Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

“Contracts are made to be broken.” There, in a simple phrase, was perhaps the worst legacy of the Bureau of Reclamation’s eighty years as the indulgent godfather of the arid West. The irrigation farmers not only had come to expect heavily subsidized water as a kind of right, allowing them to pretend that the region’s preeminent natural fact—a drastic scarcity of that substance—was an illusion. They now believed that if it turned out they couldn’t afford the water, the Bureau (which is to say, the nation’s taxpayers) would practically give it away. These farmers were about the most conservative faction in what may be the most politically conservative of all the fifty states. They regularly sent to Congress politicians eager to demolish the social edifice built by the New Deal—to abolish welfare, school lunch programs, aid to the handicapped, funding for the arts, even to sell off some of the national parks and public lands. But their constituents had become the ultimate example of what they decried, so coddled by the government that they lived in the cocoonlike world of a child. They remained oblivious to what their CAP water would cost them but were certain it would be offered to them at a price they could afford. The farmers had become the very embodiment of the costly, irrational welfare state they loathed—and they had absolutely no idea.