Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West

Environmental History, Jul 2000 by Worster, Donald

Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West By Mark Fiege. Foreword by William Cronon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. xv + 323 PP. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.

No agricultural landscape has appealed more to the controlling mind than western American irrigation. But in Mark Fiege's excellent book, Irrigated Eden, that landscape turns out to be a more complex achievement, riddled with unintended consequences, forced compromises, and tenuous control. The outcome is no rational, orderly garden but an unstable mix of natural forces and human ambition, one that, nonetheless, looks more benign and progressive than dark or tragic.

Idaho's Snake River Valley provides the focus, beginning with the 1860s, when irrigators first settled here (migrating mainly from Mormon Utah), and continuing to the 1920s, when the rural population reached its peak. Fiege divides that story into variations on a theme of hybridization. He opens with the interaction of water, earth, biota, and hydraulic technology. Although the irrigators come speaking the language of conquest, in fact they learn that mastery over nature requires obedience. If nothing else, the power of gravity must be acknowledged; water cannot be made to flow uphill. The most serious problem they face is seepage. Water inevitably runs through their fingers. Then the nature they think they are eradicating keeps returning in the form of thirsty willows, abundant muskrats and ground squirrels, marching insects that chew up the crops, and endless plagues of weeds. Farmers respond with poison and rabbit drives, which enmesh them in the now familiar problems of ecological backlash.

Similarly, Fiege finds unpredictable outcomes for the private property institutions the farmers try to introduce, as they are forced to adopt more cooperative habits. They get tangled up in competing labor systems; a newer industrial mode, marked by a deep divide between capital and labor, contests an older family mode. Once more the author finds a convergence by the end of his period, as strong families manage to coexist with authoritarian corporations. The orderly march to wealth and profit promised to these market-oriented farmers turns out to be a risky, uncertain scramble in which they suffer periodic gluts of alfalfa or potatoes, failing prices, and intense competition, although in the end they make plenty of money. Fiege confesses that he is most intrigued by the mythology that emerges in the valley: conflicting ideals of a modern technological utopia and a more archaic pastoral idyll, which somehow get merged into a dream of "industrial Eden." Images of masculinity and femininity clash under the surface of that mythology. Here he concludes that the farmers could not have it both ways. They could not gain the benefits of industrial capitalism and avoid the costs and losses. Here, at least, hybridization breaks down into naivete and failure.

Fiege is an exceptionally talented historian, and his book is an impressive piece of scholarship and clear, vigorous writing. It must rank as one of the best environmental histories of an agricultural community available. It does, however, rest on a debatable claim. The author calls for a more "realistic" view of the world-and reality is said to be more "messy," "complex," and filled with irony and paradox than we knew. Actually, he is looking for a happier view, one more congruent with the current national mood than the more radical, pessimistic environmental critique of a few decades back. History, the author concludes, does not reveal any "declension." There is no ruin or tragedy but only hybridization in his valley. Even the most massive intrusions of hydraulic engineering or industrialization became part of nature, and thus hope goes on.

Ending the story around 192o encourages this rather cheerful reading of the past. Fiege does not have to deal with the New Deal's effort to create a hydroelectric empire in the region or the rise of J. R. Samplot's agricultural empire. If Idahoans came to more accommodating attitudes toward nature, as this book suggests, they went on to bigger and better conquests-and produced more damaging effects than ever. Coevolution did not become their daily logic.

No environmental historian believes for a moment that nature ever dies or that technological conquest ever wholly succeeds in its goals. But hubris persists, tragedies result, and historical realism involves not only a sense of complexity or irony but also of wounds.

Reviewed by Donald Worster. Mr. Worster is Hall Professor of American History at the University of Kansas and author of several books including Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of American West (Oxford University Press, 1992). His new study entitled A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell will be also published by Oxford University Press in 2ooi.