A review of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner, Penguin Group, 1986
As droughts are becoming more common and as water demand across the country continues to grow, U.S. water sources are being depleted at an unprecedented rate. This scarcity is leading to water conflicts between cities, states, and even regions. Recently, Georgia asked to “correct” its border in order to have access to the upper bank of the Tennessee River to satisfy the growing demand in the Atlanta region. While this is simply a proposal at the moment, it is far from a simple request, and these conflicts over water are becoming more and more frequent as this natural resource becomes scarcer.
Water has been fought over for centuries. In the early 1900s, the fight was between the Owens Valley and the city of Los Angeles in what is now known as the first “water war.” Then, throughout the century the fight became a political power struggle over which agency, the Bureau of Reclamation or the U.S. Army Corps or Engineers, could manipulate and manage the water in the West the quickest. It was these ongoing battles over this finite resource that defined the 20th century and shaped the western United States. This comprehensive history is documented in Marc Reisner’s classic book, Cadillac Desert.
In 1979, American environmentalist Reisner was awarded the Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship, allowing him to research the federal government’s water resources policies. At the conclusion of his research he wrote Cadillac Desert, published in 1986. Reisner drew national attention to the hasty and ambitious implementation of the country’s water projects and their consequences that we continue to feel today.
In the opening of the book the West is described as, “a civilization whose success was achieved in the pretension that natural obstacles do not exist.” This overarching theme of nature being conquerable is made plain by the contrast between the title and the book’s content. Reisner chose, Cadillac, meaning “outstanding example,” which identified the West as the prime example of a desert, and then illustrates the uneasy conquering of this desert throughout the book by explaining the building of 80,000 dams over about a seventy year period. Indeed, every major river in the West, except for Yellowstone, was dammed during this time. Such extensive and rapid dam building posed a problem environmentally because dams alter the flow of the rivers both up and downstream, which affects supported habitats and nearby communities dependent on those ecosystems. While the dams produced immense amounts of hydroelectric energy and diverted water to areas where it was needed most, it is difficult to justify their massive implementation with the country’s struggling water situation today. It appears that the country may have been better off leaving the West untouched.
One event recounted in the book sets the stage for the Wests’ first war over water. In the 1920s several ambitious men turned a desert into an oasis in Los Angeles’ first water wars. Fred Eaton, William Mulholland, and Harrison Gray Otis, were the three most influential individuals in LA at the time, and despite the dire state of the city now, they are responsible for allowing LA to become the second largest city in the U.S. today.
Reisner illustrates how these three power-hungry men deceptively, but legally, built a 223-mile long aqueduct that brought water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles. Eaton, Mulholland, and Otis slowly manipulated the citizens of the Owens Valley into selling them their water rights by sending individuals into the Valley posing as investors. The Owens Valley residents thought their coming was a financial blessing. Little did they know it was all part of a plan to literally, leave them high and dry.
With 40 miles of water rights and financial backing from the most prominent Los Angeleans, Los Angeles would have enough water to satisfy the city and have a surplus. Afraid of the use-it-or-lose-it principle, the idea that the Valley could reclaim their water rights if the water being diverted to LA wasn’t being used, Mulholland devised a plan to use it all. He cleverly decided to expand the boundaries of the city of Los Angeles to include the parched San Fernando Valley, which meant the surplus water coming from the Owens Valley would cease to be surplus.
This event marked the beginning of the new West. Moving water over mountains and for hundreds of miles, was a reality. Now the desert climate of southern California could become the biggest agricultural producer in the country. As Reisner explains out, the vivid and true tale of California’s first water wars prefigured a new era of the West’s history, which is defined by dams and political wars between the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Their disagreements over which agency would build what where and where that water would go often resulted in careless actions being taken in order to “beat” the other agency. This competitive, bureaucratic blindness is what led to much of the West’s poor water infrastructures.
Near the conclusion of the book, when speaking about the state of California, Reisner wrote, “If, god forbid, another twenty five million [people] arrive, there will still be plenty [of water] for them. The only limiting factor will be energy.” As we have seen today, this is no longer true. Due to a warming climate and demand that exceeds supply in a region that shouldn’t have had a supply in the first place, the city of Los Angeles is in a crisis. While Reisner’s casual prophetic statement has been found to be false, it does not cause the book to lose relevance. Water scarcity is no longer limited to the arid West, but can be seen in different regions across the country, like in Tennessee and Georgia. Because this is becoming a national issue, a comprehensive history of water in the West, how a desert was turned into an oasis, is becoming increasingly more relevant as regions are becoming drier. While lessons shouldn’t be taken directly from the creators of Los Angeles, meaning we don’t want to deceive our fellow citizens to get what we want, the point should be that they did in fact bring water to an arid region. This idea of bringing water to places where it is scarce is going to become more common as the country continues to dry up.
Reisner manages to write a nonfiction book as if it is fiction by bringing drama to the political wars over Western water and allowing the information he is conveying to be accessible to everyone. His environmentalist voice is full of excessive detail because of his passion for nature, cynicism because of his knowledge of the issues, and profuse knowledge about the history of water in the West. Cadillac Desert is an engaging, revealing, comical, and scandalous piece of text that will provide its reader with an astonishing history of how the West was made, at least as long as the water lasts.