Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. In Cadillac Desert Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West.

Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden—an Eden that may be only a mirage.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Environment, Science, Nature, Politics, American History

582 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Marc Reisner was an American environmentalist and writer best known for his book Cadillac Desert, a history of water management in the American West.

He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of a lawyer and a scriptwriter, and graduated from Earlham College in 1971. For a time he was on the staffs of Environmental Action and the Population Institute in Washington, D.C. Starting in 1972, he worked for seven years as a staff writer and director of communications for the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. In 1979 he received an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship, which enabled him to conduct research and write Cadillac Desert, which was first published in 1986.[3] The book was a finalist for both the National Book Critics' Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award (BABRA) that same year. In 1999, a Modern Library panel of authors and critics included it on a list of the 100 most notable English-language works of nonfiction of the 20th century. It was later made into a documentary film series that premiered nationwide on PBS nationwide in 1997 and won a Columbia University/Peabody Award.

He went on to write additional books and helped develop a PBS documentary on water management. He was featured as an interviewee in Stephen Ives's 1996 PBS documentary series The West, which was produced by Ken Burns. In 1997 he published a discussion paper for the American Farmland Trust on water policy and farmland protection. Shortly before he died, he had won a Pew Charitable Trusts Fellowship to support efforts to restore Pacific salmon habitat through dam removal.

Reisner was also involved in efforts to promote sustainable agronomy and green entrepreneurship. In 1990, in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, he co-founded the Ricelands Habitat Partnership, an innovative program designed to enhance waterfowl habitat on California farmlands and reduce pollution by flooding rice fields in winter instead of burning the rice straw, as was then the common practice.[5] He also joined in efforts to help California rice farmers develop eco-friendly products from compressed rice straw, and a separate project to promote water conservation through water transfers and groundwater banking.

For a time, Reisner was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Davis, lecturing on the relationship between urbanization and environmental concerns.
Reisner died of colon cancer in 2000 at his home in San Anselmo, California, survived by his wife, biochemist Lawrie Mott, and their two daughters. His final book, A Dangerous Place, was completed before his death but did not appear in print until 2003.

Reviews

[Jon-Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why not a fifth star?

"I don't know. That doesn't make sense to me."
—Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), on whether New Orleans should be rebuilt in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Sept. 2, 2005


Because as important and well written as this book is, it is pervaded by a few theoretical flaws in its rhetorical portion. The factual reporting and research are impeccable and at this point, this book is famous in its own right and it deserves that. But:

(1) The Naturalistic Fallacy. If humans do not belong in California or Arizona, where do they belong? In Reisner's native Minnesota where there's many lakes? Of course, this is absurd. Very few people could survive in Minnesota without the energy that is produced there from fuel brought from elsewhere without rapidly deforesting it and belching the pollution of numerous wood fires. So what about further south? Just about everywhere you go, humans are out of their "natural" element—which is some place in Africa. Even where they are in their element, they are there in numbers that are unsustainable based on using only very local resources. (Unless we allow trains, trucks, ships, and planes into our "natural" world.) Indeed, most human habitations make little sense in some way, just as Speaker Hastert said of New Orleans. But, yet, there they are. Hastert's remark was just one comment made in the wake of terrible suffering, and was probably driven by his human sympathy, not wanting to see this go on again. But it was insensitive on another level and he was criticized for it. Reisner's whole book is basically saying the same thing about the entire Southwestern United States.

The irony is that this book was largely written at a time when it was abundantly clear than energy, not water, was the common denominator in resource policy. A few short years after the oil shocks, the Iranian revolution, during the Iran-Iraq War, and revised months after the First Gulf War, Resiner and other water conservationists must realize they are the junior varsity. This is before all of this activity unleashed the events of the Bush era.

(2) A sort of Malthusian bias. Policymakers often don't have the luxury of seeing things from lightyears high. If population growth really is the problem, it's difficult if not impossible for water policymakers alone to do anything about it, and, probably, in a democracy, we don't want them to. The people go where they do and the water must follow.

(3) Los Angeles and the San Joaquin valley get slammed with plenty of heat in this book and it's well deserved. But what about San Francisco? Not only does San Francisco take water from hundreds of miles away, it takes it from a dam located in Yosemite National Park, the construction of which reportedly caused John Muir to die of a "broken heart." The existence of San Francisco and the rapid urbanization of San Jose and the sustainability of the very high property values in these areas thanks to the development in areas more inland (not just farms) are all thanks to diverted water. The San Francisco Chronicle can bleat all it wants against Los Angeles's water supply, but, as it almost found out the hard way in 2012, people have a funny way of believing the principles their editorialist overlords tell them in cases beyond those they were intended for. Is Hetch Hetchy a greater sin against the environment than Mono Lake? I can't make that judgment for everyone, but it's of the same kind and Los Angeles has mitigated the damage to Mono Lake. San Francisco, for all of its radical leftist politics, has done nothing but go apoplectic every time a plan to restore Hetch Hetchy is presented.

***

The most compelling part of Reisner's critique is what you might call the "corporate welfare" element. Does it make sense for the government to pay large farming corporations in the form of cheap water while it pays other farmers in the east not to grow certain things? Well, no, especially not for someone dedicated to the free market. But are we? Is Reisner? It seems strange to argue for conservation while arguing against government intervention in the markets. Sure, you can argue that when externalities are factored in, the market can operate. But that's kind of bullshit, because you have to use the government make those things factored in. There was graft and bureaucratic manipulation in the Apollo project too.

Meanwhile, the focus on water: Resiner's critiques are valid to the extent he critiques water policy. But, when he extends his critique to the issue of the entire settlement of the west, he goes too far afield. As the title of the book implies, this is a central theme of the book. But, just like the natural gas pipelines that bring heat to the bone chilling cold of Resiner's native Minnesota, or the levies that are supposed to keep New Orleans dry, or the gasoline that makes homes affordable to the urban sprawl not just in Los Angeles, but in the DC metro, the New York area, Atlanta, Houston, etc., etc. ad nauseam, there is man-made manipulation of things other than water everywhere you turn. Even the Native Americans used massive fires to manipulate the landscape for their purposes. We all live in glass houses, not just Southern Californians and Arizonans.

This is not to say that water shouldn't be conserved, that nature shouldn't be a top consideration in water projects, but rather that it's not the only thing, or even the main limiting factor. Indeed, if energy literally were not a concern, the aqueducts wouldn't flow from the Sierra to Southern California, they would flow from the coast, where one would find numerous desalination plants, inland to the deserts. But since even as of today, it is still far cheaper to build a massive project like the State Water Project than it is to desalinate that much water due to the energy costs (much less do so without fossil fuels), it isn't done.

The history of the last 30 years is different than the 30 years before it. In the more recent period, we have seen a major American city destroyed by a failure of adequate public works and we have seen the fallout. It's the poor and the elderly—and people of color—who suffer disproportionately. Speaker Hastert wasn't wrong that New Orleans doesn't "make sense." Maybe Phoenix and Los Angeles don't make sense, either. But the people who will suffer from such a degree on high aren't the corporate farmers. If the taps run dry in the Southwest, somehow I don't think it will be the rich who suffer. In that same period we have seen resource wars where tens of thousands die—for energy. All in all, the western water works seem far less absurd in retrospect. Would all of these people running their fossil fuel furnaces in the east be better for the world?

In the 30 years before Cadillac Desert was written, disasters like Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Cuyahoga River, LA's air, and numerous others showed many people the wisdom and need for strong environmental protection. Thank god. Books like it helped move things in a much more sensical direction. We can do that without wiping the west off the map, and we've been proving it for a while now.

[Jennifer (Insert Lit Pun)]

What a book. It’s dense and involved and took me forever to read, but it has fundamentally changed the way I view the American West. And Reisner’s writing is entertaining as hell.

[Ken-ichi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some required retroactive expectation management: Marc Reisner was a journalist, writing for a general audience. Much like Charles Mann and Pollan and other pop-non-fiction writers from the journalistic world, he was less concerned with thorough documentation than he was with persuasion and exposition (even though few things are more persuasive than accurate documentation and logical analysis). With that in mind, I should not have been so utterly enraged by the nearly complete absence of direct citations in this book, despite numerous facts, figures, and yea, quoted dialogue included. Reisner was writing without the benefit of Endnote, after all, and he was a well-respected, tweedy-looking academic, so I should just trust him, right?

