LOCAL>> Lucas Bessire and William DeBuys – Running Out

Anthropologist Lucas Bessire and novelist and conservationist William DeBuys join us for a virtual event about their new books, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton UP) and The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss (Seven Stories Press).

The two will discuss the increasingly imperiled water supply in the western U.S. and ways to confront the difficult challenges of the climate emergency.

This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.

About Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times.

Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.

Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss.

An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.

About The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss
In 2016 and 2018 acclaimed author and conservationist William deBuys joined extended medical expeditions into Upper Dolpo, a remote, ethnically Tibetan region of northwestern Nepal, to provide basic medical services to the residents of the region. Having written about climate change and species extinction, deBuys went on those journeys seeking solace.

Written in a lush and nuanced style evocative of Paul Theroux or Peter Matthiessen, The Trail to Kanjiroba offers a surprising and revitalizing new way to think about Earthcare, one that may enable us to continue the difficult work that needs to be done.