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Donald Worster and Mark Fiege: diametrically opposed notions of what we see reflected in the waters of the modern irrigation based on excerpts from two sources: Donald Worster: "Here then is the true West, which we see reflected in the waters of the modern irrigation ditch. It is, first and most basically, a culture and society built on, and absolutely dependent on, a sharply alienating, and intensely managerial relationship with nature. Were Thoreau to stroll along such a ditch today, he would find it a sterile place for living things. The modern ditch is lined along its entire length with concrete to prevent the seepage of water in the soil; consequently, nothing green can take root along its banks, no trees, no sedges and reeds, no grassy meadows, no seeds or blossoms dropping lazily into side-eddy. Quite simply, the modern canal, unlike a river, is not an ecosystem. It is simplified, abstracted Water, rigidly separated from the earth and firmly directed to raise food, fill pipes, and make money. The American West can best be described as a modern hydraulic society, which is to say a large-scale manipulation of water and its products in an arid setting." From Worster's book, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Mark Fiege: "Overspread with vegetation, canals and ditches provided ideal cover and food sources for a host of animal life. Birds flew over them and lighted on the banks, and they gorged on seeds and the many kinds of insects that lived on the ground and in the water. Mice, which also consumed seeds and insects, constructed miniature runways through the grass. Ground squirrels and pocket gophers tunneled into the canal banks, where they consumed roots. Yellow-bellied marmots, "rock chucks," ate grass and forbs and made their homes where canal construction had produced piles of rock. Mice, squirrels, gophers, and marmots in turn attracted mammalian predators. Coyotes and foxes roamed the canals in search of the rodents. Skunks added mice to their diet of insects and carrion. Badgers burrowed into banks in search of their underground prey. An aquatic fauna accompanied the terrestrial animals. Fish made their way into canals; irrigators sometimes angled for them from the banks. Shellfish moved in as well. l The bed of the Snake River was lined with freshwater clams, reported the Twin Falls News in 1906, "and they have found their way into the irrigation ditches of the Twin Falls tract. . . ."Canals were coming to resemble nothing so much as the rivers from which they drew water; no wonder, then that they attracted beavers and muskrats almost immediately." From
his book: Irrigated Eden: The Making of An Agricultural Landscape
in the American West, page 48-49.
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