Some intriguing propositions:

Teddy Roosevelt personally colluded with the city of Los Angles, the Reclamation Service, and the Forest Service to destroy the irrigated communities in Owens Valley for the sake of LA.

I guess the fact that TR's brand of environmentalism was way more utilitarian than most people think isn't exactly news, but the fact that his utilitarianism extended to provisioning a metropolis like LA was a bit surprising.

Irrigated agriculture in the American West was (is?) supported by a welfare state.

Apparently it's ok for the state to pay farmers in Ohio not to farm while practically giving away subsidized water to giant agribusiness conglomerates owned by oil companies in California, but universal healthcare is a waste of money and would never work. At least I know I'm free! Just not free to eat wild salmon.

Damming and hydropower in the Pacific NW was instrumental in WWII b/c electricity (and lots of it) are required to produce aluminum for planes and plutonium for A-bombs.

Reisner basically asserts that the US might not have defeated the Axis if it weren't for northwestern hydropower, which is a pretty amazing idea that would have been even more amazing with some supporting evidence showing increasing electricity generation and aluminum production in the US, Germany, and Japan during the war years. Should I read Richard Rhodes?

In addition to the citation thing, there were also these surreal moments of anti-Irish racism, like this description of William Mullholand: "[His] face is supremely Irish: belligerence in repose, a seductive churlish charm" (p. 58). Seriously, find a Japanese farmer who's "cunning and inscrutable" and you'll just about have me pegged, Marc! I might have to slam some Jameson and karate chop you to death! Maybe it's petty of me to go all ad hominem on a dead environmentalist who clearly, despite lack of citation, knew more about the history of water in the West than I ever will, and yes, the stereotypical Irish American is himself racist and perhaps anti-Irish bigotry is so outdated and comical that the Simpsons were able to repeatedly employ it to great comedic effect over a decade ago, *breathes* but c'mon, this kind of crap isn't appropriate in a respected work of non-fiction. Even from the 80s.

Overall, if I swallowed my aforementioned misgivings, this was a fascinating and engaging history of water in the West. I was both intrigued and impressed by Reisner's unwillingness to impose some kind of grand theory on it all. The events he depicts seem mostly driven by greed, incompetence, petty competition, and simple climactic contingency. I never got the sense that he was driving toward some absurdly reductive single flaw in our culture. Water use in the West is messed up, and this book is mostly about how it got that way, not why. For all its reputation as an environmentalist fire-starter (to mix metaphors quite horrifically), though, I was surprised at how little doomsaying Reisner indulged in. Not until the very end does he start talking about silting reservoirs and salting the earth. I should also say that despite the lack of citation, the bibliography looks great! I wonder if the interviews he conducted have been archived anywhere.

Some further reading:
* http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34... (seems like it might be a bit less journalistic)
* http://www.pnas.org/content/107/50/21... (scientific article testing some of Reisner's predictions)
* http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21... (available online, but I'd love to see it in person)

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A year later, I've given CD a second read and must, finally, award it the 5th star (for whatever that's worth) that it so deserves. One of the most scathing, witty and instructive books of political /environmental/economic journalism that I've ever had the pleasure (and horror) to read. I do so wish Reisner was still around to bring us up to date on this most vital and fascinating subject. (Afterward to revised 1992 edition is as close to contemporary as CD gets).


Brilliant enough for 5 stars, but it caused me a bit of reader fatigue due to its relentless comprehensiveness. Impeccably researched, Cadillac Desert meets the highest standards of investigative reportage. Which is not to say that Reisner is absolutely objective (always an illusive goal at best) nor sober in his approach. At times, his tone borders on the sarcastic (as if he were saying, you are not going to believe exactly how incredibly stupid this idea was). His account is apolitical in the sense that he depicts Democrats and Republicans, both on the state and national levels, as bipartisan in their promotion and funding of the most suspect (environmentally, socially, economically)dams and water projects, going back at least as far as the New Deal. Reisner takes a close and critical look at the very notion of irrigation farming in a desert, its costs, benefits and long term consequences (depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer; deadly salinity levels of land and water, the making of “wild river” an oxymoron, etc.). An apt secondary subtitle for the book might be “Water flows uphill toward political power and money.” An entirely concrete example of this aphorism would be the California Aqueduct, particularly that section which carries water over the Tehachapis to L.A: “The water is carried across the Tehachapis in five separate stages. The final cyclopean one, which occurs at the A.D. Edmonston Pumping Plant, raises the water 1926 feet—the Eiffel Tower atop the Empire State—in a single lift . . . . At their peak capacity, if it is ever reached, the Edmonston pumps will require six billion kilowatts of electricity every year . . . . Moving water in California requires more electrical energy than is used by several states.”
First published in 1986 and subsequently revised in 1993, Cadillac Desert, if less prophetic now than it was 20-25 years ago, remains relevant and instructive. And if you ever thought there might be a silver-lining to pork-barrel politics, it’s a must read. In light of the recent financial system “bail-out,” and with many touting “infrastructure” projects as a solution to our current high unemployment and economic malaise, reviewing the history of perhaps the greatest public works program ever anywhere will give you pause. Dams and water projects (California’s Central Valley Project and the Central Arizona Project are just two examples) can have both intended and unintended consequences that make them less than great ideas. Engineers and “experts” (Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, Water Commissioners, Resource Specialists, etc.) can be as greedy, short-sighted, and blinded by belief in their own expertise and desire for power as anyone else.
Reisner’s description of the proposed Narrows Dam on the Lower South Platte River in Colorado (thankfully, a project that was subsequently abandoned, though it was all too typical of projects that have been built) makes for a good summary:
“Here was a dam that the state engineer said would deliver only a third of the water it promised and could conceivably collapse; a project whose official cost estimate . . . would barely suffice to relocate twenty-six miles of railroad track; a project whose real cost, whatever it turned out to be, would therefore be written off, in substantial measure, to ‘recreation,’ though the water would be unsafe to touch; a project whose prevailing interest rate was one-fifth the rates banks were charging in the late 1970s; a project many of whose beneficiaries owned more land than the law permitted in order to receive subsidized water; a project that might, if the state engineer was correct, seep enough water to turn the town of Fort Morgan into a marsh; a project that would pile more debt onto the Bureau’s Missouri Basin Project; a project that would generate not a single kilowatt of hydroelectric power and would be all but worthless for flood control.”

[Jessaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a friend who is reading a book on the dying of the Colorado River which sounded Interesting to me, but then she prefers a different booK, “Climate Courage.” I gave her all the reasons why we will not be able to stop global warming, even saying that it is too late. She had heard those reasons, but this author thinks that we will get together and change things around. I don’t see this happening. We can’t even get together on the virus, much less politics. So, I reads the sample of this book she likes, and it gave all the reasons why we think we can’t change. I deleted the sample and di not get the book. Instead, I found this one. It seemed favored amough readers here. The one she likes only got twelve reviews. Are we just pessimistic? I don’t think so.

So far, in this book, we hear about the explorers of America, and that was pretty exciting to me. Loved the dangerous boat trips along the rivers, but then I hated reading about Lewis and Clark and how they killed beavers for their skins. Mountain men were no different. What we have done to our country and to the world is atrocious. How I will feel about the rest of this book, only time will tell. I am more open to reading another adventure book.

Hours Later. I had to skip much of this book as I didn’t want to read about the politics. Things of interest: While I knew that San Diego was a desert, I didn’t realize that about Los Angeles, but I really didn’t know that San Francisco was also. It had no trees until they piped in water. The other point of interest was that there are many dams in California, and if one breaks, it can cause others to break at the same time, a domino effect. My feeling is if California is running out of water, you don’t have to worry about the dams breaking.

I think, It doesn’t matter where you live. Fine a good State or place to live where there is water, and in time, people will be running there to get away from the droughts, and you maybe be trampled, if not, they will drink all the water.

More random thoughts: This book reminds me of James Michener, minus the dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers, and wooly mammals.

And then I get to the end of the book, realizing that I have probably only read a fourth of it. So boring. We come to the State where I am living, Oklahoma. The Ogalala aquafer is drying up. I knew that, but this means that we could have another dust bowl. I guess instead of moving here from California, we should have moved to Idaho. Like my friend who is reading “Climate Courage” said, “It is too cold there.” I once read that Russia is the safest place to live during all this. Yes, I think. If you can only get rid of Putin.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing book that was too long.

