Wet Prairie - Shannon Stunden Bower

Wet Prairie - Shannon Stunden Bower
People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba

This is an amazing work of scholarship, but readable by the lay person.  Despite living in  Manitoba for the past 50 years, I had no idea that serious attempts at drainage goes back to the mid-1800s.

 From the back cover:
"Shannon Stunden Bower brings to light the complexities of surface water management in Manitoba, from early artificial drainage efforts to late-twentieth-century attempts at watershed management. She engages scholarship on the state, liberalism, and bioregionalism in order to probe the connections between human and environmental change in the wet prairie. This account of an overlooked aspect of the region's environmental history reveals how the biophysical nature of southern Manitoba has been an important factor in the formation of Manitoba society and the provincial state."

Not for everyone - but recommended to those with in an interest in Manitoba history, agriculture, or background on our continual flooding woes.

Canada