ABSTRACT
The history of the relationship of the American West to water scarcity is expansive. The goal of this chapter is to parse this history by focusing on the changing ways that humans have dealt with resource scarcity in the West, and how these actions conditioned the nature-society dialectic over time. I will pay special attention to the changing role of the state in this complex and dynamic process. Much of the bureaucratic infrastructure and physical building was done during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, so this chapter focuses on these eras in particular detail.
