Jada Ach, Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880-1925

Critical examinations of the history and culture of the American West, as often as not, focus on the region's natural resources, with the theme typically developing around the idea of unsustainable exploitation or use without adequate recompense.Starting with the relatively early example of Bernard DeVoto's characterization of the region as a "plundered province" in his article for Harper's, "The West" (August 1934: 355) -and carried forward by more nuanced analyses, such as William G. Robbins's Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (1994) and, most recently, ecocritical readings of the symbolic or metonymic value of the region's raw materialsmany studies continue to embrace a resource-based approach to understanding the evolution of the region's cultural institutions such as art and literature.Into this tradition steps Jada Ach, whose Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880-1925, provides a bold rethinking of the terms by which we approach the subject.Most directly focused on "Progressive Era management regimes" (188)-by which she means, broadly speaking, discourses that emerged in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that detail how best to apprehend, reap, employ, and sustain both people and material goods-Ach's striking "integration of queer theory, ecocriticism, and land management history" (21) seeks to reorient the terms of this tradition by closely tracing the literary renditions of the eponymous materials that, in many ways, undergird or delimit peoples' interactions with the material West.More precisely, Ach's subtle shift away from a resource-based analysis to one that emphasizes nature's elemental vitality well beyond its economic value allows for some very striking juxtapositions between historical and contemporary questions.