Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

“During the next twenty years,” Cassidy went on, “we estimate that we will have to provide some 320 million acre-feet of reservoir storage at a cost of about $15 billion; about thirteen thousand miles of new or improved inland waterways; about sixty new or improved commercial harbors; thirty million kilowatts of hydroelectric power–generating capacity; some eleven thousand miles of levees, floodwalls, and channel improvements; and recreational facilities for perhaps 300 million visitors at our reservoirs. . . .” If all of that seemed “unduly large or visionary,” Cassidy admonished, “let us remember the responsibilities our nation is facing.” It is worth taking a moment to put some of these figures in perspective. In 1962, the total amount of federally built reservoir storage in the nation was somewhere around 300 million acre-feet. In twenty years, Cassidy wanted to more than double that. Every year, the Mississippi River carries about 355 million acre-feet of water out to sea, the runoff of most of the United States from Pennsylvania to Montana. In twenty years, according to the Corps of Engineers, we were going to put the equivalent of 90 percent of that water behind dams. In 1962, there were 37,342 megawatts of installed hydroelectric power–generating capacity in the United States; by 1982, that figure was nearly to double. By 1962, nearly all the major rivers in the United States—long reaches of the Mississippi, the Snake, the Columbia, the Illinois, the Missouri, the ...