Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

What was ironic about the Bureau and the Corps staging their climactic battle in Alaska was that, strictly speaking, neither of them had any business being there. Alaska has very little agriculture—about the only place one can grow anything is in the Matanuska Valley north of Anchorage—and its few farmers employ little irrigation, if any. Besides, the state has more groundwater than one can dream of, most of it a few feet beneath the surface of the earth. The only navigable inland waterway is the Yukon River, and what the Corps was proposing to build would have put an end to that. Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the tiny towns along the Yukon sit on bluffs; only once did Fairbanks have a serious flood, and the city was expanding up the hill, away from the Tanana River. Irrigation, flood control, navigation—none of those applied; yet those were the principal assignments of the Bureau and the Corps. Everything else—recreation, power, fish and wildlife “enhancement”—was supposed to be incidental to those activities. In Alaska, however, such “incidental” benefits were the only rationale they could come up with to build dams. And the dams they wanted to build were too monumental to pass up.