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History. Technology. Nonfiction. HTML: The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruptions and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. In Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West. Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning exposé and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of Eden??an Eden that may be only a mirage.… (more)
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Brilliant enough for 5 stars, but it caused me a bit of reader fatigue due to its relentless comprehensiveness. Impeccably researched, Cadillac Desert meets the highest standards of investigative reportage. Which is not to say that Reisner is absolutely objective (always an illusive goal at best) nor sober in his approach. At times, his tone borders on the sarcastic (as if he were saying, you are not going to believe exactly how incredibly stupid this idea was). His account is apolitical in the sense that he depicts Democrats and Republicans, both on the state and national levels, as bipartisan in their promotion and funding of the most suspect (environmentally, socially, economically)dams and water projects, going back at least as far as the New Deal. Reisner takes a close and critical look at the very notion of irrigation farming in a desert, its costs, benefits and long term consequences (depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer; deadly salinity levels of land and water, the making of “wild river” an oxymoron, etc.). An apt secondary subtitle for the book might be “Water flows uphill toward political power and money.” An entirely concrete example of this aphorism would be the California Aqueduct, particularly that section which carries water over the Tehachapis to L.A: “The water is carried across the Tehachapis in five separate stages. The final cyclopean one, which occurs at the A.D. Edmonston Pumping Plant, raises the water 1926 feet—the Eiffel Tower atop the Empire State—in a single lift . . . . At their peak capacity, if it is ever reached, the Edmonston pumps will require six billion kilowatts of electricity every year . . . . Moving water in California requires more electrical energy than is used by several states.”
First published in 1986 and subsequently revised in 1993, Cadillac Desert, if less prophetic now than it was 20-25 years ago, remains relevant and instructive. And if you ever thought there might be a silver-lining to pork-barrel politics, it’s a must read. In light of the recent financial system “bail-out,” and with many touting “infrastructure” projects as a solution to our current high unemployment and economic malaise, reviewing the history of perhaps the greatest public works program ever anywhere will give you pause. Dams and water projects (California’s Central Valley Project and the Central Arizona Project are just two examples) can have both intended and unintended consequences that make them less than great ideas. Engineers and “experts” (Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, Water Commissioners, Resource Specialists, etc.) can be as greedy, short-sighted, and blinded by belief in their own expertise and desire for power as anyone else.
Reisner’s description of the proposed Narrows Dam on the Lower South Platte River in Colorado (thankfully, a project that was subsequently abandoned, though it was all too typical of projects that have been built) makes for a good summary:
“Here was a dam that the state engineer said would deliver only a third of the water it promised and could conceivably collapse; a project whose official cost estimate . . . would barely suffice to relocate twenty-six miles of railroad track; a project whose real cost, whatever it turned out to be, would therefore be written off, in substantial measure, to ‘recreation,’ though the water would be unsafe to touch; a project whose prevailing interest rate was one-fifth the rates banks were charging in the late 1970s; a project many of whose beneficiaries owned more land than the law permitted in order to receive subsidized water; a project that might, if the state engineer was correct, seep enough water to turn the town of Fort Morgan into a marsh; a project that would pile more debt onto the Bureau’s Missouri Basin Project; a project that would generate not a single kilowatt of hydroelectric power and would be all but worthless for flood control.”
I can't even begin to summarize the scope of a 500-page, indepth work like this in a few paragraphs. I can say that if you have an interest in environmental issues or history you should find this interesting. I could sometimes only manage a chapter at a time as the monumental avarice, deceit, and indifference to the environment that was described, with billions of dollars in government money used to subsidize, amongst other things, poor crops growing in a desert to the benefit of giant corporations, well let's just say if my blood could boil steam would have been coming out of my ears.
On the third point, although Reisner never says so, there's a theological foundation to his work in that the natural law is taken as the starting and the ending for what works about feeding those on this planet in the ultimate sense of working—sustainability—which is arguably the only sense that matters. This is to say that short-term, utilitarian goals, even common sense political goals generated and justified by positive law, should not be the only consideration in long-term decision making. When we allow a self-serving efficiency and a headstrong rationality to become our be-all and end-all, and when engineering is enshrined above all else, we should not be surprised at the rich harvest of head-scratching folly, moral failings, and paradox cataloged so nicely in "Cadillac Desert."
Reiner's signal achievement is that he took the indignant spark of anger that he no doubt developed working for the Natural Resources Defense Council in the six years or so prior to the publication of the book and banked it into a righteous flame that sustained him during the incredible amount of work necessary for laying the foundation of his argument.
At the hands of a more emotional man the narrative might easily have tottered and collapsed into a foaming-at-the-mouth string of expletives, half-reasoned arguments, and non-sequiters. However, like a mighty arch-gravity dam, he was able to hold it all together. He found a way to bide his time, no doubt through clenched teeth, until he was able to marshal all the facts into a logical, though still stinging, rebuke. For once, the adjective "magisterial" to describe a writer's command of his material does not seem out of place.
The Weather Channel would have loved this man's gift for metaphor. His stragegy of varying his style also worked well. There were long stretches of descriptive writing, as in his sketch of the skirt-chasing Floyd Dominy, and in the passages where he helps us understand how soil, seed, water, wind, and weather patterns work together. But, there were also long stretches of exposition in which he gave his full attention to what might be called the infrastructure of the water industry: the policies, constituencies, results, challenges. The dozens and dozens of individuals, agencies, dams, projects, reports, and incidents, the particularity of all these things, matters enormously, because all were needed, and all 600 pages were needed, in order to make the case.
It is to his credit that even this mind-numbing aspect of the story was accessible, and even interesting. He proved again that an occasional emphasis such as italicizing critical parts of a sentence is no crime in non-fiction writing. On the contrary, italics and the occasional prod of an exclamation point are blessings for tiring readers who need their brains to be goosed back into full consciousness.
By the time a revised edition was put out in 1993 with an epilogue attached, Reisner's ardor had cooled. Though his re-cap is interesting in its own way, it had none of the through line and righteous wrath of the original narrative of 1986, and therefore came as a bit of a letdown.
I gave the book only four stars because although the content was exemplary, there were at least a dozen to a dozen and a half typos in the text. Penguin/Viking, really? This is a modern classic which went through 37 reprints, according to WorldCat. Granted, the Worldcat information is often inaccurate, but it's clear that Penguin, Viking, and a few other publishing houses in the UK made big money on the book. And yet none of them could be bothered to proof it for the countless re-issues, not even for the big one in 1993 or so? How lazy.
Reisner actually has some great information packed into this book, but he tends to explore every little detail of every single situation... after a while I ended up just skimming most of the book. I probably would have enjoyed reading an edited, more streamlined version of this book.
5 stars, 6 if I was able.