From reviews of the first edition:

"This slender book brims with wisdom and scholarship."

—Harold Scarlett, Houston Post

"Charles Bowden's Killing the Hidden Waters is the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urbanindustrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence but also the vital, sustaining basis of all life everywhere. This one little book tells the whole story. In my opinion, Charles Bowden is the bcst social critic and environmental journalist now working in the Amcrican southwest, a sharp and engaging writer who never lets his cool disgust at our collective stupidity erode his fundamental sympathy for thc actual living, breathing, still hopeful human beings who inhabit this besieged land. I salute him, and I wish him a million readers."

—Edward Abbey, author of Beyond the Wall and other books

From the introduction to the new edition:

"I'll tell you where I went wrong. The faucet in the kitchen always becomes the reality we believe, and the periodic droughts, one of which for much of the nineties savaged the West, remain a fantasy. This happens each and every day as the water roars from the faucet and the skies remain dangerously blue."

—Charles Bowden

In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity's relationship with the land.

Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, "What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down," Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example—water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey's words, "the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere."

In his later books, Bowden's bitter spleen often spills uncontrollably from his pen, but his tone here is much more restrained. In "Waters," his voice is almost scholarly scholarly and tinged with sad wisdom. This is a great book, and one that deserves far more readers.


Best book about the West and its troubles with water   June 19, 2002
 6 out of 6 found this review helpful

Although Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" is the most encyclopedic book about the West and its problems with water, this book actually gets closer to the bone of what's wrong with the way we in the US live in our desert climes. The book focuses first on how the O'odham and Pima indian cultures managed to live sustainably in the Sonoran Desert with its unpredictable and rare water flows. While I doubt that many of us but the most idealistic and romantic would want to live the life of these peoples, there is a certain genius in the ways they made the land and its water work for them that we could do well to learn from. Bowden contrasts this with the civilization the European cultures came and built during the last 150 years, a civilization built on "mining" the ice-age aquifers so rapidly that they will soon be drained once and for all. Having turned the plains to a dust bowl, will we just pack up and move on as we always have in the past?

In his later books, Bowden's bitter spleen often spills uncontrollably from his pen, but his tone here is much more restrained. In "Waters," his voice is almost scholarly scholarly and tinged with sad wisdom. This is a great book, and one that deserves far more readers.