Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

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.

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.

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. Very little of the water seeps through the Corcoran Clay, so it rises back up into the root zones—in places, the clay is only a few feet down—waterlogs the land, and kills the crops.

Today, the Central Valley Project is still the most mind-boggling public works project on five continents, and in the 1960s the state built its own project, nearly as large. Together, the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project have captured enough water to supply eight cities the size of New York. But the projects brought into production far more land than they had water to supply, so the growers had to supplement their surface water with tens of thousands of wells. As a result, the groundwater overdraft, instead of being alleviated, has gotten worse.

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

California groundwater regulation was enacted in 2014 by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, but it is not comprehensively managed, and significant gaps exist in its coverage. A recent Stanford Water in the West study found that it protects less than 2% of California’s groundwater.

the Central Arizona Project, which comes as close to socialism as anything this country has ever done (the main difference being that those who are subsidized are well-off, even rich).

In a hundred years, actually less, God’s riverine handiwork in the West has been stood on its head.

But even as the myth of the welcoming, bountiful West was shattered, the myth of the independent yeoman farmer remained intact. With huge dams built for him at public expense, and irrigation canals, and the water sold for a quarter of a cent per ton—a price which guaranteed that little of the public’s investment would ever be paid back—the West’s yeoman farmer became the embodiment of the welfare state, though he was the last to recognize it.

In the spring of 1889, the jet stream that had bypassed the West was feeding a thoroughfare of ocean moisture into the eastern states. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, it rained more or less continuously for weeks.

Above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the South Fork of the Conemaugh River, a tributary of the Allegheny, sat a big earthfill dam built thirty-seven years earlier by the Pennsylvania Canal Company; it was, for a while, the largest dam in the world.

Before anyone had time to flee, Johnstown was swallowed by a thirty-foot wave.

The number of dead was eventually put at twenty-two hundred—twice as many casualties as in the burning of the General Slocum on the East River in 1904; many more than in the San Francisco earthquake and fire; nine times as many as in the Chicago fire. The only single disaster in American history that took more lives was the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, eleven years later.

Approximately 2900 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Casualties in the 1900 Galveston hurricane are estimated at more than 6000.

by the late 1880s, private irrigation efforts had come to an inglorious end. The good sites were simply gone. Most of the pioneers who had settled successfully across the hundredth meridian had gone to Washington and California and Oregon, where there was rain, or had chosen homesteads along streams whose water they could easily divert.

Through the 1890s, western Senators and Congressmen resisted all suggestions that reclamation was a task for government alone—not even for the states, which had failed as badly as the private companies, but for the national government. To believe such a thing was to imply that their constituents did not measure up to the myth that enshrouded them—that of the indomitable individualist. 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 passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902 was such a sharp left turn in the course of American politics that historians still gather and argue over why it was passed. To some, it was America’s first flirtation with socialism, an outgrowth of the Populist and Progressive movements of the time. To others, it was a disguised reactionary measure, an effort to relieve the mobbed and riotous conditions of the eastern industrial cities—an act to save heartless capitalism from itself. To some, its roots were in Manifest Destiny, whose incantations still held people in their sway; to others, it was a military ploy to protect and populate America’s western flank against the ascendant Orient.

On June 17, 1902, the Reclamation Act became law.

Powell had proposed that in those inhospitable regions where only livestock could be raised, settlers should be allowed to homestead 2,560 acres of the public domain—but allocated enough water to irrigate only twenty. The Reclamation Act gave everyone up to 160 acres (a man and wife could jointly farm 320 acres), whether they settled in Mediterranean California or in the frigid interior steppes of Wyoming, where the extremes of climate rival those in Mongolia. You could grow wealthy on 160 acres of lemons in California and starve on 160 acres of irrigated pasture in Wyoming or Montana, but the act was blind to such nuances.

Congress caught on quickly, and was soon writing “omnibus” authorization bills, in which bad projects were thrown in, willy-nilly, with good ones. (Later, Congress would learn a new trick: attaching sneaky little amendments authorizing particularly wretched projects to legislation dealing with issues such as education and hurricane relief.) As a result, instead of weeding out or discouraging bad projects, the “reforms” began to concentrate on making bad projects work—or, to put it more bluntly, on bailing them out.

The Colorado is so used up on its way to the sea that only a burbling trickle reaches its dried-up delta at the head of the Gulf of California, and then only in wet years. To some conservationists, the Colorado River is the preeminent symbol of everything mankind has done wrong—a harbinger of a squalid and deserved fate.

One could almost say, then, that the history of the Colorado River contains a metaphor for our time. One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam—a fifty-year flowering of hopes when all things appeared possible. And one could say that, amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river’s dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits.

In 1930, the American West had a population of eleven million people, about the population of New York State. Half of the people were in California, by far the most populous and modern of the western states.

the rationale they needed to build a dam to store water. With river-basin accounting, the equation was stood on its head: a lot of bad projects—economically infeasible ones—created

The centralized welfare state that everyone decries, and nearly everyone depends on to some degree, is said to have emerged from the war, the Depression, and the Great Society. It might be more accurate to say that it was born in the rivers of the American West. Hoover was big; Shasta was half again as big; Grand Coulee was bigger than both together.

The Westinghouse generators built for Grand Coulee were rated for a maximum output of 105,000 kilowatts each, which was the capacity of a good-sized oil power plant that could run, say, Duluth. For the entire duration of the war, they ran at 125,000 kilowatts, twenty-four hours a day, without a glitch.

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. We didn’t so much outmaneuver, outman, or outfight the Axis as simply outproduce it.

