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For more than 500 years the popular image of the great West has flip-flopped between that of a wilderness and of Eden. Pre-Columbian Europe was full of stories of what lay beyond the Atlantic—hideous monsters and irredeemable savages, islands of beautiful psalm-singing children and even the Garden itself. Columbus thought the first natives he met were "without knowledge of what is evil," and on a later voyage he believed he had found the immediate approach to Eden. Embedded in such images were cultural and religious messages about what was to be done with, and done to, these lands and the peoples living there. This new world—new, that is, to Europeans—was at once a wild land begging to be brought under civilization's dominion and an earthly paradise where men might glimpse their lost innocence.
This paired imagery has proved astonishingly resilient, although its focus has narrowed over the centuries. The realm of Eden, once all the Western hemisphere, was whittled down steadily by European conquest. By the late nineteenth century in the United States, its heart was in what was now called the West, particularly those parts most resistant to development. Among the purest survivals was the country between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada—arid, largely treeless, witness to nature's most extreme crankiness.
In this fine and subtle book, Mark Fiege leads us on a tour of part of that region, the valley of the Snake River in southern Idaho. Visitors today would find it an odd setting for fantasies from Before the Fall. You'll see lots of sagebrush. There are long vistas punctuated by lava outcroppings and bordered by distant ranges of desert mountains. And there are farms. The Snake, a tributary of the Columbia and itself one of the West's great rivers, bleeds off into canals and smaller ditches that feed fields of potatoes, grain, alfalfa and other crops. The country has its moments, but to most outsiders its appeal is limited. Vacationers usually consider it a place to get across.
But look closer, Fiege tells us. This nondescript landscape is full of lessons about our relations with the land we live on—and through that, about how we have imagined our world into what we need it to be.
On its face Idaho's irrigated farmland seems a clear instance of humans imposing their designs on a natural environment. People have taken a wild river, dammed and channeled it to resist its impulse to flood, then selectively directed its waters onto land of their choosing, there to nurture the crops they decide are best and the forage for the domesticated animals they set loose on the acreage they have transformed. As we drive along it seems clear enough who is in charge. Through Fiege's eyes, however, we see that this place is not at all what it seems. The usual descriptive terms—"wild" and "tamed" and "natural" and "controlled"—are suddenly slippery and not especially useful. Those gurgling channels, floodgates, grassy swards, fields and orchards turn out to be case lessons in how little we truly see and understand.
Fiege's own explorations began one day when he stopped his car to investigate a canal and found it was in fact a natural stream tied into the irrigators' scheme. He began to think about the boundaries between human and natural systems. Starting with this deceptively simple question—when is a ditch a ditch?—he was drawn into a wondrously ambiguous world.
The confident constructors of these systems quickly began to face a similar realization. "From the moment that they had completed the conduits," Fiege writes, "the irrigators had begun to lose biological control of them." Flocks of grateful waterbirds settled on the reservoirs and filled their bellies in nearby fields of newly risen grain. Seeds from dozens of plant species flushed down the ditches, took root and flourished, followed by fish and mollusks. When farmers prepared the fields by cutting away native brush and plowing the ground, new weeds colonized the surface while gophers and other rodents moved in to burrow happily in the loosened soil.
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