Two years ago, in what now seems like a feat of foresight, my wife encouraged me to read a new book by Lucas Beshear that was making waves in social science circles. Running out: In search of water on the plateau. At the time, I think I approached this recommendation with a lot of skepticism.What can anthropologists do by publishing? Princeton University Press Tell me about aquifers and their negative effects in southwestern Kansas that I didn't know about or didn't live in yet.
Steady depletion of aquifers is an ever-present reality that we have all lived with. The “water conservation days” of our childhood, the silent warnings of our high school science teacher, the river turned into dusty nostalgia – we felt the well drying up. As Beshear observes, when critical resources are depleted, “depleting industries thrive along these fault lines, which pits us against the future, against each other, and against ourselves.” (145). Through his personal reflections and family history, Beshear shows us the many fault lines within our land, our neighbors, and ourselves. He reminds us of the millennia of stewardship of these lands by the indigenous peoples who lived and violently and systematically removed them, and reflects on his family's influence on Grant County's water depletion. Working on double speaking and dealing with the cold. and the illogical economics that justify the depletion of resources with little regard for the relatively small number of people who populate the weed-infested wasteland. And he does all this with an understated, biting prose reminiscent of the late Cormac McCarthy.
For many years, my emotional resonance with SW KS revolved around ecological eschatology. The aquifer, and more specifically the Arkansas River, had become an important metaphor for all of my complex feelings about my own hometown. Among these, Bethia's book shocked me. The interweaving of his personal and family story with the story of the land that shaped him is so beautifully conceived that it spoke true to elements of my own identity that I had long withered away. I did. In explaining his vision for his trip, Bashir says, “To say that you are traveling to rediscover your homeland seems boring and abstract, even if in some sense it is true.'' How could I have expressed that I wanted to be closer to home?'' Explore the mysteries of the aquifer and explore the unknown kinship that may disappear with it? ” (12).To answer his question, I don't know exactly how Although this is now clearly expressed, I discovered many unknown kinship connections within the pages, and many (admittedly boring and abstract) rediscoveries.
In the end, I can only hope that writing this book was as healing for Bethia as it was for me when I read it. It is the job of highly skilled scholars and anthropologists to unravel the complexities of human behavior and corporate systems that conflict with sustainable living in this region. But after a while, as was the case in many of his interviews, Beshear's academic leanings faded into the background for me, and he became another figure that the Plains created and destroyed in all those familiar ways. I did. Perhaps unlike any other book I've come across as an adult, this book let my guard down, made me vulnerable, brought out something in me that I didn't even know was possible, made me feel homesick. I did.
