Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)
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Cassuto, David N. Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Desert Southwest. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 224 pp. Softcover. ISBN: 0472067567, $22.95.
<1> Concentrating primarily on the environmental history of the last 100 years in the American Southwest, David N. Cassuto examines what he suggests is the nexus of political dispute regarding water in the region: the intractable tension between the ideologies of reclamation and restoration. After an initial chapter on John Wesley Powell and the 19th century origins of the hydraulic West, the book proceeds with an exploration of four representative texts in order to demonstrate what Cassuto has identified as the successive stages of the reclamation movement: "At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mary Austin believed in spite of herself that Reclamation would work to the good of both humans and the land. In the 1930s, John Steinbeck portrayed Reclamation’s horrific social and ecological effects while still hoping that it could be retailored to benefit yeoman farmers. The 1970s find Edward Abbey raging against the desecration of the canyonlands and advocating the forcible destruction of Reclamation and all its trappings. By 1990, Barbara Kingsolver seeks to articulate a vision of a post-Reclamation West" (97). The book ends with a speculative foray into the potential of systems theory as a model for a new form of environmentalism, one which might supplant the entrenched forces of reclamation and correct the idealism of restoration.
<2> Unfortunately, the analysis breaks little new ground in the discussion of these four authors, and Cassuto’s governing insight that water is the "privileged signifier" of the West is unsurprising (vii). The chapter on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, in large part recapitulates the work of environmental historian Donald Worster, and despite his challenge to Worster’s argument (that Steinbeck does not provide an adequate "critique of hydraulic society") Cassuto’s assertions lack convincing proof (74). Dripping Dry does provide a useful, if not entirely predictable, review of the major Eurocentric (more on this below) players and events in the history of water in the Southwest including Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam, but the book only flirts with the equally important analysis of environmentalism and ecology. This emphasis means that a potentially rich discussion of such thorny and historically-contingent concepts of balance and risk is left unrealized.
<3> Cassuto’s choice of authors is a sound one insofar as it suits his schematic emplotment of one exclusive tradition in the Southwest, but the influence of Native American and Latino/Latina writers is too profound to be neglected in a study like this, particularly in relation to environmental issues. One wonders how a novel by Frank Waters or Leslie Marmon Silko or a collection of poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca (each of whom has meditated on water issues from very different perspectives) would challenge some of the assumptions and conclusions of the analysis. Waters’ People of the Valley would engender a useful discussion of the longstanding tradition of water management known as the acequia system; in fact, this omission is an especially egregious oversight on Cassuto’s part given the fact that the novels of both Austin and Kingsolver that he discusses do include these alternative water-related traditions. Though his stated interest is in the cultural debate over environmental policy and activism, ignoring the very diverse heritage of water use in the Southwest marginalizes those perspectives and suggests that they are irrelevant to the debate.
<4> What is most interesting about this book is not the insight it provides on individual authors--and they are surely there--or the severely circumscribed history of water issues in the Southwest it traces, but the promise of grafting poststructuralist theory and new science studies onto a more traditional (if that word can be used with such a young field) form of ecocriticism. Cassuto certainly must have heard the periodic calls for a more rigorous and theoretically sophisticated articulation of nature-based criticism, and the fact that he employs such theorists as Georges Bataille and Bruno Latour is a refreshing turn. Other ecocritics would do well to open up to the possibilities of a similar challenge. The discussion is most engaging when it promises a thorough exploration of the links between resource management and the desires attached to waste and expenditure, for example, or how the politics of environmentalism might usefully be understood and revised according to a logic of systems analysis that attends to the production and negotiation of communication networks.
<5> But Cassuto does not pay off on his promises as fully as he might have; too often the theoretical discussion simply is not integrated into the literary and cultural analysis of the politics of water management (the chapter on Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams does bear out some useful insights into issues of grassroots advocacy and resistance). Cassuto attempts the admirable task of synthesizing literary analysis and the theory of advocacy, but the book’s allegiance to both results in an argument where neither really materializes. Weakened by a tendency to collect all forms of activism under the umbrella of a hegemonic environmental movement and also by cryptic references to the stagnation of language, Cassuto’s ideas on sustainability in the final chapter are sometimes puzzling and more often seem little more than wishful thinking. Ultimately his discussion excludes too many of the real stumbling blocks that haunt progressive green politics for his recommendations to seem practicable. However, the legal history of water rights that emerges at several points in the book is a strength that deserves mention. And it should come as no surprise that since the publication of the book Cassuto has earned a law degree and joined the law faculty at Pace University, ostensibly suggesting a fruitful collaboration between action and criticism that is explored in this book.
Cory Shaman
University of Mississippi