Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Large and bearded, inclined toward jeans, cowboy boots, and western shirts, Martin looks as if he would feel more at home in the cockpit of a Peterbilt than at a professor’s desk, even if his writings are nationally known. His first notoriety came in 1973, when he and a colleague, Robert Young—who was so wounded by the hounding he got that he opted to leave the state—published a book called Water Supplies and Economic Growth in an Arid Environment, an innocuous-sounding little tract which, in Arizona, was almost as revolutionary as Das Kapital. They first asked, as a matter of speculation, what might happen if the Central Arizona Project was not built. The underground aquifers, Young and Martin reckoned, would undoubtedly be depleted as the farmers continued to pump them out (in the 1960s, the rate of overdraft—use over replenishment—climbed as high as four million acre-feet per year). As pumping costs rose due to the dropping water table, some farmers would begin to go out of business. But there was still enough water so that the decline would be very slow. Arizona’s farm income, by Young and Martin’s calculations, would be reduced by about one-fifth of 1 percent per year. The reason the decline in income would be so modest was self-evident: as pumped water got more expensive, the farmers would conserve it better and switch to higher-value crops, and they would do more with less. The way to see if the Central Arizona Project Was worth building, then, was to see if each ac...