Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Dominy’s Bureau regarded the operation as a “success,” failing utterly to recognize the public relations catastrophe into which it had happily stepped. Even Imperial Valley farmers, who had so much water to waste that some of them applied ten or twelve feet per year to their crops, were opposed to the dredging because they liked to shoot ducks. Ben Avery, a widely read outdoor columnist for the Arizona Republic—a newspaper never known to oppose water development unless it was California’s—adopted Topock Marsh as his personal crusade and made a point of savaging the Bureau several times a year. In June of 1966, one of his columns finally caught Dominy’s attention. “I believe we will have to take Avery on,” he wrote to his regional director, Arleigh West, “or face up to the realities [sic] that there is a great deal of truth in what he is saying.” In other words, Dominy knew Avery was right. He knew that Topock Marsh was pitiful compensation for all the habitat the Bureau and Corps had ruined. He knew that the marsh would reappear unless the Bureau continued to spend millions of dollars trying to annihilate it. But which course of action did he choose? The Bureau, he decided, was going to deny everything Ben Avery said and continue demolishing the marsh.