Rivers of Empire

Donald Worster, who won the Bancroft Prize for his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, is Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is also the author of The Ends of the Earth, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, and the forthcoming Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West.

• AcknowledgementsI. Introduction: Reflections in a DitchII. Taxonomy: The Flow of Power in HistoryIII. Incipience: A Poor Man's ParadiseIV. Florescence: The State and the DesertV. Florescence: The Grapes of WealthVI. Empire: Water and the Modern WestVII. Conclusion: Nature, Freedom, and the WestNotesIndex

'It is of enormous help to those who campaign against giantism in water resource schemes in the developing world ... Worster writes vividly ... much of his material is carefully deconstructed documentation and if the quotations read as larger than life, so were the key actors ... it is for the reviewer (a scientist) to muse, after completing this magnificent and significant text, that the true value of Worster's critique is for all our futures, under scenarios of climate change and population growth.'Malcolm Newson, Ecumene 1994