Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The Bureau of Reclamation set out to help the small farmers of the West but ended up making a lot of rich farmers even wealthier at the small farmers’ expense. Through water development, the federal government set out to rescue farmers from natural hardships—droughts and floods—but created a new kind of hardship in the form of a chronic, seemingly permanent condition of agricultural glut. We set out to tame the rivers and ended up killing them. We set out to make the future of the American West secure; what we really did was make ourselves rich and our descendants insecure. Few of them are apt to regret that we built Hoover Dam; on balance, however, they may find themselves wishing that we had left things pretty much as they were. — Suppose, though, that it were possible to solve at one stroke all the West’s problems with water.