"This volume presents an environmental, social, and economic history of the Llano Estacado region of the US Southern High Plains. The authors illustrate the tremendous changes in environment that occurred with the European settlement of the Plains. They detail the development of a modern irrigation culture, dependent upon nonrenewable or exhaustible water resources. Human agency in the region - large-scale technological developments, national and state regulatory institutions, and global trade systems - are featured as forces that have brought great wealth to the region while at the same time erecting an edifice that, because of resource depletion, cannot be sustained. The Llano Estacado of the US Southern High Plains shows how this "modern irrigation culture" developed and questions how it might be viewed through a sustainability lens, using a multiplicity of definitions of "sustainability" and its opposite "criticality.""--Jacket.