Marc Reisner (1948–2000)

5/5

In the western US, rivers flow backwards and uphill towards wealth and power. This sentence from Cadillac Desert best encapsulates the way that water resources have been 'managed' by both the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Army Corps of Engineers since the turn of the 20th century. While a lot of people hold this book up as a foundational text of environmental writing, it does so through a historical and political lens. There's very little here about the actual environment itself.

If show more you can walk away from Cadillac Desert without being thoroughly furious with the US government and the inherent greed in humanity you should probably get your morals checked. In the course of less than fifty years, every major waterway in the large majority of the United States was dammed countless times under the pretense of water conservation, power generation, and flood control. Most of the water these dams have is siphoned off towards agricultural lands in arid environments that should never have entered production in the first place. The land itself is mostly owned by large corporate entities that have little interest in the common good of the people. The water they are given was and has been subsidized by every American taxpayer for decades, and the projects themselves are constructed on our dime as well, with hardly a chance of them every being paid off, let alone profitable. Even with all of these projects in place, it's still not enough. There is simply not enough water in the southwest to support the industry and population that relies on it. As rivers dry up from climate change and groundwater reserves are drawn up at rates that will see the aquifers depleted beyond repair, we will soon find ourselves having to repay the debt that all of this gluttony and hubris have wrought.

This is to say nothing about the Bureau or the Corps themselves, who increasingly built dams in less and less ideal places, and lied more and more about how much it would cost. This is to say nothing about the dams silting up faster than was anticipated and becoming useless, or irrigated lands turning into plains of desolate salt. This is to say nothing of all of the wild rivers, riparian areas, flyways, swamps, and ecological niches that we have sunk under the reservoirs themselves. This is to say nothing of the thousands of humans that have been strong armed by their own government to give up their land for dams, or the cultural resources that we have lost along the way. Every way that you spin it, Cadillac Desert makes it clear that this period of dam building was an absolute mistake.

What puts Cadillac Desert over top for me is the voice with which Reisner writes. He is venomous, sarcastic, and sardonic. You can feel his contempt for the situation and the people responsible dripping off the text. It's excellent writing, in spite of the density of the information that he presents. I am predisposed towards being interested in natural resource management, specifically in the arid southwest, but I cant help but feel that Reisner could pull nearly anyone in with his treatment of the material. Another reason for this is that Reisner doesn't fiddle around or mince his words. He assumes that the reader is mostly already on the same page as him when it comes to the realities of climate in the southwest. He doesn't spend much time trying to argue that we ARE fucked, much more WHY and HOW we are fucked, and WHO did the fucking, which is a much more nuanced and important conversation to be having. Too many times environmental writing makes the mistake of becoming educational on a lot of fundamental concepts, and in the process water themselves down.

Cadillac Desert is a foundation piece of not only environmental writing, but of United States history that should be even more widely read than it already is. Absolutely critical to understanding just how far up the creek without a paddle we have gotten ourselves. show less

In the American West, water doesn't flow downhill. Water flows towards money.

Cadillac Desert is an absolute monument, equal to any of the great damns the Reisner discusses and derides. This history, of settlement, irrigation, and the cruel legacy of dam building, is a comprehensively footnoted assassination against an ideal of the American west. The family farm is the image American democracy is built around. West of the rain line, the barrier on the Great Plains where annual rainfall is show more less than 20 inches annual, the family farm is cruel lie. Dryland farming can't sustain a family on the homestead of 160 acres, aside from a few sites on streams. Irrigation needs complex and expensive capital investments. Dams and canals and pumps.

The target of Reisner's ire is the Bureau of Reclamation, a rogue bureaucracy riddled with faulty numbers, blind corruption, and headless of oversight. The Bureau of Reclamation builds dams, spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to drown canyons and streams, argue that it's efforts are profitable through criminally poor accounting, and then sell power and water to immense agricultural conglomerates at prices that are basically free, a few dollars an acre-foot. Irrigated farms in California, Arizona, Idaho, and other western states have received incalculable subsidies to grow crops which farmers in the east are being paid not to grow; cotton, alfalfa, corn, and other low-value water-intensive crops. The byzantine world of water districts, senior rights, and and agricultural flows is a trillion ton beast, distorting sensible land and environmental policy in the West.

This book is detail heavy, it took me a solid week, and that's a rare thing. But over thirty years on, it reads like current events, like things that have happened yesterday. And in many ways, Reisner won. Dams in the west have come down. Three Gorges in China is perhaps the last superdam the world will ever build. This doesn't make up for the ecological impacts or the monetary waste, but he's won.

This book is vital reading for anyone who lives west of the Rockies. Reisner writes like a Jeremiah, crying out against immanent apocalypse. And if his doomsday hasn't yet come to pass, a killing Dust Bowl 2 drought, soil poisoned by accumulated salts, famine and refugees, it has not been avoided, only pushed off a little bit. And as an aside, I went to grad school in Tempe. I remember calculating that the incremental cost of a gallon of water on my utilities was something like a tenth of cent. show less

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 show more 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. show less

What an eye-opening and distressful book. Reisner has thoroughly researched the various projects of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Reclamation, and others - so many departments to control so much land. What he discovered is the unbelievable amount of in-fighting and the phenomenal amount of waste and destruction as a result sheer number of dams that have been erected - literally hundreds and show more hundreds of them affecting every major watershed in our country. He compares the slow time to construction today with 1936 when the four largest concrete dams ever built were built at the same time: Hoover, Shasta, Bonneville and Grand Coulee. The amount of corruption that pervaded these agencies is mind-boggling, even to the most pessimistic of us. The wanton destruction of Indian land is horrific with entire reservations being drowned for the benefit of white farmers on the surrounding lands. We still see these agencies doing the same thing today in the Dakotas, but for gas and oil.
It is clear from the title that so much of the far western lands are geologically deserts that we have spent billions converting to habitable land - but the water is running out, and in the end nature will win, and these deserts will take back the land, and we will have problems of epic proportions because of the shortage of water. This is becoming more and more evident. If you want to understand why water is the next gold, and why the next civil wars will be fought in the courts and on the lands, over water rights, read this book. show less