The best synopsis I came upon was on page 484: "illegal subsidies enrich big farmers, whose excess production depresses crop prices nationwide and whose waste of cheap water creates an environmental calamity that could cost billions to solve." He goes into copious detail in the 500 pages. The political system (congress, Bureau of Reclamation, and Army Corp of Engineers) become a vicious cycle that dam and divert rivers as much as they can, whether it makes sense or not.

Lots of great stories (how Los Angeles got its start and remains dependent on diverted water; how western states fight over water; the bull-headedness of Floyd Dominy, an early head of the Bureau; how Jimmy Carter got eviscerated by politics trying to shut down bad projects; how Lyndon Johnson got his political start by supporting dam projects; on and on). Also lots of long lists of dams and their capacity, projects and their ill-fatedness, many mentions of millions of acre-feet.

Marc Reisner was director of communications for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), so he leans towards preservation of the natural environment (i.e. not dams). Here, he over-communicated. I would have loved to read the 200 page version. As it is, I had to come back to it several times to get through it.

The original copyright is 1986, and he added an epilogue in 1992 I believe. His book is filled with predictions of disaster. Basically, we are drawing down groundwater 1000 times faster than nature replenishes it. It is 24 years later. I'd love to see an accounting of how well his predictions have come true.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reisner's account of the American West's water wars is massively well researched and dramatically written. He explores the financial, political, and social forces demanding that a watered West be somehow engineered. The water was procured for those who could command it or pay for it, and of course there were losers all over the West. The book captures a whole era in all it's glorious unsustainability, and it was written before the age of great dams was clearly done. The only daunting thing for a non-engineering-literate reader like myself is Reisner's constant reference to figures and statistics, which ram his points home with numbers slightly beyond my comprehension.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simply great book about the past, present and future of water in the U.S. The focus is on the dry side of America, but not just west of the Rockies. The High Plains and the Ogalalla Aquifer, as well as the Upper Missouri, get extended treatment.

So too does the fact that "rugged Westerners" are ultimately usually socialists when it comes to the issue of water and it being supplied to farms at below cost by the federal government, and acreage limits then being broken.

It's not just the lack of water and cost of water Reisner covers. He also notes that with alkaline soils of much of the West, irrigation tends to raise salt levels. Yes, we may eventually genetically engineer more salt-tolerant crops, but how far can we take this?

The only regret is that Reisner died before being able to pen another issue of this book to take global warming into account fully.

Anyway, especially on the Colorado, as Phoenix and Las Vegas struggle with jobs and diminishing water supplies at the same time, this book reminds us of Ed Abbey's phrase: "The desert always wins."

I've re-read this more than once, every few years, and get new insights every time.

[Nia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really important and interesting , going over the history of the West, in particular the history of irrigation , aqueducts and water projects in the West . However, it's so depressing that I only made it halfway through the book. Greed, Manifest Destiny, and wishful thinking based on greed...

I seem to recall the two or three people to whom I mentioned this book who had familiarity with it thought it was exaggerated or a little bit overblown. Now Propublica is reporting that it wasn't the slightest bit exaggerated, unfortunately. This guy was right.

[Clint · Rating 5 out of 5]

if this doesn't make you want to take Los Angeles and associated farmland and dump it in the ocean - nothing will.

Great history of water development in the west.

[Florence · Rating 5 out of 5]

The message comes through loud and clear. One should not live west of the 100th meridian in the American West. As a result of ten years of research and analysis, Mark Reisner , an environmentalist from Minneapolis, writes about the on-going drought that greeted early settlers there. He details the extreme measures taken by the government and opportune business men to deal with the lack of water in areas where people likely should not have settled in the first place. Los Angeles, the 2nd largest desert city in the world, was one that demanded more water than most.
This book, right down to its dying cactus on its cover, emphasizes the looming water crisis. The disappearing water parallels the billions of tax payers' dollars that have disappeared through building dams and irrigating crops.
He details by whom, when and how a multitude of dams and reservoirs were approved and built. He makes no bones about those poorly designed or constructed structures and squarely blames the on-going fight between the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Army Corps of Engineers "for giving water development a bad name".
One of the first of the players was Mulholland. With Roosevelt's help he ensured a dam would be built to divert water for irrigation purposes to some very rich farmers. That is precisely how Owens Valley (N. California) water was sent down to Los Angeles. Those in Owens Valley could do nothing about it!
"What began as emergency measures often turned into environmental disasters. It was a blanket death sentence for free flowing rivers"...
Never before had so little economic development been proposed at such exorbitant cost."
Today, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers' database, there are approximately 75,000 dams in the USA. The exact number is not known, though Texas has the most with 6,798.

There were devastating consequences for fisheries. At the time decision makers were of the opinion "new power and water was worth the price".
Water quality also became a huge issue. Water sitting in reservoirs absorbed salt from the soil and carried it forth when diverted to destination points. Mark claims that by the time the Colorado River hits Los Angeles, a cup of water has approximately three tablespoons of salt in it. Adding lemon is the only way to make that drinkable! Tourists in Avalon, California are not served water in a restaurant. With rationing there, a tourist pays for bottled water. The restaurants then do not have to wash glasses.
Due to extensive irrigation soil conditions in the San Joaquin Valley have deteriorated. "Build up of toxic salts has degraded an area the size of France and is causing $27.3 billion annually in lost crops." Wheat crops do not do well. Even cotton is questionable. Main crops in regions with little rainfall are corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and hay.

Marc writes about several great disasters. For example, the horrors of Teton Dam and the Saint Francis Dam breaking are described. These are backed up by old photos. For more drama, I would suggest you go to the internet and check out the documentaries available there.
He leaves you wondering which of the multitude of dams existing today are stressed to their limits. If the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River goes, he claims it will take out the Hoover Dam in Nevada too.

Mark does not discuss the removal of dams to any extent, but he does discuss the tremendous problem of silt or sediment collected behind the dams and in reservoirs. Though there are many benefits to having dams, the new society has found other ways to address water issues; so as a result, over 1150 dams have been removed in the past 100 years. Strategies change based on case basis.

There are downsides to removal other than cost, however. They have found that sediment collected behind the dams and in reservoirs may contain PCBs, dioxide and heavy metals. How to remove toxic materials in the silt and where to put the sediment are two big questions, he says. If successful, quick recovery of a resilient water system and long term benefits could be the reward.

He talks about the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington (which provides most of the hydroelectric power in the USA) and its role in the production of aluminum for ships and planes during WW 11. At that point in time severe drought ensured the approval of several dams on the Columbia River. Dam building peaked in the 1960's. Few were built in the 1970's.


Water rights have been on the table for years. In 1908 the Indian Tribes were awarded 50% of water rights. They can use it themselves, store it or lease a portion. In 1963 the Central Arizona Project ensured their water would come from the lower basin states on the Colorado River. The Nov.1ST ARIZONA REPUBLIC coincidentally highlights that as a result of climate change and drought, the Navajo who live on 25,000 square miles of land, are being forced off their land by drought and encroaching sand dunes. For more on this informative series go to watercrisis.azcentral.com.

In this book we find all kinds of data on water allocation. California was the problem way back then. It still is. Its burgeoning growth increased water demand from the Colorado River. California and Arizona were in constant dispute about it for many years.
For more current information I had to do some of my own research. In 1952 after 11 years in court and a $5 million bill, Arizona came out the winner. California was allocated 4.4 maf (million acre-feet)of water per year. Arizona got 2.8 maf and Nevada 300,000 maf. Each state also got all the water in their tributaries. In 1997, however, California was using 5.2 maf., diverting unused water to other states. Arizona created a state water bank in 1995. Today Phoenix claims they have about 2 years of water stored in aquafers; this was delivered by the CAP aqueduct for underground storage. They also store water for other states.

Mark ends his book with an afterword. A far cry from the old days, he concludes that today we are more aware of issues with water quality and its salinity, have concerns over endangered fish, and want and need more recreation. These concerns all require regulatory action. The era of great water projects has ended.

