Cadillac Desert Quotes

“In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Reason is the first casualty in a drought.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“When archaeologists from some other planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude that our temples were dams.

Imponderably massive, constructed with exquisite care, our dams will outlast anything else we have built — skyscrapers, cathedrals, bridges, even nuclear power plants. When forests push through the rotting streets of New York and the Empire State Building is a crumbling hulk, Hoover Dam will sit astride the Colorado River much as it does today — intact, formidable, serene.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Ours was the first and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locale. —Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, on sailing up the Colorado River to a point near the present location of Las Vegas, in 1857”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Well, I’ll tell you. You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathé. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathé. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop the goddamned waste!”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Then came cheap oil, electricity, and the motorized centrifugal pump. Finally freed from all constraints but nature’s (irrigation would last only as long as the finite aquifer held out), the farmers began pumping in the finest California tradition—which is to say, as if tomorrow would never come.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“To some conservationists, the Colorado River is the preeminent symbol of everything mankind has done wrong—a harbinger of a squalid and deserved fate. To its preeminent impounder, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, it is the perfection of an ideal. The”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“In 1904, the newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power issued its first public report. 'The time has come,' it said, 'when we shall have to supplement the supply from another source.' With that simple statement, William Mulholland was about to become a modern Moses. But instead of leading his people to the promised land, he would cleave the desert and lead the promised waters to them.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Great American Desert appeared to have retreated westward across the Rockies to the threshold of the Great Basin. Such a spectacular climatic transformation was not about to be dismissed as a fluke, not by a people who thought themselves handpicked by God to occupy a wild continent. A new school of meteorology was founded to explain it. Its unspoken principle was divine intervention, and its motto was “Rain Follows the Plow.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“For the first time in their history, Americans had come up against a problem they could not begin to master with traditional American solutions -- private capital, individual initiative, hard work -- and yet the region confronting the problem happened to believe most fervently in such solutions. [...] When they finally saw the light, however, their attitude miraculously changed -- though the myth didn't -- and the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Throughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Its drop of nearly thirteen thousand feet is unequaled in North America, and its constipation-relieving rapids, before dams tamed its flash floods, could have flipped a small freighter.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“The Colorado Basin, then, is a few years away from permanent drought, and it will have to make do with whatever nature decrees the flow shall be. If the shortages were to be shared equally among the basin states, then things might not be so bad for Arizona. But this will obviously not be the case; there is that fateful clause stipulating that California shall always receive its full 4.4-million-acre-foot entitlement before Phoenix and Tucson receive a single drop. What began as an Olympian division of one river’s waters emerged, after fifty years of brokering, tinkering, and fine-tuning according to the dictates of political reality, as an ultimate testament to the West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Up close, the Granite Reef Aqueduct seems almost too huge to be real. Where will all the water come from? From the air, however, the aqueduct and the river it diverts are reduced to insignificance by the landscape through which they flow”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Brower had said that he wouldn’t mind dams in the Grand Canyon as long as the Bureau built a comparable canyon somewhere else. He received a standing ovation—in Denver.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“They believed, in other words, that the fate of the dams hinged on a technicality. They couldn’t fathom that a sea change in public feeling toward the natural world was taking place, one of those epochal shifts that guarantee that things will never be the same. But it was, and people didn’t care whether the dams flooded the monument or the park, or whether they drowned a mile or a hundred miles of the canyon, or whether they submerged the bottom fifty feet or the entire chasm. They wanted no dams—period.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“the Sierra Club took out full-page advertisements attacking the dams in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. One of the Bureau’s arguments for building the dams, an argument which it would later regret, was that tourists would better appreciate the beauties of the Grand Canyon from motorboats. “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel,” asked one advertisement, “so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Above all, he loved the desert rivers. Brower’s favorite place in the Colorado Basin was Echo Park. Near the confluence of the Green and the Yampa rivers, Echo Park was a pure indulgence in the most austere of deserts. In autumn, its groves of cottonwood and yellowing willow gave it a New England air. In the spring, the swollen Green would flood the canyon bottom and leave lush meadows as it went. Echo Park was probably the most beautiful canyon flat in all of Utah, part of Dinosaur National Monument. It was also an ideal site for a dam.