Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Realistically speaking, the dam made no sense at all. Neither did Devil’s Canyon Dam. The last thing Alaska had to worry about was an energy crisis. It had 300,000 inhabitants; its population could fit inside a few square blocks of Manhattan. Even then, before the gigantic North Slope oil field was discovered, it had proven oil reserves estimated at 170 million barrels (the North Slope was to increase the figure by some ten billion more). It had 360 million board-feet of timber; the driftwood floating down the Susitna River seemed enough fuel to fulfill Anchorage’s needs. It had, right around Anchorage, some of the most dramatic tidal variations in the world; the difference between high and low tide approached twenty feet, and a single tidal project taking advantage of similar conditions at DeRance, France, was producing hundreds of megawatts, more than Anchorage (which held half of Alaska’s population) would need for decades. Mainly, though, it had plenty of smaller hydroelectric sites scattered about, some of them practically at Anchorage’s doorstep. They should be developed first—that was the “orderly” water development the water planners were always talking about.