His reminders of the serious discussions by politicians and developers in 1964 of NAWAPA has a bone chilling effect. Marc devotes a few pages to discussing it. He emphasized the beauty of Canadian rivers and lakes and that the USA might just want it badly enough to take Canada by force.
Of note are dams in the Peace River area of B.C. which are still proceeding as planned. The James Bay project in Quebec was built during Bourassa's time by Canada. Bill Bennett, Lester Pearson, and Brian Mulroney are just a few of Canadian leaders who were in favor of some type of water management scheme, but Canadians were opposed to the plan. The fishing industry would have been eliminated; mass wilderness areas and wildlife would have been submerged in the quest for moving water to the USA. Hundreds of thousands of people would have had to relocate. Prince George City would no longer exist. Reisner claims Canada would have suffered phenomenal environmental consequences had NAWAPA gone ahead. He commented the plan was one of "brutal magnificence" and "unprecedented destructiveness".

Though the Corps of Engineers considered this project they never made a proposal. It has not been considered seriously since the 1970's. This project was viewed by some as the "hydrologic antichrist". Fortunately Canadian water exports became exempt in the Free Trade Agreement.

Water is the life force. Reisner embraces the desert environment and reaches out to us, making us question how sustainable the American Western states and cities are. Reading this volume of information has made me so much more aware of the looming water crisis. As I visit in Arizona at this time, a symposium was just held on the topic of long term drought and the water supply. Topics such as "the river runs dry", desalination plants, rationing and "snaring mist from the sky" are the norm.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Am I in my classic nonfiction era?

I dunno, but so far I've read three classic and a little dates works published over 30 years ago, Cadillac Desert being the most recent, obviously.

Basically, the premise is that the American West doesn't have enough water to sustain all the very wonderful and great (read: agricultural) things that people want to do, and it's only lasted this long because we've been sucking dry aquifers that should have lasted centuries in decades and also damming the absolute hell out of rivers (what's a little fishy death between friends).

And this is because a few wealthy farmers with very loud voices know that people and politicians have a soft spot for farmers and ranchers (even if their products can be grown more sustainably elsewhere) over practicality, and everyone out west has a "use it or lose it" mentality.

And also because there were a lot of dam-happy engineers and politicians who wanted to stamp their names on big public works in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, and because the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation were in a pissing contest, and because no one called Floyd Dominy's bluff when he said he'd quit if he didn't get his way (I wonder how he and Robert Moses would have gotten along, but I doubt their egos would have squeezed into the same Superdome).

Anywho, the afternote was interesting (it was written in 2017ish for the 30-year-anniversary edition). While lots of the past issues were more or less solved (ish, still lots of issues), a whole host of other issues have popped up and were probably going to get worse under Trump's first term (spoiler alert: they did). And with a little bit of foresight, I just know things are only going to devolve further this time around, catapulting us into climate crisis faster than you can say "not if he gets us nuked first."

TL;DR: stop buying California almonds (water suckers), the West is drying out because we suck ass, sustainable solutions abound if we just stop listening to a few self-interested capitalists, and Canada has a ton of fresh water.

Oh!

Speaking of unnecessary and wasteful water-suckage: DON'T USE CHAPGPT.

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was a slow read. Very pretty. And the author was very fond of obscure words. Obscure words that I refuse to look up, and I don't think I would have even with an electronic copy. I read this book due to its reference in The Water Knife. It seemed like an awful lot that happened in that fictional book also happened in real world California. I'm not sure I buy this book's title. This book was pretty darn informative but mostly it talked about people acting in their short-term selfish self-interest. Other than destroying the soil and water by making it too salty, I thought this book more positive and optimistic than I expected. Oh and the possible diversion of the Columbia River to feed into the Colorado drainage (yikes). In the end this book was a lot about how politics didn't work for 100 years. Presumably it will not work in a similar way in the future. Interesting read, especially if you've got a month to devote to it. 3.5 of 5.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reisner's big old brick of a book on water in the West was published in 1986. Sadly, the only thing that feels dated about it is some of the ways he writes about Native Americans. The big water questions and absurdities are still fresh. We're still constantly faced with new proposals for bizarre, expensive, destructive dams on every remaining river. We are still overpumping groundwater and turning the soil to salt.

And I also felt a renewed appreciation for the environmental movement and what it's accomplished. At first, they were just 'posy-sniffers' that the Bureau of Reclamation could laugh at. Now they are a force, slowing and stopping some of the worst projects.

2 big highlights for me:

1) The whole Owens Valley story. The way Reisner writes about the California Water Wars, I feel like I'm watching a Fargo-inspired HBO series, replete with huge plot twists, ample violence, and a pervasive sense of doom.

2) The 'Lake Sakakowea' story, which just destroyed me. The U.S. government stole the land at the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, where people from the Arikara, Hidatsa, and Mandan tribes lived, and drowned it under a reservoir. Because there was some push-back by the tribes (a meeting was disrupted), the water commissioners grew furious and denied the tribes any right to graze, fish, hunt, or even let their cows drink at the reservoir. They weren't allowed to use any of the water for their own irrigation or claim some of the power generated by the dam. They couldn't even sell the wood of the trees that were about to be flooded.

And then the white bureaucrats named the reservoir after Sacajawea.

The book includes this unbearable picture of the tribal chairman being forced to sign the papers allowing the land to be flooded. He weeps while the white people stand around awkwardly: https://recoveringdemocracyarchives.u...

Reading that story, I thought about the Standing Rock movement, and how miraculous (and inspirational and completely devastating) it is that people still try to fight injustice after all they've seen.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this non-fiction book after reading the fiction book, The Water Knife, which mentions Cadillac Desert multiple times. Indeed, Cadillac Desert clearly served as a major motivator behind Bacigalupi's novel. So I figured, hey let's do a one-two, fiction-nonfiction combo.

Okay, so this book is about the water works of the Southeast and the cities and organizations that guided them. Los Angeles, Army Corp of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, etc. It is superbly well-written, with rich detail not just about the projects and politics but the people behind them.

And yet I reached a point that I just couldn't pick it up and read anymore. In fact, I'm retiring this book at only about 60% completed.

The problem is that it is relentlessly negative and cynical. It's entirely deserved, mind you, but the sheer and ceaseless inundation of greed, corruption, and ignorance depicted in the politicians and leaders behind the American southwest's water policy became too hard to swallow. I'm not naive, and I absolutely loathe the phrase 'ignorance is bliss.' But honestly, ignorance is bliss. I eventually realize the value of the knowledge gained was less than what I was losing in disgust and distaste for my fellow human beings. I'm happy I read what I did, for this was a topic on which I was wholly ignorant. But I'm also quite happy I stopped when I did, for the book's themes become entirely repetitive and redundant.

[William Liggett · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you read only one book about the role of water in the west, this should be the one. Reisner recounts the complex and often violent history of efforts to control water in this dry land. Only in the last few years has water been allowed to return into the once verdant Owens Valley of California, after it was diverted through subterfuge to supply the needs of southern California. There is so much history to tell about the way the huge dams along the Colorado River were sold to the American public based on benefits that never fully materialized. It is sobering to think how Reisner's story will play out since written in the late 1980's with the growing population and increasing droughts from climate change. His tale makes one wonder how much we have yet to learn about how to relate to our environment.

[Billy]

...just a chapter or two in, i already predict this will be one of the more important books i read this decade

[Whiskey Tango · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about water, money, politics, and the transformation of nature.

I once lived near Cadillac Desert, where an eccentric millionaire buried a fleet of new Cadillacs in the ground. Presumably, he had a point. When I saw a PBS documentary based on the book, I understood why environmentalists and historians of the West mourned Marc Reisner's death. Reisner's book documents the growth of the Bureau of Reclamation, responsible for Hoover, Shasta, and Grand Coulee dams, and its bitter rivalry with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Neither pork barrel politics nor utopian schemes have yet solved the American West's insoluble problem: water.

1. Mulholland's Dream
Mulholland's Dream tells the story of how the hunt for and the exploitation of water brought the city of Los Angeles to life -- and, literally, life to Los Angeles. Evoking the real-life visionaries, scoundrels and dark intrigues behind the fiction of the motion picture Chinatown -- and the remarkable tale of Water Department chief William Mulholland's quest to quench the city's ever growing thirst for more and more water .

