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Book Review
| Border Oasis: Water and the Political Ecology of the Colorado River Delta, 1940-1975. By Evan Ray Ward. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. xxx + 208 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliographical references, index. Cloth $45.00.
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| It is a truism of environmental history that nature rarely respects human boundaries. So it is somewhat surprising that so few local studies dare to cross national borders. With Border Oasis, Evan Ward follows water across an international border, uncovering the fascinating story of a transboundary ecosystem. |
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In its broadest sense, this is a transnational story. The ecosystem that concerns Ward is the Colorado River delta, which straddles the U.S.-Mexican border, forming a fragile but vital environment that has endured the pressures of not one, but two national development impulses. As both nations pursued maximum development of the delta, the quantity and quality of water that crossed the border steadily declined, forcing the two countries to negotiate solutions, first in the 1940s to guarantee Mexico a share of the water and then in the 1960s and 1970s to reduce salinity. |
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It is also a national story. Many readers will be familiar with the U.S. Progressive-Era impulse to develop resources rationally and the resulting federal megaprojects that remade the waterscape of the lower Colorado. Less familiar to some readers will be the ways in which Mexican nationalism also shaped the region. The Mexican Revolution, which overlapped with the Progressive Era, made national sovereignty the cornerstone of resource development south of the border, a sort of Mexican analog to the American gospel of efficiency. Consequently, the Revolution triggered sporadic violence against American-owned property in northern Mexico. After the Revolution, the Mexican government began promoting settlement and agricultural development as a nationalist bulwark against U.S. economic influence. |
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Locals on both sides of the border, however, did not always fully share the national agendas of the two countries, and so Ward's story is also necessarily a regional one as well. This is his most significant historiographical contribution. If other studies have emphasized international conflicts and negotiations, Ward demonstrates that regional politics also shaped that struggle. In this regard, his study becomes provocatively comparative. As the water quality declined into the 1960s, both countries' national officials viewed the problem in terms of their mutual desire to harmonize U.S.-Mexican relations broadly. Nationalism still ran high among Mexicans in the delta region, however, and Arizona irrigators resisted any treaty that might reduce their share of the river. Even as national governments inclined toward cooperation, locals remained as irreconcilable as ever. The treaties that resulted from this stalemate favored U.S. interests partly because of the nations' different federalisms. U.S. politics guaranteed local voices would be heard, and Arizona's senators and the Bureau of Reclamation (which was sympathetic to its southwestern clients) trumped the more conciliatory State Department. Although Mexican locals protested these agreements, Mexico's more centralized political system blunted grassroots opposition. Not only, then, does Ward's regional perspective enrich the conventional story of national negotiations, but, as he points out, it challenges westerners' self-proclaimed victimization by eastern interests. |
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In sum, Ward's unusual integration of environmental, diplomatic, and borderlands history differs from most regional environmental histories and showcases what environmental history does well—telling detailed local stories about humans and their habitats—while also doing what environmental history doesn't do enough of—placing those local stories in comparative and transnational contexts. |
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Jared Orsi teaches borderlands history at Colorado State University. |
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