Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Across the entire West, the Corps, as opportunistic and ruthless an agency as American government has ever seen, was trying to seduce away the Bureau’s irrigation constituency; it was toadying up to big corporate farmers who wanted to monopolize whole rivers for themselves; it was even prepared to defy the President of the United States. As a result, the business of water development was to become a game of chess between two ferociously competitive bureaucracies, on a board that was half a continent plus Alaska, where rivers were the pawns and dams the knights and queens used to checkmate the other’s ambition. But the Corps and the Bureau played a little too well and a little too long for their own good. While they were fighting over a Lake Ontario-size reservoir in the middle of Alaska, and over countless squalid little projects desired by local interest groups, an unprecedented water crisis was gathering on the southern high plains—a crisis tailor-made for their own limitless ambition which, in the end, they would do nothing about. The Corps and the Bureau wasted so much money on frivolous projects which didn’t so much solve the nation’s water situation as satisfy the greed of powerful interests and their own petty ambitions that in the 1980s, despite dozens of new dams and reservoirs built during the intervening years, a water crisis loomed larger than in 1962. Within the next half century, as much irrigated land is likely to go out of production—land that grows nearly ...