William Mulholland emigrated from Ireland in 1878, and worked as a ditch digger for the L.A. water system. He quickly taught himself hydraulic engineering, rose quickly through the ranks, and soon became superintendent. He tried desperately to make the exploding population conserve water, but growth sabotaged everything he did, and soon the city sucked dry the little Los Angeles River, its only source of water. Mulholland knew he would have to find new water, and turned to the remote Owens Valley, 230 miles north of L.A.

Between 1911 and 1923, Mulholland's agents quietly purchased 95 percent of water rights to the Owens River. Against overwhelming odds, Mulholland constructed a 233-mile aqueduct across the blistering Mojave Desert to deliver Owens River water to downtown L.A. When the Owens Valley dried up, local ranchers seized aqueduct gates and dynamited the pipeline repeatedly. In 1927, Mulholland declared war, securing L.A.'s legal rights to Owens Valley water with a massive show of armed force.

When the huge San Francisquito dam -- part of the aqueduct project -- burst in 1928, it caused the worst California disaster since the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Mulholland resigned in disgrace and died a broken man, his real achievement forgotten. But in the 1930s and 40s, L.A.'s City Council, Chamber of Commerce, and its Board of Realtors continued to promote the water search he had set in motion -- this time, 300 miles east to the Colorado River, and, with state help, 600 miles north to the Feather River. But still, it wasn't enough

After L.A. had drained so much water from the streams feeding Mono Lake -- a jewel in the California desert -- the Lake level fell 40 feet. Environmentalists began to take notice. A handful of biologists fought the powerful Department of Water and Power, and in 1988, the state forced the city to stop its diversions of water from Mono Lake. The victory helped open the gates for the conservation measures, progressive water policies, and fragile peace that have come to Los Angeles in recent years.

2. An American Nile
Is the Colorado River a preeminent symbol of economic folly and environmental disaster -- or the perfection of an ideal? Do its dams represent technological hubris gone mad -- or lifeblood for millions of Americans living in the Southwest? American Nile tells the story of how the Colorado River became the most controlled, litigated, domesticated, regulated and over-allocated river in the history of the world. Reiner chronicles how the Colorado became so dammed-up and diverted that by 1969 it no longer reached the sea except in the wettest of years.

Despite the warnings to Congress in 1888 by explorer John Wesley Powell that the lack of water was a serious obstacle to unbridled settlement of the West, America was determined to settle the Colorado's starkly arid domain. In the height of the Great Depression, the heroic construction of Hoover Dam -- an engineering achievement compared to the Pyramids or the Sphinx -- made the Colorado into the greatest single source of electricity in the world, inspiration for dam builders the world over, and proof that the fatal dryness of the Great American desert could be conquered.

On the heels of the Hoover dam came a rush of hydroelectric dams, flood control dams, irrigation dams in California, Arizona, Montana, Washington, Oregon -- all engineering dryness and free-flowing rivers out of existence. Some 55 dams were built on the Columbia River and its tributaries alone -- including the colossal Grand Coulee; by 1956, 90 percent of its salmon were gone and nearly every stretch of the Columbia was a reservoir.

The same year, work began on the Glen Canyon Dam -- designed to generate both hydropower for Phoenix and revenue to pay for still more dams -- that would submerge 186 miles of canyonlands, destroying natural wonderland. Despite the last-minute efforts of the Sierra Club to stop the dam, the reservoir, named Lake Powell, was christened 100 years to the day that Powell had passed through Glen Canyon.

When the Bureau of Reclamation turned next to building two dams in the Grand Canyon, the Sierra Club engaged in a bitter battle -- and finally swayed public opinion -- to block them. But saving Marble Canyon did not stop the flood of people drawn to new homes and new jobs in Arizona, leading to President Lyndon Johnson's authorization of the Central Arizona Project, the most expensive waterworks in Bureau history. Today, with double-digit growth in Phoenix, there's just not enough water to meet insatiable demand. Whereas the Hopi have lived in the desert for a thousand years on tiny amounts of water, Americans built swimming pools and huge irrigation farms in the desert sun -- with water from the Colorado. No river has been asked to do so much -- for so many -- with so little.

3. The Mercy of Nature
The Mercy of Nature traces the fierce political and environmental battles that raged around the transformation of California's Central Valley from a semi-arid plain into the most productive and environmentally altered agricultural region in the history of the world. I could not help but think of Steinbeck.

In the 1920s, farmers discovered a centuries-old aquifer under the land and began massive pumping efforts that decimated the existing water supply. Enter President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the little-known Bureau of Reclamation, funding the giant Central Valley Project, the largest waterworks in history. Yet much of the land irrigated with federally-subsidized water was not cultivated by small farmers as reclamation law required -- but by large corporations that benefited illegally from the boon.

With agriculture stretching CVP water to the limit by 1960, California Governor Pat Brown initiated the State Water Project, whose scale nearly equaled that of the CVP. By 1974, the Central Valley was producing 25 percent of America's food -- but much of the profit was captured by giant agri-business companies that bought taxpayer-subsidized irrigation water at extraordinarily cheap rates. As they had for decades, "pork barrel" water projects continued to roll through Congress.

Jimmy Carter was the first president to mount a serious effort to slow the juggernaut of dam building. His investigators uncovered huge cost overruns, environmental threats, and devastating poverty among the farm workers who kept the big farms in business. But caught in a fight for his political life after the failed rescue mission for hostages in Iran, Carter retreated from water reform in the Central Valley. Says Reisner, "He failed to see how water flows uphill toward power and money."

In the mid-80s, the combined effects of bird deformities caused by toxic water run-off from farms, Congressional investigations into water subsidies, and a six-year drought began to turn the tide of public opinion. In 1992, an urban-dominated Congress finally addressed the enormous thirst of California agriculture -- which was, in effect, creating an artificial drought for nature and cities alike -- with a water reform law.

Today, the Central Valley will never again be the same; nearly all the corporate farms have left the valley, along with some smaller farms. The growers that remain must now wrestle with new restrictions on their previously unchallenged water rights and usage.

No water. No life. No blue. No green.

[Annk · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars because everyone should read this book, now.

[Richard Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marc Reisner’s classic, Cadillac Desert, takes us for a walk on the wet side, revealing far more than you ever wanted to know about dams, flood control, irrigation, and municipal water systems — and the serious long-term drawbacks that came along with building thousands of water projects in the frenzied pursuit of short-term wealth and power. It’s a brilliant, funny, and annoying expose of government corruption. It’s an ecological horror story. It’s a collection of powerful lessons for our society, lessons on how not to live, warning signs.

The western regions of the U.S. tend to be dry. Agriculture is risky where annual rainfall is less than 20 inches (50 cm). Locations like Phoenix, Reno, or El Paso, which get less than seven inches (18 cm), are especially poor places to settle, let alone build cities.

Native Americans in the west were blessed with excellent educations, and they wisely lived in a manner that was well adapted to the ecosystem, for thousands of years, without trashing it. Europeans suffered from dodgy educations that celebrated the magnificent civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, all of which transformed lush oases into moonscapes and went extinct. Almost all of these dead cities were hard-core irrigation addicts.

Around the world, most civilizations arose in arid regions. Desert soils were often highly fertile, because the nutrients were not leached out by centuries of significant rainfall. Desert farmers did not need to clear forests before planting. All they needed to do was add water. Irrigation turned their deserts green, but it also accelerated the growth and demise of their societies.

By the late nineteenth century, Los Angeles was growing rapidly, but it was doing this by mining the groundwater, a practice that had no long-term future. The city finished the Owens Valley project in 1913, which brought in water from 223 miles away (359 km), and included 53 miles (85 km) of tunnels. Drought hit in 1923, and the head of the water department frantically urged the city to stop the growth immediately, even if this required killing everyone in the Chamber of Commerce. They ignored him, so he began pressing for an aqueduct from the Colorado River.

To make a long story short, America built a couple thousand major dams between 1915 and 1975. Many were built during the Depression, to put the unemployed to work. In congress, water projects became an extremely popular form of “pork.” A great way for me to get your support for my bill would be to amend the bill to include a water project in your district. This got out of control, to ridiculous proportions.

Many worthless projects were built at great expense to taxpayers and ecosystems. Corporate America refused to invest in dams, because they were unlikely to pay for themselves, let alone generate reliable profits. So, the west became a socialist utopia, dominated by militant free market conservatives who adored massive government spending in their region, and howled about it everywhere else.

