Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Whatever the case, the timing was miserable. It was 1977 and California was in the midst of its driest year on record—the year before had been the third-driest—and Auburn Dam was on the hit list. Though Auburn’s existence would hardly have helped the state a bit, no one was about to notice that during a drought. Colorado, whose mountains were so bereft of snow that many of the ski slopes were closed in February, had three projects on the list, the most of any state. None of them would have helped much, either, but reason is the first casualty in a drought. The Central Arizona Project was already half-built, but it, too, was on the hit list. The western governors, who saw, by Andrus’s own embarrassed and baffled reaction, the hopeless disarray of the Carter administration, milked the incident for all it was worth. Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado had to plumb the depths of his emotions to convey properly his deep and profound sense of outrage and shock. “We’re not going to be satisfied,” Lamm shouted at a huge crowd of scribbling reporters, “until we get our projects back.” Governor Raul Castro of Arizona was “stunned and angry.” The ever-opportunistic Jerry Brown of California, who had won over the state’s powerful environmental community by publicly opposing the only two federal dams then being built in California—Auburn and New Melones—made one of his deft about-faces and said, “We want to build more dams.”