Water, food and land

How rival federal agencies dammed the American West's rivers for water projects.

How Chicago and its western hinterland grew together as city and frontier.

How Haber and Bosch's ammonia synthesis transformed world food production.

Four meals traced to their sources, from fast food and organic to hunted and grown.

Meat in human evolution and modern farming, and the costs of heavy meat-eating.

Water control as the basis of power in the arid American West.

A world history showing how control of water shaped political and economic power.

How land ownership shaped history: how people fight over, keep and share land.

The case against water privatisation and the companies buying up water supplies.

Groundwater pumping and the legal fiction of unlimited rights.

Field reporting on aquifer depletion and river closure worldwide.

Glennon's case for pricing and trading water rights.

How free tap water became bottled water, one of the most profitable products sold.

The economics of cheap water and what happens when it stops being cheap.

The rush to buy farmland across the developing world, and who loses from it.

The engineering and capital replacement cycle of urban water systems.

Water technology as an export industry built from a domestic constraint.

Water projects worldwide that work with nature's rhythms rather than against them.

Soil loss, water and the financial fragility of American farmland.

How ownership of American agriculture came to sit with a few families and firms.

The people trying to grow food in a hotter climate, from vertical farms to lab meat.

Standard textbook on rotation-age valuation and forest finance.

The career of Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Local water-extraction fights, several of them with Nestle Waters.

The challenges of feeding the world by 2050 and the reasons for hope.

Why family farms lose ground to consolidated ownership.