Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The 1940s and 1950s were boom years in Arizona. Phoenix—population in 1940, 65,000; population in 1960, 439,000—grew overnight from outsize village to big city. Between 1920 and 1960, the state’s population doubled twice, and millions of irrigated acres came into production. One of the revelations of the postwar period was that, given the opportunity, people were happy to leave temperate climates with cold winters for desert climates with fierce summers, provided there was water to sustain them and air conditioning to keep them from perishing (Phoenix, in the summer, is virtually intolerable without air conditioning). Not that the migrants had bothered to ask whether there was enough water before they loaded their belongings and drove west. They simply came; no one could stop them. How they were to fill their pools and water their lawns was Arizona’s problem.