Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Powell’s ideas—at least his insistence that a federal irrigation program was the only salvation of the arid West—were embraced, tentatively at first, then more passionately, then with a kind of desperate insistence. The result was a half-century rampage of dam-building and irrigation development which, in all probability, went far beyond anything Powell would have liked.

On this same line, huge San Bernardino Valencias found their way to the 1884 World’s Fair in New Orleans, where they attracted crowds. No one could imagine oranges grown in the western United States. It was then and there, more or less, that the phenomenon of modern Los Angeles began.

Its distance from Los Angeles was staggering, but its remoteness was overshadowed by one majestically significant fact: Owens Lake, the terminus of the river, sat at an elevation of about four thousand feet. Los Angeles was a few feet above sea level. The water, carried in pressure aqueducts and siphons, could arrive under its own power. Not one watt of pumping energy would be required. The only drawback was that the city might have to take the water by theft.

Los Angeles employed chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies to get the water it needed.

The Paiutes showed her what no one else saw—that order and stability are the most transient of states, that there is rarely such a thing as a partial defeat.

Homesteading in California was another name for graft; half of the great private empires were amassed by hiring “homesteaders” to con the government out of its land.

The conservation of Roosevelt and Pinchot was utilitarian; their progressivism—they spoke of “the greater good for the greatest number”—had a nice ring to it, but it also happens to be the progressivism of cancer cells.

To build a great dam on a tempestuous river like the Snake was terrifically exhilarating work; enforcing a hodgepodge of social ideals was hardly that. Stopping a wild river was a straightforward job, subjugable to logic, and the result was concrete, heroic, real: a dam. Enforcing repayment obligations and worrying about speculators and excess landowners was a cumbersome, troublesome, time-consuming nuisance—a nuisance without reward.

But Ickes and Mike Straus cooked up the idea of hiring Woody Guthrie as a “research assistant” to write some songs in praise of the dams. Guthrie, an itinerant Okie guitar picker, toured the Northwest like a prince in a chauffeured car, composing paeans to water and power like “Talking Columbia”:

In the end, the Axis powers were no match for two things: the Russian winters, and an American hydroelectric capacity that could turn out sixty thousand aircraft in four years.

For a dam, whether or not it made particularly good sense, whether or not it decimated a salmon fishery or drowned a gorgeous stretch of wild river, was a bonanza to the constituents of the Congressman in whose district it was located—especially the engineering and construction firms that became largely dependent on the government for work. The whole business was like a pyramid scheme—the many (the taxpayers) were paying to enrich the few—but most members of Congress figured that if they voted for everyone else’s dams, someday they would get a dam, too.

Its dams control flooding, while its stream-channelization and wetlands-drainage programs cause it. Its subsidization of intensive agriculture—which it does by turning wetlands into dry land, so they may then become soybean fields—increases soil erosion, which pours into the nation’s rivers, which the Corps then has to dredge more frequently.

The only problem with that rationale was that the big growers wanted all of the water for themselves, they wanted the government to develop it for them, and they didn’t want to have to pay for it.

The Corps of Engineers’ obsession with humbling the wild Missouri River seemed to derive mainly from the fact that Colonel Pick was mad at it.

But no humiliation could have been greater than for them to see the signs that were erected around the reservoir as it slowly filled, submerging the dying cottonwoods and drowning the land they had occupied for at least four hundred years. In what looked to the Indians like a stroke of malevolent inspiration, the Corps of Engineers had decided to call the giant, turbid pool of water Lake Sacajawea.

But one’s sympathies might be tempered if one were told that the Bureau, over the intense opposition of a local town, and on a pristine stretch of river up for inclusion in the Wild and Scenic Rivers system, was perfectly capable of proposing a dam which, by its own admission, was completely useless.

At one point, according to a former director of the National Park Service, Horace Albright, it had even toyed with the idea of damming the river’s outflow from Yellowstone Lake and turning the jewel of Yellowstone Park into a regulated reservoir, and Albright had ordered his rangers to take the drastic step of hiding the Park Service boats so the Bureau couldn’t come in and survey.

Throughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture.

To him, it seemed, nothing in nature was worthwhile unless it was visited by a lot of people. If it was a pristine river, accessible only by floatplane or jeep or on foot, navigable only by whitewater raft or kayak or canoe, populated by wily fish such as steelhead that were difficult to catch, then it was no good. But if the river was transformed into a big flatwater reservoir off an interstate highway, with marinas and houseboats for rent—then it was worth something after all.

One of his former aides said Dominy liked people the way we like animals—we like them, but we eat them.

In those days—the late 1920s—backpacking and mountaineering were considered the oddest of preoccupations, the province of slightly deranged British peers.

In that particular speech, Brower had said that he wouldn’t mind dams in the Grand Canyon as long as the Bureau built a comparable canyon somewhere else. He received a standing ovation—in Denver.

With one hand they dam them; with the other they channelize them; the two actions cancel each other out—the channelized streams promote the floods the dams were built to prevent—and the whole spectacle is viewed by some as a perpetual employment machine invented by engineers.

To a degree that is impossible for most people to fathom, water projects are the grease gun that lubricates the nation’s legislative machinery. Congress without water projects would be like an engine without oil; it would simply seize up.

Everyone knows there is a desert somewhere in California, but many people believe it is off in some remote corner of the state—the Mojave Desert, Palm Springs, the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. But inhabited California, most of it, is, by strict definition, a semidesert. Los Angeles is drier than Beirut; Sacramento is as dry as the Sahel; San Francisco is just slightly rainier than Chihuahua. About 65 percent of the state receives under twenty inches of precipitation a year. California, which fools visitors into believing it is “lush,” is a beautiful fraud.

What few people, including some Californians, know is that agriculture uses 81 percent of all the water in this most populous and industrialized of states. California’s $18 billion agricultural industry—and it is a gigantic, complex, integrated industry—is the largest and still the most important in the state, Silicon Valley notwithstanding.

Several of the “big farmers” who would get much of the water from the Feather River Project were oil companies—the same oil companies that were paying into the Tidelands Oil Fund. In exchange for a modest extraction tax—quickly offset by the billions they would make on the easily accessible oil—they would have their barren, worthless acreages in the San Joaquin Valley turned opalescent green. And they would get the growth, and the cars, and the freeways, that would increase the demand for—and the cost of—the oil!

Moving water in California requires more electrical energy than is used by several states.

When the Bureau’s dams went up, regulating the rivers and allowing the marshlands to be dried up—about 93 percent of the Central Valley’s original wetlands are gone—it conveniently ignored the economic value of the millions of ducks whose habitat would be ruined. But later, when it became convenient to overvalue their worth, economic alchemy turned them into gold.

By the economists’ calculations, the true cost of delivering water to Westlands has now reached $97 per acre-foot; the farmers are being charged between $7.50 and $11.80. Taking the average farm size in the district, this translates into a subsidy of around $500,000 per farm—per year.

All things man-made had become plentiful, but a great menu of things once abundant in nature had become scarce.

Another way to think about the issue: the same 80–20 usage ratio between agriculture and urban customers during the previous major drought (1987–1992) still holds now, but nine million more people live in the state. Per capita urban use has declined dramatically while the total water use by agriculture has remained steady.