Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

People say that they “love” the desert, but few of them love it enough to live there. I mean in the real desert, not in a make-believe city like Phoenix with exotic palms and golf-course lawns and a five-hundred-foot fountain and an artificial surf. Most people “love” the desert by driving through it in air-conditioned cars, “experiencing” its grandeur. That may be some kind of experience, but it is living in a fool’s paradise.

People figured that when the region was settled, rainfall would magically increase, that it would “follow the plow.” In the late 1800s, such theories amounted to Biblical dogma. When they proved catastrophically wrong, Powell’s irrigation ideas were finally embraced and pursued with near fanaticism, until the most gigantic dams were being built on the most minuscule foundations of economic rationality and need. Greening the desert became a kind of Christian ideal.

Not far from Utah, at the threshold of the Great Basin, the rapids die into riffles and the Colorado River becomes, for a stretch of forty miles, calm and sedate. It has entered the Grand Valley, a small oasis of orchards and cows looking utterly out of place in a landscape where it appears to have rained once, about half a million years ago. The oasis is man-made and depends entirely on the river. Canals divert a good share of the flow and spread it over fields, and when the water percolates through the soil and returns to the river it passes through thick deposits of mineral salts, a common phenomenon in the West. As the water leaves the river, its salinity content is around two hundred parts per million; when it returns, the salinity content is sixty-five hundred parts per million.

Along the Gila River in Arizona, the last tributary of the Colorado, is a small agricultural basin which Spaniards and Indians tried to irrigate as early as the sixteenth century. It has poor drainage—the soil is underlain by impermeable clays—so the irrigation water rose right up to the root zones of the crops. With each irrigation, it became saltier, and before long everything that was planted died.

When Echeverría threatened to drag the United States before the World Court at The Hague, Richard Nixon sent his negotiators down to work out a salinity-control treaty. It was signed within a few months.

Nowhere is the salinity problem more serious than in the San Joaquin Valley of California, the most productive farming region in the entire world. There you have a shallow and impermeable clay layer, the residual bottom of an ancient sea, underlying a million or so acres of fabulously profitable land. During the irrigation season, temperatures in the valley fluctuate between 90 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit; the good water evaporates as if the sky were a sponge, the junk water goes down, and the problem gets worse and worse.

A few thousand acres have already gone out of production—you can see the salt on the ground like a dusting of snow. In the next few decades, as irrigation continues, that figure is expected to increase almost exponentially.

The problem in California is that there is absolutely no regulation over groundwater pumping, and, from the looks of things, there won’t be any for many years to come. The farmers loathe the idea, and in California “the farmers” are the likes of Exxon, Tenneco, and Getty Oil. Out on the high plains, the problem is of a different nature. There, the pumping of groundwater is regulated. But the states have all decided to regulate their groundwater out of existence.

The vanishing groundwater in Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nebraska is all part of the Ogallala aquifer, which holds two distinctions: one of being the largest discrete aquifer in the world, the other of being the fastest-disappearing aquifer in the world.

The states knew the groundwater couldn’t last forever (even if the farmers thought it would), so, like the Saudis with their oil, they had to decide how long to make it last. A reasonable period, they decided, was twenty-five to fifty years.

The American West was explored by white men half a century before the first colonists set foot on Virginia’s beaches, but it went virtually uninhabited by whites for another three hundred years. In 1539, Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a nobleman who had married rich and been appointed governor of Guadalajara by the Spanish king, set out on horseback from Mexico with a couple of hundred men, driving into the uncharted north. Coronado was a far kinder conquistador than his ruthless contemporaries Pizarro and De Soto, but he was equally obsessed with gold.

Whether one can justify what the city did, however, is another story. Los Angeles employed chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies to get the water it needed. In the end, it milked the valley bone-dry, impoverishing it, while the water made a number of prominent Los Angeleans very, very rich. There are those who would argue that if all of this was legal, then something is the matter with the law.

Samuel T. Clover’s Daily News, the only paper on record opposing the aqueduct, lobbed a potential bombshell when it reported that the city’s workers, under cover of darkness, were dumping water out of the reservoirs into the Pacific to make them go dry, thus assuring a “yes” vote. But Mulholland’s lame explanation that they had merely been “flushing the system” was widely believed. On September 7, 1905, the bond issue passed, fourteen to one.

Roosevelt was a trust-buster, but only because he feared that unfettered capitalism could breed socialism. (For evidence he only had to look as far as Los Angeles, where Harrison Gray Otis was whipping labor radicals into such a blind, vengeful froth that two of them blew up his printing plant in 1910 and killed twenty of their own.) 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.

When they finally saw the light, however, their attitude miraculously changed—though the myth didn’t—and the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.

The Colorado’s modern notoriety, however; stems not from its wild rapids and plunging canyons but from the fact that it is the most legislated, most debated, and most litigated river in the entire world. It also has more people, more industry, and a more significant economy dependent on it than any comparable river in the world. If the Colorado River suddenly stopped flowing, you would have four years of carryover capacity in the reservoirs before you had to evacuate most of southern California and Arizona and a good portion of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The river system provides over half the water of greater Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix; it grows much of America’s domestic production of fresh winter vegetables; it illuminates the neon city of Las Vegas, whose annual income is one-fourth the entire gross national product of Egypt—the only other place on earth where so many people are so helplessly dependent on one river’s flow.

To some conservationists, the Colorado River is the preeminent symbol of everything mankind has done wrong—a harbinger of a squalid and deserved fate.