Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The battle over the Grand Canyon dams was the conservation movement’s coming of age. Only the upper basin had wanted Echo Park built; the lower-basin states had either remained neutral or opposed it. But now everyone knew the river was overallocated, and everyone wanted to see it replenished by water from somewhere else, so all the basin states were in favor of the Grand Canyon dams. Never before had conservationists challenged the collective will of seven states. Brower and the Sierra Club led the fight. As in the Echo Park battle, he managed to recruit heavyweight expertise. Luna Leopold, one of the country’s leading hydrologists and the son of Aldo Leopold, the famous ecologist, was willing to take a swipe at the Bureau’s flow calculations. Brower found some nuclear engineers from M.I.T. and Bechtel who were eager to demonstrate why nuclear reactors were a cheaper alternative. (Brower would later become one of the leading opponents of nuclear fission.) His most valuable discovery, however, was an utterly unknown thirty-year-old mathematician from New Mexico named Jeffrey Ingram. Ingram was a self-described fanatic about two things: the Grand Canyon, and numbers. He loved playing with figures, and above all he loved exposing figures as frauds. In particular, pyramid schemes fascinated him, and in the Bureau’s pay-back scheme for the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, he thought he had discovered the greatest pyramid scheme anyone ever saw.