The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California Audiobook (Free)

‘[An] exhaustive, deeply reported accounts . Few other journalists could have written a reserve as personal and authoritative . . . As Arax makes plain in this essential book, it has been the same story in California for almost two centuries right now: When it comes to water, ‘the resource is finite. The greed isn’t.” –Gary Krist, THE BRAND NEW York Times Reserve Review

A vivid, searching trip into California’s capture of drinking water and soil–the epic story of the people’s defiance of character and the wonders, and about The Dreamt Land: Chasing Drinking water and Dust Across California ruin, they have wrought

Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even while California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Property, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution program, built-in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, that’s straining to maintain with California’s relentless development.

That is a heartfelt, beautifully written book about the land and the individuals who have worked it–from gold miners to wheat ranchers to small fruit farmers and today’s Big Ag. Since the starting, Californians have redirected streams, drilled ever-deeper wells and built higher dams, pressing water supply recent its limit.

The Dreamt Property weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the ‘Golden State’ myth in riveting fashion. No various other chronicler of the West has therefore deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so a lot of the water. The country’s biggest farmers–the nut king, grape king and citrus queen–tell their tale here for the first time.

This is a tale of politics and hubris in the arid West, of imported workers left behind in sunlight as well as the fatigued earth that is made to give more whilst it keeps sinking. But when drought becomes to flood once again, all is ignored as the farmers vegetable more nuts as well as the developers build more houses.

Arax, the local son, is persistent and tough seeing that he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the property becomes an elegy to the dream that produced California and today threatens to undo it.