By the time Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976, the national debt was close to a trillion dollars, and inflation was in double digits. It was time to seriously cut spending, and Carter hated water projects, because they were so wasteful. He attempted to terminate 19 water projects, and promptly became the most hated man on Earth. He was a president with above average principles, a serious handicap.

Ronald Reagan took a different principled approach — no more free lunches. He thought that those who benefitted from the welfare should fully repay the government for the generous help they received, both capital costs and operating expenses. States should pay a third of the costs of reclamation projects, up front. Pay? Legions burst into tears. The keg was empty, and the party ended.

I was amazed to learn that Carter was special because of his sense of history. “He began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams we had built. What right did we have, in the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all of the world’s rivers? What would happen when the dams silted up? What if the climate changed?”

Well, of course, great questions! As victims of dodgy educations, our graduates do not have a sense of history, a tragedy for which we pay dearly. What right did we have to build 440 nuclear power plants that cannot be safely decommissioned? What right did we have to destroy the climate? What right did we have to leave a trashed planet for those coming after us? A sense of history is powerful medicine, an essential component for an extended stay on this planet.

We know that any dam that doesn’t collapse will eventually fill with silt and turn into an extremely expensive waterfall — no more power generation, no more flood control, no more irrigation. Every year millions of cubic yards of mud are accumulating in Lake Mead, the reservoir at Hoover Dam. Many reservoirs will be filled in less than a century. In China, the reservoir for the Sanmexia Dam was filled to the brim with silt in 1964, just four years after it was built.

We know that irrigation commonly leads to salinization. Salts build up in the soil, and eventually render it infertile, incapable of growing even weeds. This often happens after a century of irrigation. Salinization played a primary role in the demise of the ancient Fertile Crescent civilizations. China’s Yellow River Basin is an exception, because of its low-salt soil. It’s a serious problem in the Colorado River Basin, the San Joaquin Valley, and many other places. It’s sure to increase in the coming decades, following a century-long explosion of irrigation around the world.

We know that the Ogallala aquifer will eventually become unprofitable for water mining. This ocean of Ice Age water lies primarily beneath Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. Following World War II, diesel-powered centrifugal pumps enabled farmers to pump like there’s no tomorrow. A 1982 study predicted problems after 2020. When the irrigation ends, many will go bankrupt, many will depart, and some will return to less productive dryland farming, which could trigger another dust bowl. Water mining has become a popular trend around the world, a short-term solution.

Stonehenge was built between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, and it was a durable design. It had no moving parts, no electric-powered controls, and it was not required to prevent billions of gallons of water from normally flowing downstream to the sea. How long will our dams last? The Teton Dam did a spectacular blowout two days after it was filled.

Typhoon Nina blasted Asia in the summer of 1975. Near China’s Banqiao Dam, a massive flood resulted from 64 inches (163 cm) of rain, half of which fell in just six hours. The dam collapsed, and the outflow erased a number of smaller dams downstream. Floods killed 171,000 people, and 11 million lost their homes.

In 1983, a sudden rush of melt water blasted into Glen Canyon Dam, damaging one of its spillways. The dam did not fail that day. It did not take out the Hoover Dam downstream with a huge wall of water. It did not pull the plug on agriculture and civilization in southern California.

As we move beyond Peak Oil, and energy production goes downhill, industrial civilization will wither. It won’t be able to make replacement parts for dams, turbines, the power grid, and so on. Will the nation of the United States go extinct some day? The status quo in California is dependent on the operation of many pumping stations, which depend on the operation of hydro-power dams. The Edmonston station pushes water uphill 1,926 feet (587 m), over the Tehachapi Mountains, using fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps.

As I write, the west coast is experiencing a serious drought. Reservoirs in California are dangerously low. Droughts can last for decades, or longer. There is a good chance that climate change will increase the risks of living in extremely overpopulated western states. So might earthquakes.

A wise man gave this advice to California governor Edmund Brown: “Don’t bring the water to the people, let the people go to the water.”

[Tanner Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

When my dad suggested "Cadillac Desert" to me over a year ago, I couldn't think of a more boring subject than "the American West and Its Disappearing Water." But I could not have been more wrong. After begrudgingly starting this book just over two weeks ago, I realized that not only was Marc Reisner a fantastic author but also that this subject is downright fascinating. I haven't been this enraptured with a book in a long time.

"Cadillac Desert" has an objective. It wants to convince you that water is not as renewable in the American West as we expect. Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming exist thanks to a manmade fiction created by the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. When the Latter-day Saint pioneers trekked west from Illinois, they settled in Salt Lake City. From there, they spread across much of the southwest and became veritable masters of irrigation. Skip forward 70-80 years, and the Bureau of Reclamation enters the picture, trying to expand what the pioneer irrigators were doing. The Bureau built hundreds of dams, storing trillions of gallons of water in artificial reservoirs. These reservoirs, and the labyrinthian legislation that accompanied them, fueled the explosive growth the Southwest has seen. Las Vegas, for example, spawned from essentially nothing and nobody into a glittering, water-filled oasis of almost 3 million people. Los Angeles might be the poster child of water-fueled fiction, though. In the mid-1800s, LA was home to 1,610 people. Thanks to titanic water projects whose proportions and costs defy comprehension, LA is now home to nearly 4 million people. Every single one of them lives in a city that really shouldn't exist. There was barely enough water to keep those 1,610 people alive.

Reisner covers stories like this and many more throughout this masterpiece. He talks about the Teton Dam disaster, the creation of Hoover Dam, the ingenuity and eventual bureaucratic inertia that made and broke the Bureau of Reclamation, and the ecological effects of mankind's apparent futile attempt to recreate the verdant, Appalachian East in the deserts of the West.

If you live west of the 100th meridian, you need to read this book. I am both amazed and appalled at what we have wrought in the West. We have dammed, diverted, and/or destroyed almost every major river in the Rockies in our efforts to tame this desert. It's Herculean, truly. I live where no human should theoretically be able to live. And yet here we are, thriving. Even after reading the entire of how we did it, I am amazed. The only thing I can compare it to is NASA's moon landings or the making of the atomic bomb. The taming of the West is larger than both of those projects combined, in my estimation.

It's important to note that this isn't a "feel-bad" book. You aren't supposed to read it and regret the dams or the irrigation. You're just supposed to understand. With that understanding comes responsibility, though.

This book sits comfortably in my top ten favorite books of all time. For a boring book on water, I'd say that's pretty good.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

As California sweats through a fourth year of drought I thought it might be a good time to read this history of water development in the American West. Although it is often hailed as an environmental classic, Cadillac Desert can also read as a jeremiad against big government. While Reisner does spend some time on the environmental consequences of America's century of dam building and large-scale crop irrigation, what really gets his blood pumping is the corruption and fiscal stupidity of it all. But, as he drily notes, "reason is the first casualty in a drought" (315).

As a result, the author ends up stomping sideways across the American political landscape, lobbing grenades at both wealthy conservative land-owners and big government New Dealers alike. The heart of the tale is the history of the Bureau of Reclamation and its metamorphosis under FDR from a lands program for small farmers to a powerful agency hellbent on damming virtually every river of meaningful size in the lower 48, and pushing around any native tribes, towns or farmers that got in its way.

The central truth here is that nearly all new dam projects make little to no economic sense from an irrigation perspective. The costs of building a massive dam are usually larger than the economic value created by the irrigated land. Normally the project can only be funded via revenues from hydro-electricity and (increasingly) billions in taxpayer subsidies. As FDR's Reclamation Commissioner memorably put it to his staff: "I don't give a damn whether a project is feasible or not. I'm getting the money out of Congress, and you'd damn well better spend it." The absurdity is compounded by the fact that the government was at various times subsidizing cheap water for Western farmers to grow the same crops it was paying Eastern farmers not to plant. After learning that, the whole deal all starts to look kinda shady.

Having grown up in California's Central Valley, I was especially interested in the history of the twin canal projects that fuel the valley's agricultural production: the federal CVP and the state SWP. On the one hand, the fertile soil of the Central Valley is one area of the West where massive publicly-funded irrigation projects actually do make sense, and as a result the region is one of the most productive in the world. On the other, Reisner makes a strong case that the system amounts to "socialism for the rich" (334), with a handful of Big Ag landowners reaping giant profits off the back of public investment. Even today, there is a tension between the conservative claim that government can't create jobs ("you didn't build that", etc.), and the "Jobs Grow Where the Water Flows" protest signs that sprout up when water deliveries don't arrive in dry years.

