Episode 11: Running Out

On this episode, Ryan is joined by two of his WT colleagues — Dr. Nathan Howell, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering, and Dr. Erik Crosman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Sciences — and Dr. Darryl Birkenfeld, executive director of the nonprofit organization, Ogallala Commons. We discuss anthropologist Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, a National Book Award finalist published in 2021. Running Out concerns the High Plains’s most important source of water, the Ogallala Aquifer, which for decades has been depleted by agricultural irrigation at a rate faster than it can be replenished. To explore the causes and consequences of this depletion, Bessire returns home to his family farm in southwest Kansas, and his account mixes memoir, history, and ethnography. Our panel discussion touches on a range of topics, including: the politics (and aesthetics) of depletion; what it means to think of water as something other than a commodity; the relationship between depletion and global warming; the importance of democratizing groundwater management; and the role of humanities scholarship in responding to ecological crises. For more information on this topic, see also the Ogallala Commons website; the USDA’s Ogallala Aquifer Program; and the website for WT’s Southern Plains Conference, which includes a link to the proceedings for the 2020 conference on local groundwater.