Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

During the first and only term of his presidency, Jimmy Carter decided that the age of water projects had come to a deserved end. As a result, he drafted a “hit list” on which were a couple of dozen big dams and irrigation projects, east and west, which he vowed not to fund. Carter was merely stunned by the reaction from the East; he was blown over backward by the reaction from the West. Of about two hundred western members of Congress, there weren’t more than a dozen who dared to support him. One of the projects would return five cents in economic benefits for every taxpayer dollar invested; one offered irrigation farmers subsidies worth more than $1 million each; another, a huge dam on a middling California river, would cost more than Hoover, Shasta, Glen Canyon, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee combined. But Carter’s hit list had as much to do with his one-term presidency as Iran.