Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Spring 1998

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 1998, pp. 187-88.

Comments

Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Donald Pisani's collection of ten articles published between 1982 and 1994 and four section introductions discuss the evolution of public policy and resource development in the West. Unlike some collections, this is an internally consistent examination of the complicated and interrelated history of water, land, and law.

The first section, "Water Law," explores the importance of prior appropriation in raising capital and transforming the landscape. Pisani cautions against environmental determinism, arguing that water laws resulted from case specific economic concerns rather than simple aridity. He also reasserts, his thesis that prior appropriation and water developments in the West were consistent with the ideal of limited government, not a force for imperial control and tyranny.

The second section, "Land," explores the legal, economic, and social influences on the settlement of western lands. Investigating, squatter law and land monopolies in California, Pisani argues that the state's urban character, its economy, and its need for irrigation discouraged the development of small family farms. In the section's third chapter, in which he explores the relationships among water, railroads, and land policies, Pisani esmphasizes that "the 1902 Reclamation Act was incomplete by itself." He pleads this crucial point well, describing the political coalition that supported the Act and then fractured over its implementation.

The third section, "Forests, Conservation, and Bureaucracy," chronicles the relationships among forests, conservation, and reclamation from 1865 to 1911. The essays argue the nineteenth- century conservation ethic resulted from an emotional and moral response to perceived abuses, not a scientific attempt to manage resources. Moreover, Pisani reminds the reader that science is a set of ideas that are a part of an era, not an aloof and independent corpus of facts. This hypothesis informs his discussion of the growth of the science of forestry and the genesis of both the Forest and Reclamation Services.

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