Author: Emmet Gowin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691235414
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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A powerful photographic survey of the impact of irrigation systems on the landscape of the United States In The One Hundred Circle Farm, renowned photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) presents stunning aerial images of center-pivot irrigation systems in the western and midwestern United States. This type of farming involves a method of watering crops in which equipment rotates around a centrally drilled well, creating enormous, distinct circles of irrigated land, often in the midst of dry terrain. Anyone who has taken a cross-country flight has likely seen countless acres of these iconic symbols of industrial agriculture. Through a faithful yet personal photographic survey, Gowin’s powerful images not only bear witness to the ambitions humans wield in shaping the landscape, but also attest to how such primal elements—circles, pivots, and lines—symbolize water depletion and the fragile environment. The stark photographic compositions, more than one hundred in all, were created over eight years. Fields resemble lost civilizations; crops gape like strange new suns. Hauntingly beautiful, the images highlight Earth’s nourishing geology, visual evidence of our labors. Inscribed onto the earth, these lines are reminders of the technology extracting unimaginable amounts of water that cannot be replaced, and raise questions about what large-scale irrigation must answer for when the water runs out. With an afterword by anthropologist Lucas Bessire discussing the history and impact of pivot irrigation on American farming, The One Hundred Circle Farm stands as a poetic visual record, evidence of the tenuous connections between human enterprise and our planet’s most precious resource.
Author: Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1644451166
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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An epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great Plains For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it. In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize. American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
Author: Lucas Bessire
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216436
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.
Author: Jane Brox
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807021071
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Amid the turmoil after her father's death-decisions to be made, the future of the family farm to be settled-Jane Brox, using her acclaimed "compassion, honesty, and restraint" (The Boston Globe), begins a search for her family's story. The search soon leads her to the quintessentially American history of New England's Merrimack Valley, its farmers, and the immigrant workers caught up in the industrial textile age. Jane Brox's first book, Here and Nowhere Else, won the 1996 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, and has been represented in Best American Essays. She is a frequent contributor to The Georgia Review. Jane Brox lives in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts.
Author:
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ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Category : Duroc Jersey swine
Languages : en
Pages : 1236
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Author: Emmet Gowin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196036
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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"Emmet Gowin likes to ask a provocative question: "Which country on earth has had the largest number of nuclear bombs detonated within its borders?" The answer is the United States. Covering approximately 680 square miles, the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site, was the primary testing location of American nuclear devices from 1951 to 1992; 1,021 announced nuclear tests occurred there, 921 of which were underground. The site, which is closed to the public, including its airspace, contains 28 areas, 1,100 buildings, 400 miles of paved roads, 300 miles of unpaved roads, 10 heliports, and two airstrips. Its surface is covered with subsidence craters from testing, and in places looks like the moon. In 1996, Gowin received permission to document the landscape by air, after over a decade of working to secure access. These aerial views of environmental devastation--made quietly majestic but no less potent in the hands of a master photographer--unveil environmental travesties on a grand scale. While groups of images from the Nevada Test Site series have been published previously, this book will produce the largest number yet, and three quarters of the pictures will not have been published at all. Gowin is the only photographer to have been granted access to this site, which is now permanently closed, post-9/11. Other than images made by the government for geographic purposes, no other images of this landscape exist. The book will feature a preface by photographer Robert Adams (America, b. 1937), whose photographic and written work is concerned with landscape, urbanization, and activism. It will also feature an afterword by Gowin on how he made the images, and their significance to him today."--Provided by publisher.
Author: Barney Nelson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806169885
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
In Making Circles, Barney Nelson unveils working-class cowboy culture through the eyes of one who has lived the life she chronicles. From living on ranch camps to surviving both cowboy school and graduate school, Nelson’s story is a journey through time and place, pointing out that cowboys inhabit every continent and century, from Lakota Indians and Hawaiian paniolos to Argentine gauchos and Australian ringers, from Pegasus to Cervantes and Tolstoy. Even Thoreau called himself a cowboy. Nelson's story is both personal and expansive, guiding the reader in circles around the modern West, from Montana to Mexico. Along the way, she celebrates the many characters she has encountered and considers role models. Unafraid to challenge the status quo, Nelson fearlessly defends embattled ranchers as well as the humanities, while speaking truth to the powerful forces of environmentalism, tourism, and urban voters. Both a primer for aspiring journalists and an insider’s reflection on horse and ranching cultures, this tour de force memoir honors the practice of writing and its manifold benefits: embracing solitude, avoiding boredom, and accepting aging and death as part of human and animal life. Full of valuable tips, lessons learned and taught, and far-ranging musings on philosophy and poetry, Making Circles demonstrates brilliantly the value and meaning of the term “cowboy journalist.”
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ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural credit
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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