Killing the Hidden Waters
by Charles Bowden
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From the introduction to the new edition:"I'll tell you where I went wrong. The faucet in the kitchen always becomes the reality we believe, and the periodic droughts, one of which for much of the nineties savaged the West, remain a fantasy. This happens each and every day as the water roars from the faucet and the skies remain dangerously blue." Charles Bowden- In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the show more premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity's relationship with the land. Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, "What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down," Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example-water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey's words, "the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere." show lessTags
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31+ Works 1,335 Members
Charles Bowden is a journalist. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. Charles Bowden was born in Joliet, Illinois on July 20, 1945. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona and a master's degree in American intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin. He completed work toward his doctorate there but walked out while show more defending his dissertation, because he was frustrated with what he felt were uninformed questions from his review committee. He was a reporter for The Tucson Citizen in the early 1980s. He wrote several books during his lifetime including Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields, and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. He died on August 30, 2014 at the age of 69. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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