The book itself is highly readable and quotable and highly recommended for Westerners or anyone interested in where their water comes from. Some of its side stories, like Los Angeles' legendary water thievery, are pure entertainment.

So what do we do now? How will a changing climate once again re-write the story of water in the American West? One weakness of the book is that Reisner doesn't fully assess what this water development policy has bought us as a nation -- and what it has cost us.

You can make a case that at least part of the value of building dams is help small farmers and to subsidize cheap food, thereby benefiting the least well off. Of course, it's far from clear that reclamation was the most efficient way to accomplish these goals, even if that was part of what FDR had in mind. Instead the book makes a convincing case that the system ran on Congressional pork barrel and amplified the power of large agribusiness at the expense of small farmers.

And finally, a more thorough accounting of the environmental impacts would be helpful, as well as a way of connecting human prosperity to the health of our ecosystem. While David Brower and the Sierra Club make cameo appearances in Reisner's story, the conservation perspective is not elaborated as much as could be. Today the San Joaquin and Sacramento River ecosystems, and the Bay Delta, are polluted and vastly degraded from their original splendor and we're not even quite sure what it is we've lost. That is of course a larger question than a 30 year old book can easily answer. Time for someone to write a sequel.

[Kira · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so good. My brain is too tired to explain why but you just gotta trust me. His writing is fantastic and makes something as seemingly dense as water history in the American west read like a true crime. My only complaint is that he wrote this book in 1985 and now I don’t know what else has happened since then. I would pay top dollar for him to write a modern-day follow up. Thank you, Marc Reisner, excellent job

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you live in the American West, you need to read this. Yes, it's 30+ years old and hasn't been updated in 25 years. Yes, it's depressing as hell. But the central truths remain:

* American water policy, especially in the West, is predicated on the idea that water should flow to where wealth and power are already concentrated. As a result, huge amounts of wealth and power have been pushed—in the form of water, control of water, and subsidized water costs—from the average American taxpayer to an incredibly small portion of the population, and especially to corporate farms. This is even truer now than when Reisner wrote his (incredibly well-researched) epic.

* American water projects are both directly and indirectly responsible for incredible environmental degradation across the West. While some Americans are waking up to this reality (the renewed campaigns to remove dams, and the successful removal of Elwha River dams in Olympic National Park, for instance, both point to this truth), most of us are still woefully unaware of just how much damage water projects have caused. (Poor farming practices encouraged by American water policies were in large part responsible for the Dust Bowl, for instance; water projects have led to large populations in places that can't sustainably support them, such as Phoenix, Tuscon, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles; the list could go on for pages and pages.)

* And if you're the sort of conservative who says you're all about reducing the federal deficit and eliminating wasteful spending, then you should really be damn upset when it comes to dams (most of which were a waste of money in economic terms even when they were just ideas) and the subsidized water connected to them. A huge portion of our federal deficit was first run up as a result of water projects, and the economic realities of most of these projects haven't gotten better since.

I could ramble for days, but the truth is, you should just read this massive (and massively depressing) book, because I guarantee there's an awful lot of history in here that you never studied in school, especially if you grew up in or near some of the places most affected by these water projects.

Now if only someone would take Reisner's masterpiece (he died in 2000) and update it with more current data...

[5 stars for brilliant investigative reporting and offering a stark take on the historical myths we all too often learned when it comes to water, the West, and this idea that we as people belong in these stark landscapes—or that we can improve on them. Spoiler: We can't. We just ruin things, because people are the worst.]

[Fred Forbes · Rating 5 out of 5]

It takes some enormous discipline, research and knowledge to produce a work like this. To say nothing of significant writing skills to keep the subject moving along. Consider. Water moving in from the Pacific drops 150 inches of water on the Pacific Northwest in an average year. Once the storms are blocked by the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains, the rainfall average falls to 4 inches. Consider the demarcation line for the country, the 100th meridian running through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Abilene, Texas. East of the line, the country averages over 20 inches of rain per year, west of that line, far less. So one side has adequate moisture for farming, cattle, population, etc. while the other needs manipulation of the water supply through dams, canals and aqueducts

How this water is controlled and came to be so is the subject of this book. The major reason for awarding it 5 stars is the ability the author has to explain and interweave such diverse topics as geography, meteorology, agriculture, the fishing industry and salmon lifestyle issues, economics, electricity, psychology, dam construction and politics (especially politics!). Certainly a job well done.

I lived for awhile just north of Sacramento near the Nimbus Dam on the American River and learned to sail my 13' Pirateer sloop just below the dam and further up the river behind the Folsom dam so it was interesting to see his graphic descriptions of the area and the realities for these dams during periods of drought and flood.

I also enjoyed the facts and analysis with such gems as "you need 7 or 8 feet of water in the hot deserts to keep grass alive which means you need 50,000 pounds of water to raise one pound of cow... and irrigated pasture used more water than Los Angeles and San Diego combined." Interesting comments about VP Hubert Humphrey in 1967 wanting to feel the thrum of the turbines of a new dam he was to dedicate but he was unable to alter his schedule to await completion of the fish ladders so firing it up condemned hundreds of thousands of steelhead and salmon to death. The author points out that many people existed on salmon through the depression as poor man's steak, selling for 10 cents a pound and frankly, they were tired of it. As he notes in the Afterword, many of these ruinous policies were enacted and executed by people of "earlier generations doing what they thought was right." Now it is a matter of undoing much of it and thanks to the efforts of environmentalists and others and frankly, I think this book has a lot to do with it. A most worthy read!

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really, really interesting book. I picked it up, without knowing much about it, because I knew it had been influential in the American environmentalist movement. The focus is on water development, especially dam building, and particularly on water development in the American West and Midwest. It looks at how water policy has effected, over time, an upward redistribution of wealth and power from small family farms to wealthy and corporate farming operations, and at the environmental implications of water development for irrigation farming in the desert. Aside from the major political, economic, and environmental themes, there's a lot of interesting information about dam engineering (and how catastrophic dam failure occurs), climatology, geology, and the history of the settlement of the American West (I finally know what John Wesley Powell is famous for!).

By way of criticism, the opening section on the settlement and building of L.A. is long and sometimes feels more like a blizzard of names than a coherent narrative; also, the author leans toward conspiratorial interpretations which are surely often correct but which at other times feel overly simplistic--note, e.g., the "blue envelope" trope which, I would agree with other government employees with whom I've discussed the book, is way, way overdone. He also tends to attribute poor water usage practices by small farmers to "greed," which feels like a simplistic and unjust interpretation of farming practices that are probably driven at least as much by economic hardship and predictable human shortsightedness as by greed. Nevertheless, considering the sordid tale of corruption, regressive economic policy, and incompetence that Reisner tells, extreme cynicism on his part is perhaps understandable, and on balance he does try to present these issues in all their complexity: it is to his credit that he doesn't romanticize the populist players in this drama.

All in all, a totally worthwhile read.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water - 22 Tapes Unabridged (Part 1 & 2) ~30 hours

http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert...

From Library Journal: Dams ostensibly provide indispensable economic development through flood control, irrigation, and recreation. Goldsmith and Hildyard, with examples from throughout the world, demolish the common justifications for large dams. They advocate traditional irrigation as environmentally sound and economically beneficial. Reisner focuses more narrowly on North America in his portrayal of the personalities and agencies (e.g., Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), and the manipulation and deceit through which water policy in the United States has evolved. This policy, a form of financial vandalism of the future, has made us rich but our descendants insecure. Cadillac Desert describes serious, perhaps fatal threats to the miraculous desert civilization of the West. With different approaches, both volumes take effective aim at the vested interests that perpetuate unsound water resource development. Both volumes contain insights for the specialist and the wider public. James R. Karr, Smithsonian Tropical Research Inst., Balboa, Panama. Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This recording is well and truly cocked up. Cut into this non fiction at about the halfway mark is the fantasy book Magic Kingdom for Sale, which is quite funny when the one snippet from the former talks about lava and switches to the rock melting via dragon breath.

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. The subject is not one that most people will consider interesting, but that is only because most people have very little knowledge about the subject and take for granted the easy and cheap access we all have to water these days. People who read this book will never feel that way again.

