Cadillac Desert: The American West And Its Disappearing Water (1993) - Plot & Excerpts
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.”
I read the book called, “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Reisner. I felt like this book was a great book, for it tells the history of Western United States and how we managed to inhabit it like it is today. Marc mostly explains how the main problem for western settlers was the source of water and where to find it in the west. For out west the climate is mostly arid hot climate inside a desert or sub-desert biome, that made farming impossible without a irrigation system of some sort. Overall I thought Marc had a great argument for towards the problem of disappearing water in the west, which I will explain next.tI thought Marc’s main argument in this book, was the fact on why out west there is a major disappearing water source. His argument mostly centers on, what I thought was the fact of the high rate of people migrating out west in earlier centuries. For he goes through pass events in American history that caused Americans to move out west, one of these is one we know very well, the California Gold rush. Which Marc explains as being one of many reasons why people moved out west, along with another reason was the completion of the railroad system across the country. Overall Marc’s argument is well appointed throughout the book with many different examples of why the American west is experience the disappearance of it’s water. By far my favorite point that Marc brings up, would have to be the fact that earlier in American Western history, close to a hundred percent of the water in the west was used for irrigation farming. And I felt like Marc supported this fact with many different examples of damns that were built just to satisfy the need of a water resource. These examples of damns built provided a better understanding of why the west was and most likely still is searching for the non-renewable and precious resource: water. Overall Marc’s main argument was about the fact of the disappearing of the west’s water resource and why/how this came about in the last few centuries or so.tI totally agree with Marc’s argument about the disappearing of water in the American west. For throughout the book Marc explain that the main cause of the disappearing water, was due to the fact of the high rate of people each year that moved out west to find a new life. We can see this today with Los Angeles and San Francisco alone are two of the largest cities in the United States by population. This shows us that we can keep damning up the rivers in the west more than they already are, there will never be a significant amount of water in this area. Marc explains, and I agree with him, for the west was and still is a place that is hard to inhabit by humans without a system of resource conservation, especially for water. Probably one of my favorite quotes in this book would have to be, “to easterners “conservation” of water usually means protecting rivers from development, in the West, it means building damns” (p.104). Just from this quote, I get the feeling that what earlier settles did to conserve or should I say the high usage of water in the west was by my perspective and also Marc points across was a bad decision. And is probably the biggest reason why the west had such difficulty in having enough water resources for the amount of people who continued to migrate to this part of the country. Finally I really enjoyed how Marc gave the example of the 1930s Dust Bowl and the main reason why this event occurred. Just this event alone shows how the usage of water in the west and also the land usage in the west was a problem waiting to happen and it did. For Marc explains and I totally can see why this could have been the main cause in why the 1930s Dust Bowl occurred. Was the fact that many farmers in the west turn over millions of acres of pastureland into field to grow wheat. And doing so caused millions of acreage feet of top soil to be blown across the country. I felt like Marc explained this very well and was a great example of how many of these events in our history could have been avoid if the consideration of conserving water and our use of the land was done in a different way. Overall I agree with Marc’s argument about a hundred percent but not quite, which I will explain next why that is. But other than that I feel like Marc gave a strong argument on why the American west was and probably still is experiencing a disappearing of water.tAs I just mentioned I did not agree with Marc’s argument for I feel like his book was more like a history textbook about how western settlers migrated to the western United States and the reason why they did. For I feel like Marc use to many past events on how the west got their water resources than what the problem is with the disappearing of their water. Other than this I agree with Marc’s argument, but I feel like he could have explain more of the issue of the disappearing water than the history of how the west damned the rivers to get their water resources.tTo conclude, my overall impression of this book by Marc is very high for it was interesting and I enjoyed reading it. But his argument could have been supported in a different way and then I might have agreed with him up to a hundred percent. Otherwise I recommend reading “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Reisner, if you are looking for a book that talks about the issues the American West had during their search for the precious resource of water that everyone needs.
What do You think about Cadillac Desert: The American West And Its Disappearing Water (1993)?
Wonderfully engaging overview of the history of water development in the west. If you live west of the Mississippi, drink water, and/or buy food that is produced there, this should be mandatory reading. Reisner is incredibly funny, and pieces together a compelling history of the bloated egos and budgets that led to some of the most short-sighted public projects in the history of the world. It is a tale of hubris, of culture, of the misguided spirit of expansion that made this country "great." It also serves as one of the most clear and accessible warnings against the act of damming almost every single healthy river in North America. To know the history of water in America is to be given a glimpse into the larger problems that face our country today. What I most appreciated was how Reisner turns the term "welfare state" on its head, and illustrates how some of the most useless and most expensive publicly-funded infrastructure projects of all time are supported by the people who tout less government intervention as the key to a viable economy. Politicians and businessmen alike made their ascendance to power on the backs of regional dams, which explains why the proliferation of dams was such an integral and important phenomena of the 20th century.One of the most hard-hitting and poignant environmental books I've been lucky enough to come across.
—Max Potthoff
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, 2005Because 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.
—Jon-Erik
It's easy to grow up in the West, in California, and not know where your food comes from, where your electricity, where your water comes from. It's easy to believe that all the huge water projects, the dams, the aqueducts, are for the big desert cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles, that the places in need of power and water and multi-billion dollar federal projects are the urban dwellers, and you would be completely wrong. This book is still as fascinating, hard-hitting, and prone to make you yell and throw things as it was 30 years ago when it written. Because nobody knows this shit. The destruction, the hubris, the greed, the stupidity. The chapter where the dam breaks and Rexburg is lost had me in tears.And given the NPR story *last week* about how the Bureau of Reclamation wants to add another 10-20 feet to the top of Shasta dam, someone is not listening. Read it and weep. I did.
—LeeAnn Heringer
