Running Out

This book is the first ethnography of water conservation across the Great Plains. Its central concern is the slow drawdown of the High Plains aquifer, and it asks how people living above this water source understand and live with the prospect of its depletion.

Written with a literary sensibility, the work draws on interviews with local farmers, state regulators, and other members of the community. Bessire combines these conversations with historical records, journalistic sources, and his own reflections on what his family has experienced in the region.

Bessire comes from a line of farmers and ranchers who have lived and worked in this region for five generations, and his family's history is part of the story the book tells.