Mark Fiege and Stephen Mihm on Bank Notes

Precarious foundations: irrigation, environment, and social change in the Canadian Pacific Railway's Eastern Section, 1900–1930

“…This solution was itself derived in part from previous California legislation. (2) Irrigation promoters raised expectations of a garden landscape carved out of desert; however, the environmental realities of large-scale irrigation development proved more uneven, unpredictable and sometimes undesirable than either promoters, developers or settlers would have wished. Although Canadian Department of the Interior officials claimed that conditions along the Bow River would create a benign environment, without the problems of salinization or undesirable environmental change, the outcomes of development appear strikingly familiar.…”

“…In a host of locations, states and developers crafted irrigation settlement policies to colonize vast tracts of land. 2 A considerable body of scholarship analyzes the North American dimensions of this global phase of irrigation expansion. Scholars have sought to understand the social and political aspects of irrigation by examining the role of the state in irrigation development, the social effects of differential water access and control, and the rural societies and environments which irrigation, in part, produced.…”