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Relatively late in life, Brower had discovered the sublime emptiness of the plateau and red canyon country of the Colorado River Basin. It was the same terrain that had enchanted John Wesley Powell eighty years before, and it was almost as unpeopled and unspoiled as it had been then. Brower loved everything about it: the bottomless dry wind-sculpted canyons, beginning suddenly and leading nowhere; the rainbow arches, overhangs, and huge stately monoliths (an expert rock climber, Brower had pioneered the route up the most impressive of them, Shiprock in New Mexico); the amphitheater basins ringed by great hanging rock walls; the”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“Brower had pioneered the route up the most impressive of them, Shiprock in New Mexico); the amphitheater basins ringed”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“United Western Investigation”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“The plan was majestic. It contemplated two huge new dams on the Colorado River in Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon, at opposite ends of Grand Canyon National Park. Both had been carefully situated so as not to flood the park itself—except for what the Bureau called “minor” flooding that would drown lower Havasu Creek, the canyon’s most beautiful side stream, and submerge Lava Falls, the river’s most thunderous rapid. But the park would sit inside a dam sandwich: Bridge Canyon Dam would back up water for ninety-three miles below it, entirely flooding the bottom of Grand Canyon National Monument, and Marble Gorge Dam would create a reservoir more than forty miles long right above it. The dams had one purpose—hydroelectric power—and a single objective: lots and lots of cash. They would not conserve any water, because there was none left to conserve; in some years, they would cause a net loss to the river through evaporation. They were there only to take advantage of the thousand feet of elevation loss between Glen Canyon and Hoover dams. Together, they would generate 2.1 million kilowatts of peaking power, marketable at premium rates. Later, the power revenues would finance an artificial river of rescue; for now it would pay for the other features of the plan. One of those features—actually, it was the centerpiece of the plan—was a pair of big dams on the Trinity River, in far-northern California, and a long hard-rock tunnel that would turn their water into the Sacramento River, where it would begin its journey to Los Angeles.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“simple matter of physics, then, made the Central Arizona Project even worse, in an economic sense, than the Colorado River Storage Project. But politics demanded that it be built, and in the 1960s, Arizona had power.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“On a map of Arizona, the Colorado River can be seen making a wide circle around the northern and eastern half of the state.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“In 1956, Ike would end up signing the Colorado River Storage Project Act against his better judgment, and the budgets of both the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers would increase dramatically during his administration. In the lower Colorado Basin, however, Eisenhower had an excuse to do nothing. Until the Central Arizona Project was given final shape—and that couldn’t happen until the legal battle had ended and it was determined who had rights to what water—the river’s looming deficit would remain an inconsequential fact. Once”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“When Franklin Roosevelt came out to dedicate Hoover Dam on September 30, 1935, the one important dignitary who refused to attend the ceremony, which drew some ten thousand people, was the governor of Arizona, B. B. Moeur.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“At the end of his memorandum, almost as an afterthought, Schleicher included a remark which, in retrospect, would take on a chillingly prophetic overtone. “A final point,” he said, “is that flooding in response to seismic or other failure of the dam—probably most likely at the time of highest water—would make the flood of February 1962 look like small potatoes. Since such a flood could be anticipated, we might consider a series of strategically-placed motion-picture cameras to document the process . . .” (emphasis added).”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“During the following winter, superstorms such as this were routine. In the Sierra Nevada, the standing snowfall record of 750 inches, set in 1906, was eclipsed by fifteen feet.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“(A hand-picked Fresno legislator named Ken Maddy once referred to groundwater regulation as “World War III.”)”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

“One modest example of how the farmers managed to deceive the Bureau was provided by the case of Russell Giffen, one of the big landowners in the Westlands district. A Fresno rancher who stitched together seventy-seven thousand acres of valley property—about seven times the acreage of Manhattan Island—Giffen was the largest cotton grower in the world: nationally, he also ranked just behind Boswell and one other farming company in the combined federal farm subsidies he received. In the 1970s, Giffen decided to clean up his estate for probate, and sold most of the land for $32.5 million.”
― Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water