Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition
by Marc Reisner

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• ISBN13: 9780140178241
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

Book Review: Water, water everywhere. Except in deserts.
Summary: 5 Stars

Regarding the water projects built over the last 150 years, Reisner wonders, "What has it all amounted to? ... Not all that much ... Modern Utah, where large-scale irrigation has been going on longer than anywhere else, has 3 percent of its land area under cultivation. California has 1,200 major dams, the two biggest irrigation projects on earth ... but its irrigated acreage is not much larger than Vermont.

Owens Lake in California dated back to the Ice Age. In 1905 it was about 35 feet deep and covered over 100 square miles. It was plied by steamboats. An Eden sparkled along the Owens Valley while snow sparkled nearby on Mt. Whitney, the highest peak between Canada and Mexico. It was so productive agriculturally that there was talk of building a railroad to carry the produce to Los Angeles.

But Los Angeles wanted the Owens Valley's water. And L.A., although 250 miles away, was 4,000 feet downhill. With a population in 1907 of 500,000, the city had enormous political power and a cell of brutally cunning politicians - they inspired the U.S. Forest Service to designate much of the treeless Owens Valley a National Forest to seal the valley's doom. In 1913 the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed and the Owens River started flowing on to Los Angeles. Coincidentally, L.A. would need only a fraction of the water for years, so it was used for - guess what? -- irrigating desert land in the San Fernando Valley that had been bought up by a syndicate. The syndicate's clairvoyant members were the arch capitalists of Los Angeles: the two owners of the L.A. Times and other molders of public acquiescence, the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, bank presidents, power company executives ... Five years later 75,000 acres of San Fernando Valley desert were under irrigation with water paid for by the taxpayers, almost as much land as was dropping OUT of production in the Owens Valley. Land values increased a hundred fold.

From 1913 until 1990, Los Angeleans were supposed to just use water, not think about it, certainly not to worry about where it came from to transform their glaring desert into a Babylonian garden with its thirsty lawns, hedges and palm trees, with thousands of decorative fountains and waterfalls, swimming pools, even cooling mists sprayed into the air where people congregated. It wasn't until 77 years after the rape of Owens Valley that L.A. first began promoting water conservation.

Thirteen years after the Los Angeles Aqueduct began flowing, Owens Lake was dry. The people of the Owens Valley did not go peacefully into oblivion. They occupied the aqueduct's flood gates and turned the water into the desert. Eventually they were driven off, then a series of explosions destroyed seventeen sections of the aqueduct. Finally, an army of Los Angeles police put an end to the resistance.

The rape of Owens Valley started a feverish race between the competing U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to throw dams across every waterway in the country. Major rivers were dammed time and time again. Not one good unused dam site remains in the U.S. Projects like Hoover Dam were extremely beneficial. Without its output of electricity, West Coast industries might not have produced the aluminum and the thousands of planes it took to win WW II. Lake Mead has made an oasis out of Las Vegas. A network of canals laid in the Mojave Desert offers waterfront homesites! Many of the projects, however, were based on arithmetic that would have earned a schoolboy failing grades.

The dams were big and bigger. "Hoover was big; Shasta was half again as big; Grand Coulee was bigger than both together ... The largest and longest concrete dam in the world ... so massive it would have ordinarily taken hundreds of years to cool down [as the concrete cured] and cooling pipe had to be laid through it at close intervals ... The pipe would have connected Seattle to Chicago."

The story of Teton Dam (a Bureau dam) is a tragedy. Geologists recoiled at the idea of a dam at the fissured, earthquake-prone site. A Geological Survey geologist was so certain of the failure of any dam built there that he ended a memorandum with these prophetic words: "Since a flood could be anticipated, we might consider a series of strategically-placed motion-picture cameras to document the process."

June 5, 1976: The reservoir behind brand-new Teton Dam is almost full. A seepage in the canyon wall began two days before and now the dam itself is vomiting mud. A spring appears at yet another seep, becomes a torrent and a whirlpool forms inside the dam. The dam disintegrates and 80 billion gallons of pent-up water is released -- the second largest flood in North America since the last Ice Age. The torrent continued all day until the huge reservoir was empty. The dam cost $100 million. Damage downstream: about $2 billion.

PBS produced a commendable video of this important book. The four-tape special, available on Amazon's video site and at many libraries, is well worth watching. In it, the author of this book speaks at length, impressively.

Chinatown, the movie with stellar performances by Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, is based to some extent on events described in Cadillac Desert.

Summary of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

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• Books > Subjects > History > Americas > United States
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