Vail: Science and Religion in Utah Water History

In False Gospels of Efficiency: Contested Knowledge, Determined Experts, and Unfaithful Lands in Rural Utah (Agricultural History), author David Vail (History, Nebraska – Kearney) explores particular conflicts that emerged in construction of an early-1900s rural water conservation district in Cache Valley, Utah.

In Vail’s account, Utah and its water system are unique in its merging of both scientific and religious promises – a scientifically watered West that would lead to a spiritually Edenic West. Vail describes Utah as having a distinct spiritual culture, injecting Mormon religious doctrine into field- and lab-based conservation views to create what he calls an “agri-spiritual aesthetic.”

The specific, conflicted conservation history of Cache County Water Conservation District No. I (“District No. I”) has much to do with how its lands conformed to and contested this agri-spiritual aesthetic in Utah’s Mormon settlements in the 19th century. Vail explores how agricultural experiments, designs for canals, water pumps, and formations of conservation districts all reflected a Mormon irrigation culture, which blended faith, science, technology, and environment into a conservation gospel with one message: making the Utah desert bloom would demonstrate the power of irrigation for the entire semiarid West.

Vail provides a detailed accounting of key actors from the 1800s to World War II, as well as the lasting effects of these historic events, discussing the environmental, economic, and technological difficulties farmers and scientists faced in District No. I for decades.

This article builds on work that has documented the powerful role of spirituality, environment, agriculture, and irrigation in the Mormon colonization of the Great Basin by tracing how agri-spirituality made and remade conservation views.