Thirsty West
Reisner, Marc
Thirsty West CADILLAC DESERT by Marc Reisner Viking Penguin. 582 pp. $22.95. This is a long, passionately written, and informative book about the Bureau of Reclamation's crusade to bring water to...
...it has been inventing a whole new realm of subsidies, which are quite possibly illegal, in order to keep the price from going up...
...For seven years, from 1972 to 1979, he was a staff writer for the Natural Resources Defense Council...
...As John Wesley Powell of Grand Canyon and Shiloh fame pointed out, the United States is substantially desert west of the 100th meridian, and the desert is a formidable antagonist...
...This is a long, passionately written, and informative book about the Bureau of Reclamation's crusade to bring water to the American desert...
...Now one thinks of expensive cars, double martinis, and swimming pools...
...What they seem not to understand is how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made...
...In 1979 he received an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to investigate water resources in the West...
...Reisner is a bold, assertive writer, and he marshals his facts well...
...Its main drawbacks," he says of one variation of such a plan, "are that it would largely destroy what is left of the natural West and it might require taking Canada by force...
...In an epilogue, Reisner deals with the Natural Resources Defense Council's 1985 report on the Central Valley Project in California...
...Irrigation farmers, not content with surface water, are overdrawing groundwater...
...Reisner scorns a grand scheme evolved by the North American Water and Power Alliance in the 1950s to help solve the West's problems with Alaskan and Canadian water and power...
...The author, Marc Reisner, takes a dim view of the crusade...
...What has not changed, Reisner reminds us, is the deficiency in rainfall...
...William K. Wyant (William K. Wyant for years covered environmental issues for the St...
...The apocalyptic plan might have delighted Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe...
...In the case of the huge subterranean reserve called the Ogallala aquifer, a heritage of several ice ages now ranging under seven thirsty Western states, the yearly depletion rate is said to equal the annual flow of the Colorado River...
...There may be some things about water that Reisner does not know, but after reading Cadillac Desert, one is inclined to believe that he has done his homework...
...According to the report," he notes, "the Bureau [of Reclamation] not only has been giving its California clients—the nation's richest farmers—cheap water...
...The huge man-made reservoirs behind the magnificent array of dams are gradually silting up...
...As the title Cadillac Desert suggests, the American West's vigorous pursuit of water has given the word "desert" a better public image than it used to have...
...Despite all the benefits claimed for Federal water development, Reisner argues that the cost of it has been "a vandaliza-tion of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...He wrote "Westward in Eden...
...Much of the book is devoted to the adventures and exploits of the immensely colorful water titans of the Western past, such as Reclamation Commissioners Mike Straus and Floyd Dominy, and William Mulholland, the Irish immigrant who delivered the Owens River to Los Angeles...
...But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels, the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers, has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska...
...There is not enough water in the West to lick the desert...
...River water has become increasingly salty...
...It used to evoke sand, poverty, prospectors, burros, and thirst...
...Desert, semidesert, call it what you will," Reisner writes...
...The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-size section green—and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater...
...Part of that reckoning may be bringing to birth a gigantic, horrendous water project that would harness the mighty rivers of Alaska and British Columbia to send their waters tumbling into the Rocky Mountain trench...
...Reisner does not confine himself to the often-told tales about the inequity of the Federal Government's water programs, which have tended to give an advantage to large farmers over small farmers whom the Reclamation Act of 1902 was intended to benefit...
Vol. 50 • December 1986 • No. 12
