Book Review #2: Cadillac Desert

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition (1993)

By Marc Reisner

All current writers of water have clearly read and religiously cite Reisner’s now classic work, first published in 1986. Reisner began writing this book in 1978 and for several years pieced together the hundred year legal, social and political history of the government agency responsible for transforming hundreds of thousands of bodies of water from rivers and wetlands to reservoirs and lakes. The Bureau of Reclamation “would build the highest and largest dams in the world on rivers few believed could be controlled” and invested ghastly amounts of tax payer money into converting the American West from an expansive dessert to the heart of America’s agriculture industry.

Reisner begins his retelling of the development of the American West in 1539 with the failed Spanish conquest by Don Francisco Vazquez de Coronado of the barren lands we now call California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. In the early 1800s the same land was explored by Lewis and Clark and then by pioneers during the gold rush. The general consensus was if you could survive the trek through hell, you might strike it rich in San Francisco (Los Angeles, however, was stunted in its growth primarily because of a severe lack of water).

The vast piece of land between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Coast remained an abandoned death trap Brigham Young and his followers discovered the secret to transforming the dessert into lush agriculturally viable land with masterful irrigation techniques. Then, in 1902 “the United States launched its own irrigation program, based on Mormon experience, guided by Mormon laws” and with it the Bureau of Reclamation came into its golden years.

Reisner’s extraordinarily detailed retelling of this history reads like a 608 page script from a Spanish telenovela where the agents of The Bureau of Reclamation play the villains in bed with big corporations and big agriculture and the victims are represented by small farmers, failed dam flood victims and people displaced by the building of methane burping reservoirs. It is hard to stomach when one realizes this is not only non-fiction but also the impeccably detailed political history of one of the richest, most powerful and developed countries in the world.

What’s worse is the effect this political history reeked havoc on the rest of the worlds water policies. Resiner laments, “When archaeologist from some other planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude that our temples were damns. Imponderably massive, constructed with exquisite care, our damns will outlast anything else we have built- skyscrapers, cathedrals, bridges, even nuclear power plants. When forests push through the rotting streets of New York and the Empire State Building is a crumbling hulk, Hover Dam will sit astride the Colorado River much as it does today, intact, formidable, serene” (Ch 3, para 1).