BOOK COMMENTS: CADILLAC DESERT, by Marc Reisner

After seeing Glen Canyon Dam, I continued my readings on the American West. Cadillac Desert was the book which has made me despair most. Though written about 20 years ago, it provides an overview of the appalling story of American water development and use.  

At 68 I remain naive. The huge downside of open democracy is that its combination of consumerism, rapacious advanced industrial capitalism and human impulse control failure has produced a consumptive short-sightedness, a failure of vision that leads only to the dark. (See book, The 6th Extinction).  

Even more disgusting is how the institutions of society fail to function effectively.  I warned you, naive.  Foolish elementary school Catholic idealism. 

John Wesley Powell called for a political division of the West based on its existing river-watershed-drainages. But capitalism can do little that is sensible, stunted as it is by its pernicious policy of discounting the future. 

First the West was stripped of its pelted animals,its bison herds decimated. Healthy protein, in retrospect, but the calf was golden. Railroad rights-of-way artificially divided western lands, and eager, ill-informed, unexperienced newcomers acquired 160 acre parcels of arid desert to farm. The Mormons were the only group with enough co-operative structure to build private functional irrigation systems, but those models were ignored as water need, rights and use quickly became the great looming reality. 


Weather cycles of wet/dry, so deeply misunderstood and ignored by almost all stakeholders, soon caused landowners of all sizes to fail.  And so the giant program to provide subsidized water to the great West began, though Powell had warned that should all the water in the West be distributed over the territory, it would cover it to a depth of 2 inches. 

Teton Dam Collapse, June 5, 1976

Dams were built in response to growing population needs. Never before was so much promised to so many. TGTBT! Congress members quickly arranged lucrative irrigation programs which provided cheap water for farming, on land that was marginal or not, for crops that were mostly inappropriate. 

In the long run, silting would make the dams useless, salination would reduce crop yields, small farms would be acquired by huge corporations, wildlife and fish populations would be decimated, and thousands of square miles of wild rivers and canyons drowned under suburban-style lakes and reservoirs.

Water is provided at deeply subsidized prices to agribusiness, crops are subsidized by price supports, and American business and bureaucracy has simply learned to "farm the government". 

The American economy is deeply compromised by this support system; the irony of conservative complaints about "socialism" is richly available in the West, as "lone individualist" western lifestyles are touted by landowners benefitting from the generosity and short-term economic thinking of American taxpayers, their elected officials, and agribusiness interests.

The very practice of individualism has become a commodity.  That hectoring, grouchy Thoreau was all too correct and John Wesley Powell's tears mingle with the infrequent rains that fall from western skies on the stupendous monstrosity of civilization we've made.

Very little consolation is available.  I get in my gas-guzzling Jeep, drive over svelte highway systems right up to the red rock canyons, hop out wearing a bug-proofed shirt, hiking boots that John Muir would die for, protein bars, a camel-siphon instant water system, and go for a hike. Utterly impossibly compromised.  God may forgive, but Mother Nature will not.