Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The Corps’ great work—and its transmutation into one of history’s most successful bureaucracies—began late in the nineteenth century, when it took upon itself the task of restyling America’s largest rivers to accommodate barge traffic and, occasionally, deep-draft ships. At the same time, it found a role for itself in flood control, which it first accomplished by building levees and dikes, and then, after denying for years that reservoirs could control floods, by building flood-control reservoirs. And it built them at a pace that would have left the most ambitious pharaoh dazzled—something like six hundred in sixty years. The Army Engineers have so many hands in so many different types of work that their various activities sometimes cancel each other out. The Corps drains and channels wetlands—it has ruined more wetlands than anyone in history, except perhaps its counterpart in the Soviet Union—yet sometimes prohibits the draining and dredging of wetlands by private developers and other interests. (This was a role forced on the Corps by the Congress, not one it undertook voluntarily.) Its dams control flooding, while its stream-channelization and wetlands-drainage programs cause it. Its subsidization of intensive agriculture—which it does by turning wetlands into dry land, so they may then become soybean fields—increases soil erosion, which pours into the nation’s rivers, which the Corps then has to dredge more frequently. Cynics say this is all done by design, because the...