Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West

Abstract

Review: Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West By Mark Fiege Reviewed by Cain Allen Oregon Historical Quarterly, Portland, USA Mark Fiege. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1999. 323 pp. ISBN: 0-295-97757-4 (softcover). US $19.95. Recycled, acid-free paper. Irrigated agriculture is not exactly the sexiest subject under the sun; in fact, sometimes it can be downright boring. But irrigation is an important part of the environmental history of the American West, and as such, it has not lacked attention from scholars. However, while much important research has been done on irrigated agriculture in California, very little has been written on irrigation in the Pacific Northwest, a region that, like the Golden State, has benefited immensely from private and public agricultural development of arid lands. Mark Fiege, a professor of history at Colorado State University, has helped fill this historiographic gap with Irrigated Eden, an environmental history of irrigation in Idaho's Snake River Valley. He has taken what could be a deadly dull topic and turned it into a fascinating tale of the subtle and often unforeseen interactions between humans and the non-human world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Written in a lively style with a strong narrative focus throughout, Irrigated Eden is certainly one of the finest histories of Northwest agriculture on the shelves. Chapter one sets the stage for the later chapters, introducing readers to the Snake River Valley and to the culture and technology of irrigation. The author also introduces his primary argument here, an argument that he sums up quite nicely in the conclusion: In attempting to change and control a dynamic environment, irrigators themselves changed. Culture and nature, social system and natural system, shaped each other: the result was a hybrid landscape and a hybrid social order (p. 207). Fiege fleshes out this argument in the next five chapters, which cover the hybrid habitats created by irrigation; the hybrid social orders that farmers developed to deal with the contingencies of farming in an arid region; labor and irrigated landscapes; how both the environment and the market shaped the types of crops produced in the Snake River Valley; and the myths and metaphors associated with irrigation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.