In its natural condition the Sacramento Valley was a flood-ravaged region where an inland sea a hundred miles long regularly formed during the rainy season, to drain slowly away by the summer months. Today the Valley is marvelously productive, with a great capital city at its center, but only after a seventy-year struggle to devise and build an intricate thousand miles of levees and drains. Robert Kelley sets that battle within the encompassing national political culture, which produced, through the Republican and Democratic parties, widely diverging ideas about how best to reclaim the Valley from flood. He draws on approaches developed in the field of policy analysis to examine the relationship between American political culture and environmental policy-making. We find that the prolonged controversy over the Sacramento Valley illuminates American decision-making, then and now.
By:
Robert Kelley Foreword by:
David N. Kennedy Imprint: University of California Press Country of Publication: United States Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 149mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 590g ISBN:9780520214286 ISBN 10: 0520214285 Pages: 420 Publication Date:02 February 1998 Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format:Paperback Publisher's Status: Active
Robert Kelley is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of The Shaping of the American Past and several other highly esteemed books.