land delivers hope. This deep dive into one of the most vexing challenges facing Texas and the nation offers glimpses of the way forward in the untapped opportunities that water also presents.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781477322444
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	08/11/2020
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	1,045,969
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Seamus McGraw is the author of The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone and Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change. His award-winning writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Playboy, Popular Mechanics, and Reader’s Digest.

Table of Contents

Prologue
1. Pipe Dreams: The 1968 State Water Plan
2. When Mine Is Yours and Yours Is Ours
3. “That’s the Kind of Thinking That Will Get Your Land Took from You”
4. The Last Straw
5. Rice in the Desert
6. What Makes the Dollar Flip
7. Dow by Law
8. An Oak with Its Roots in the River, Redux
9. Old Men Shouting at the Clouds
10. A Tale of Two Colonias
11. Up Against the Wall
12. Finding a Solution, Come Hell or No Water
13. Must Be Something in the Water
14. Hanged in a Fortnight
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading
Index

What People are Saying About This

Nate Blakeslee

"In Texas, water is the stuff dreams are made of—but there has never been enough to go around. Seamus McGraw’s thorough and insightful history of the state’s water wars gives us an unsparing look at the nightmares in our past and invites us to wake up and prepare for a future of scarcity."

Dan Fagin

"A timely, important book that manages to be a romp, too. You’ll meet dreamers, schemers, and even a few genuine heroes who have been fretting and feuding over the water woes of the Lone Star State for centuries. By the time you finish A Thirsty Land, you’ll understand that water truly is destiny—and not just in Texas. Seamus McGraw raises urgent questions that we will all have to face to avoid a parched future."

Editorial Reviews

It’s hard to write about the slow creep of environmental crises like drought without resorting to shock tactics or getting lost in the weeds…[McGraw] draws out the conflicts in compelling ways by drilling into the plight of individual water users. Even if you feel no connection to Texas, these stories are relevant to every part of the country.

Outside

Interviewing both scientific experts and everyday water users, [McGraw] clearly delineates the competing interests, describes political and geological reality, and makes a compelling argument for statewide water policy that utilizes modern technology and fairly weighs parochial needs against the good of the whole.

Southwest Books of the Year Arizona Daily Star

A reporting tour de force and reminiscent of Cadillac Desert, the 1986 book by Marc Reisner that is required reading for anyone seeking to understand water policy in the West. McGraw’s work is similarly nuanced, thoroughly researched and beautifully written. .  . McGraw showcases a deep understanding of Texas law, history and culture. There’s a desire not just to explain where we stand now, but how we got here.

Texas Observer

A Thirsty Land tells a compelling and important story not just about the state's water history, but also about its social, economic, and political identity.

Western Historical Quarterly

McGraw skillfully weaves his memorable conversations with everyday Texans into detailed research on water history and laws. The result is a highly readable and engaging book full of lively characters…McGraw argues cogently that Texas needs a rigorous statewide water plan based on natural boundaries of aquifers and the knowledge that thirsty land regions and water-abundant regions are interconnected.

Great Plains Research

In stark prose that often gleams like a bone pile bleached in the sun, McGraw travels back and forth across Texas to give a free-ranging but deadeye view of the crisis on the horizon.

Texas Monthly

Although A Thirsty Land is Texas-based, it raises questions about water as a resource and commodity that fits any location; questions we should all be considering regardless of where we live and the prodigiousness of our local water resources.

Block Island Times

Water is set to become the world’s most important commodity. It will be access to water that will determine which communities thrive. It will be the ability of state and local governments to set and enforce water conservation policies that will determine the long-term viability of the quickly growing cities and suburbs being planted in the desert. . . we need to worry about the right things. . . Start worrying about water.

Inside Higher Ed

McGraw's book proves that the United States simply isn't ready for the next big drought or flood. This is a problem that's been brewing for a long time, and climate change is about to make it worse. Gulp.

EcoWatch

Readers will put the book down with a sense of urgency, a set of strategies, and a feeling of hope.

Texas Books in Review

It’s hard to write about the slow creep of environmental crises like drought without resorting to shock tactics or getting lost in the weeds…[McGraw] draws out the conflicts in compelling ways by drilling into the plight of individual water users. Even if you feel no connection to Texas, these stories are relevant to every part of the country.

Outside

"In stark prose that often gleams like a bone pile bleached in the sun, McGraw travels back and forth across Texas to give a free-ranging but deadeye view of the crisis on the horizon."

Texas Monthly

2018-03-05
A hard look at a hard problem: finding sufficient water to live in a place without much of it.Texas, writes journalist McGraw (Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change, 2015, etc.), sits at the same latitude as the Sahara and has much of that desert region's aridity—so much so that in any given year, "it is more likely that a significant drought will occur somewhere than it is that the average amount of rain will fall." If that formulation makes your head hurt, imagine how a Texas farmer or rancher feels, especially given the state's right-of-capture water law, which essentially says you can extract all the water that sits underneath the land you own, even if that action dries up your neighbor's well. In one instance, a farmer in arid West Texas is growing rice, knowing that it's a wetlands crop better suited to the Gulf Coast, to make a point that the system of water rights is irrevocably broken. McGraw traveled the length and breadth of the Lone Star State talking with people whose livelihoods are directly contingent on the flow of water, a problem that will soon confront Americans everywhere given the trends of climate change. In that sense, as so often, Texas is a bellwether. Houston, as he observes, has fine drinking water, but that came about because the formerly poorly used Trinity River, which flows a couple of hundred miles from Dallas southward, was heavily regulated under the terms of a water regime that has been in place since the 1950s and reinforced under the terms of the U.S. Clean Water Act. In our current anti-regulatory climate, the water may get dirtier in the coming years. It's a wait-and-see thing, in other words, but in the meantime, McGraw's fine book serves as a useful guide.Observers of Western water ways will want to have this on their shelves alongside the likes of Marc Reisner and Charles Bowden.

Kirkus Reviews