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“A deep look into the complex problem of aquifer depletion in the Plains. A native of southwest Kansas, and an anthropologist by training, Bessire seeks to unravel why depletion continues despite many stakeholders actively working toward different outcomes. He puts depletion in its historical context finding to it be the latest in a series of depletions- colonization, genocide, over hunting. He also learns that despite many farmers seeking solutions, current economic structures reinforce the practice of depletion. Part memoir, he uses his grandmother’s research as a jumping off point; and despite a previously strained relationship, he leverages his father’s rights as a landowner to gain access to various water governing bodies and grows closer to him in the process. At 180 pages this is a short but powerful book, I highly recommend it.”
— Amy • A Great Good Place for Books
Finalist for the National Book Award
This audiobook narrated by John Chancer recounts 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.
Lucas Bessire is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life. John Chancer is an award-winning narrator of hundreds of audiobooks. An actor with a long association with theater on both sides of the Atlantic, he has appeared in dozens of TV and film roles and has voiced numerous audio dramas, radio plays, video games, and cartoons.
Lucas Bessire is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life. John Chancer is an award-winning narrator of hundreds of audiobooks. An actor with a long association with theater on both sides of the Atlantic, he has appeared in dozens of TV and film roles and has voiced numerous audio dramas, radio plays, video games, and cartoons.
Reviews
"Finalist for the National Book Award" "Finalist for the Outstanding Western Book Award, Center for the Study of the American West" "Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History" "Kansas Notable Book of the Year" "Winner of the Bonney MacDonald Book Award, Center for the Study of the American West" "Winner of the Victor Turner Prize, Society for Humanistic Anthropology" "Powerful. Bessire tells a tragic and infuriating story of massive, earth-shattering loss juxtaposed with the cultivated world and the human search for meaning and purpose."—Kathleen Stewart, author of A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America"A marvelous achievement. Weaving a thread of human decency through a blanket of unrecoverable loss, Bessire delivers a damning message about our great incapacity to respond to an imminent crisis and our misplaced faith in an agricultural economic treadmill."—Loka Ashwood, author of For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America Expand reviews