Food and Water Sustainability: A Comparative Framework Across the American Southwest and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_33How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Food Environment; Water Scarcity; sustainability; Barbara King-solver; Animal dreams; American Southwest

Abstract

The American Southwest is growing more at risk of its food and water systems because of the drought, the decline in the groundwater or rather surface water flows due to a fad, and the growing food waste too. Colorado River Basin is the backbone of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah but these four states have been facing a lot of pressure as scientists are documenting an increase in groundwater depletion, dwindling snowpack, and decreasing Great Salt Lake storage levels. Arizona has been found to be ranked among the leading food waste producers in the country, and, in this context, the operations failure causes environmental and economic issues. Although the information on depletion and waste may be the needed quantitative parameters, they tend to ignite the cultural level in which community resilience and identity are formed. These issues can be traced in Animal Dreams (1990) by Barbara Kingsolver where the author focuses on irrigation systems contaminated with pollutants, poor-looking orchards, and food itself as a subject of cultural heritage. This paper constructs a comparative methodology integrating both scientific discoveries and literature review to build up existing knowledge on sustainability. It incorporates hydrological models, surface-water and groundwater measurements, along with food-waste research to determine their sustainability in terms of three variables, which include; water-resource management, environmental conditions, and social and economic effects of system inefficiencies.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Minakshi Banger
AU  - Rakhi Rani
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Food and Water Sustainability: A Comparative Framework Across the American Southwest and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Food Studies: Intersections of Culture, Science and Sustainability (ICEFS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 375
EP  - 388
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_33
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_33
ID  - Banger2026
ER  -