Growing up in Idaho and being surrounded by so many beautiful, free-flowing rivers, the occasional dams and reservoirs, and the myriad acres of irrigated farmland I wanted to know how everything fit together. I wanted to know why water wars were waged. I wanted to understand exactly what the fight between environmentalists and everyone else was really all about. I wanted to understand why Idaho's Snake River water was so coveted by California's politicians. This book could not have done a better job of informing me on all these and many other issues.

I will never forget the story of Los Angeles' water czar, William Mulholland, who, after visiting Yosemite National Park, stated that if he were in charge he would send photographers into the valley to shoot pictures day and night for an entire year. He would then publish the photos in books and send them to every library in the world. Then, Mulholland said, "I would build a great dam and stop all the goddamn waste."

Talk about scary! And many people in high places have that exact mind set today.

[Amerynth · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's funny that a book all about water could be so dry. Marc Reisner has written a tome on water rights in the American West with his book "Cadillac Desert: The American West and its disappearing water" that is overly long. Reisner somehow made John Wesley Powell seem boring, which is absolutely crazy because I love a good Powell story.

Reisner actually has some great information packed into this book, but he tends to explore every little detail of every single situation... after a while I ended up just skimming most of the book. I probably would have enjoyed reading an edited, more streamlined version of this book.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cadillac Desert is a tremendous work of natural science, history, environmentalism, and politics, and despite it having dated somewhat since its publication, it should be considered required reading for anyone interested in those subjects, or who happens to live anywhere west of the hundredth meridian.

It starts off by recounting the history of the exploration and development of the West, with a particular focus on John Wesley Powell, a fascinating figure in his own right. It then moves to the development and settling of the West, in particular the city of Los Angeles, the creation of new institutions to exploit and develop water resources, and the increasingly desperate and deranged water projects that were constructed at the behest of powerful groups who wanted to maintain the explosive growth of the region, and not always with the best interests of the citizenry at heart. An endless series of dams, diversions, and canals were constructed, as various Western states battled with their interest groups, each other, and the federal Bureau of Reclamation to obtain the water they needed to maintain their growth. The book closes with a discussion of the North American Water and Power Alliance, a water engineering project of such ludicrous scope - damming nearly every river in British Columbia and shipping the water to Los Angeles through transcontinental canals - that it would seem preposterous if not for all of the previous projects that came before it, and there's also an epilogue that shows the tangible consequences to salmon fisheries of interfering with the natural flow of water.

It's an extremely well-written book that will teach you a lot about the West, but it's also a polemic that raises a lot of questions about how the West got to be where it is today, and as I was reading it I found myself thinking a lot about the political dynamic on display here. A big chunk of the West is a lifeless, waterless hellhole that has no business being settled at all, much less farmed for crops like cotton or rice. Yet time and time again, extremely right-wing officials went running to the federal government to build them more and more dams and canals with extremely dubious financial or environmental merits, sucking money and people away from perfectly habitable states. As you read 700 pages of this, it's almost enough to make you into a states' rights kind of guy. I'm not keen on that almost meaningless catchphrase at all, but I think most opposition to states' rights comes from Civil War-era social issues like the South's miserable record on discrimination. Would states' rights be more acceptable in a purely economic context, like Canadian provinces? Where would NYC be today if it hadn't had to keep shoveling money into stupid canals across Arizona that were a waste of space, a waste of land, a waste of power, and even more of a waste of water? Weren't the richer states of the Northeast subsidizing selfishness in the Southwest? Is the New Deal vision of infrastructure as progress, the TVAs and LCRAs, simply a mistake?

Reisner has an excellent paragraph that makes this very point: "The irrigation farmers not only had come to expect heavily subsidized water as a kind of right, allowing them to pretend that the region's preeminent natural fact - a drastic scarcity of that substance - was an illusion. They now believed that if it turned out they couldn't afford the water, the Bureau (which is to say, the nation's taxpayers) would practically give it away. These farmers were about the most conservative faction in what may be the most politically conservative of all the fifty states. They regularly sent to Congress politicians eager to demolish the social edifice built by the New Deal - to abolish welfare, school lunch programs, aid to the handicapped, funding for the arts, even to sell off some of the national parks and public lands. But their constituents had become the ultimate example of what they decried, so coddled by the government that they lived in the cocoonlike world of a child. They remained oblivious to what their CAP water would cost them but were certain it would be offered to them at a price they could afford. The farmers had become the very embodiment of the costly, irrational welfare state they loathed - and they had absolutely no idea."

To that end, I was also struck by the similarity between those farmers, who were often incredibly reactionary oligarchs in their states, and businessmen who make their money off of things like oil, gas, or railroads (and often these were the same people). Is there something inherent to natural resource extraction that encourages plutocrat behavior as opposed to, say, software development? I have an unprovable pet theory about how the different incentives that come from making money off of a rivalrous and legally excludable good like natural resources makes entrepreneurs more likely to be dickheads than someone who gets rich off of developing human capital, but even this weren't true, it's remarkable how the same people who Reisner quotes as saying "Contracts are made to be broken" if the result is cheaper water will lobby their Congressmen for taxpayer-subsidized boondoggles. Reisner again: "In the Congress, water projects are a kind of currency, like wampum, and water development itself is a kind of religion. Senators who voted for drastic cuts in the school lunch program in 1981 had no compunction about voting for $20 billion worth of new Corps of Engineers projects in 1984, the largest such authorization ever. A jobs program in a grimly depressed city in the Middle West, where unemployment among minority youth is more than 50 percent, is an example of the discredited old welfare mentality; a $300 million irrigation project in Nebraska giving supplemental water to a few hundred farmers is an intelligent, farsighted investment in the nation’s future."

And that's another great aspect of the book, where it shows the perversities that this grand construction spree enabled in the federal bureaucracy itself. An astonishing percentage of these public works were built not so much to solve specific problems, but as part of a turf war between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. A dam could be used for flood control, irrigation, navigation/recreation, or drinking water, and there were tons of shell games between those uses so that one agency could steal a project away from the other. Bureau of Reclamation head Floyd Dominy, who was profiled a bit more sympathetically in John McPhee's masterful Encounters With the Archdruid, comes off as an evil civil servant version of LBJ in his ceaseless efforts to maximize his Bureau's budget and prestige regardless of how useless his dams were. He encouraged lots of cool scumbag behavior by Congressmen noted for it, like Jim Wright, the "Representative from American Airlines" who prevented Southwest Airlines from flying out of Love Field in Dallas to all but a few places just to protect American Airlines' headquarters at nearby DFW. Jimmy Carter was the only President to try to take on this system, and Congressmen of both parties and all ideological persuasions laughed in his face. Decades earlier, badass Senator Paul Douglas also tried to stand in the system's way, with a similarly depressing lack of results.

And in a way, it is morbidly fascinating to read about all of the underhanded deals that went down to do things like make LA the metastasized monster it is today. If you've seen the excellent film Chinatown the basic story will be familiar, but it's still impressive to read about William Mulholland's corrupt deals with Joseph Lippincott and diabolical Robert Moses-esque plots to gain Owens Valley's water rights, build aqueduct, and expand the city all at once. Or to see how shady contractors like Bechtel began life with shady contracts to build Boulder Canyon Dam. Or to learn how otherwise iconic stars like Woody Guthrie were hired to propagandize dams for the government in the name of Progress.

And on and on until you're confronted with what's more than an ideological dilemma, but an existential dilemma: what are these pharaonic structures doing to our civilization in the long run? Reisner mentions irrigating cultures like the Hohokam, the Sumerians, and the Egyptians, and how frail they ended up being. China wasn't yet on its dam-building tear in 1986 when the book was published, but he discusses the problems that the construction of the Aswan Dam had already had for Egypt, and how the country was likely to be forced to construct yet more gargantuan works to solve the problems of its earlier ones. He doesn't use this language, but it felt like a sort of Jevon's Paradox for water - each dam you build helps ameliorate groundwater depletion from dumb farming decisions, but that just ends up encouraging even more farming that ends up being a net loss: "illegal subsidies enrich big farmers, whose excess production depresses crop prices nationwide and whose waste of cheap water creates an environmental calamity that could cost billions to solve." In my city of Austin our aquifer seems like it will last a while, but it's always worth pondering the true sustainability of life on the wrong side of the Hundredth Meridian, and this book is one of the best at that you'll find.