By 1956, the Congress had voted 110 separate authorizations for the Bureau of Reclamation, some encompassing a dozen or more irrigation projects and dams. Of these, seventy-seven—nearly three-quarters—were authorized between 1928 and 1956, along with hundreds of projects built by the Corps of Engineers in the East and West. In that astonishingly brief twenty-eight-year period between the first preparations for Hoover Dam and the passage of the Colorado River Storage Project Act, the most fateful transformation that has ever been visited on any landscape, anywhere, was wrought.

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. And this, as much as the economic folly and the environmental damage, was the legacy of the go-go years: the corruption of national politics. Water projects came to epitomize the pork barrel; they

Important legislation—an education bill, a foreign aid bill, a conservation bill—was imprisoned until the President agreed to let a powerful committee chairman tack on a rider authorizing his pet dam.

What had begun as an emergency program to put the country back to work, to restore its sense of self-worth, to settle the refugees of the Dust Bowl, grew into a nature-wrecking, money-eating monster that our leaders lacked the courage or ability to stop.

Congressmen hostile to the Reclamation program loved to crucify Belle Fourche at appropriations time; it was like stoning a flightless auk.

By the time he became Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Water and Power in 1949, Bill Warne had developed an obsession: rerouting the fabulous amount of water that spilled into the Pacific from Eureka on north.

In the end, he wrote a blistering eighteen-page letter to the Corps accusing it of “computational manipulation” and of ignoring the environment; then, exercising his gubernatorial discretion, he vetoed the dam. According to friends, Carter was deeply incensed by the Corps’ reliance on deception to justify the dam; as an Annapolis graduate, he didn’t believe a military unit would do such a thing.

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.

In the Congress, water projects are a kind of currency, like wampum, and water development itself is a kind of religion. Senators who voted for drastic cuts in the school lunch program in 1981 had no compunction about voting for $20 billion worth of new Corps of Engineers projects in 1984, the largest such authorization ever.

“There is no coherent federal water resources management policy,” he read. “. . . extensive overlap of agency activities . . . several million acres of productive agricultural and forest land and commercial and sport fisheries [have been ruined] while [other] large expenditures have been made to protect these resources . . . overlapping and conflicting missions . . . large-scale destruction of natural ecosystems . . . ‘the pork barrel’ . . . obsolete standards . . . self-serving . . . pressure from special interests.”

the State Water Project, more than anything else, is the symbol of California’s immense wealth, determination, and grandiose vision—a demonstration that it can take its rightful place in the company of nations rather than mere states. It has also offered one of the country’s foremost examples of socialism for the rich.

It was a subsidy that had an architectural elegance, a wonderful symmetry to it. 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!

“He did it for the old man” was how Jerry Brown’s last loyalists explained the spectacle of the younger Brown promoting what seemed certain to become the most expensive water project in the history of the world.

The fifty-two members of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District are protected, by charter, against conflict-of-interest disclosures. No one has to release information on stock ownership, business connections, or anything else that might provide a clearer picture of where their true interests lie. As a result, no one knew much about them—though many tried to find out—except what was obvious: in the 1960s most were white, male, middle-aged or older, wealthy, and passionately committed to water development.

The presence of Getty (and Chevron USA) in the service area of the California Water Project again pointed up the architectural brilliance with which the project was conceived. They pay a severance tax to California on oil they pump off Long Beach, which is immediately put into a fund that makes annual interest-free “loans” of $25 million a year to the State Water Project, which delivers doubly subsidized irrigation water to their formerly worthless land.

The Bureau is like one of these crooks with money earning interest in twenty different banks—it has to spend the money on something. It is all borrowed money—it belongs to the people of the United States—but the people of the United States don’t know that. The whole thing is a machine, a perpetual-motion machine that keeps churning out dams, which the politicians and most westerners are reflexively in favor of, and the whole business is running the country into the ground.

What Congress has chosen to do, in effect, is purify water at a cost exceeding $300 an acre-foot so that upriver irrigators can continue to grow surplus crops with federally subsidized water that costs them $3.50 an acre-foot.

the West’s dependence on distant and easily disruptible dams and aqueducts is just the most palpable kind of vulnerability it now has to face. The more insidious forces—salt poisoning of the soil, groundwater mining, the inexorable transformation of the reservoirs from water to solid ground—are, in the long run, a worse threat.

the American West, the Bureau and the Corps fostered a similar style of water development that, though amazingly fruitful in the short run, leaves everyone and everything more vulnerable in the end.

There, in a nutshell, is how one of the nation’s preeminent examples of reform legislation is stood completely on its head: illegal subsidies enrich big farmers, whose excess production depresses crop prices nationwide and whose waste of cheap water creates an environmental calamity that could cost billions to solve.

If blame is laid anywhere, it ought to be laid at Congress’s door. Congress authorized the Central Valley Project; Congress approved the Westlands contract; Congress persistently refused to reform the Reclamation Act in any way except to enlarge the subsidies and to permit subsidized water to be sold to bigger farms; Congress, instead of offering incentives to conserve water, issued a multibillion-dollar license to waste it in the form of more and more dams.

The Bureau of Reclamation set out to help the small farmers of the West but ended up making a lot of rich farmers even wealthier at the small farmers’ expense.

By erecting thirty thousand dams of significant size across the American West, they dewatered countless rivers, wiped out millions of acres of riparian habitat, shut off many thousands of river miles of salmon habitat, silted over spawning beds, poisoned return flows with agricultural chemicals, set the plague of livestock loose on the arid land—in a nutshell, they made it close to impossible for numerous native species to survive.

The Columbia was once the greatest salmon river in the world: Fifteen million fish returned every year to spawn; today there are fewer than two million, and half of the watershed’s salmon runs (dozens in all) are in fairly imminent danger of going extinct.