Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Had the editorialists and reporters taken a longer look, they might have seen that the big story was not the dam at all but the TVA itself, an agency that had evolved from a benevolent paternalism into the biggest power producer, biggest strip miner, and single biggest polluter in the United States. Unaccountable to the public, largely unaccountable to Congress, the TVA was an elephantine relic of the age of public works; it had undoubtedly done its region some good, but by the 1970s it had passed the uncharted point in an agency’s career—twenty years, thirty years, sometimes much less—when it confronts new challenges with barnacled precepts and, in a sense, turns on the constituency it was created to help. Had they looked around them, the reporters might have seen that Appalachia, the godchild of this benevolent agency for four decades, still looked socially depressed; physically, it looked horrifying. The single most important reason was the TVA’s purchase of immense quantities of strip-mined coal. It still clung to the discredited notion that the salvation of Appalachia lay in cheap power, and strip-mined coal was the cheapest fuel. But the strip-mining, besides eliminating thousands of jobs in deep-mined coal, was creating a scene of gruesome devastation. The denuded mountains seemed covered with a reddish-brown rash, and rivers that were once pristine were running with what looked like old blood. Meanwhile, the TVA’s older coal-fired power plants were creating polluti...