This research will examine Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. The research will set forth the political, historical, and economic context for Reisner's examination of water-related development and usage and then discuss the strategy Reisner uses to develop his ideas about the dire consequences to the West's economic and social infrastructure of continuing to exploit and pollute its nonrenewable water resources in the same way as in the past. The combination of poor water management, overdrawing of ground water from the major western aquifers, and a more general attitude that the resource would always be available has created a crisis whose consequences have not been sufficiently understood either by policy makers or by the American population as a whole.
Reisner's general argument is that the West, especially the Ogallala Aquifer region, which is by and large arid and uninhabitable desert, was explored, populated, settled, and developed by people who embraced the frontier experience with the baseline perception that the territory, despite natural attributes hostile to human habitation, was something to be inhabited and made livable on one hand and manipulated and tamed on the other, to suit the needs and ambitions of human preference, intelligence, and capital. A key consequence of this perception was twofold: that those with sufficient financial or political resources and frequently with self-serving ambition would control the means by which water resources would be exploited, and that the exploitation itself would result in degradation of the environment and indeed the prospect that the water itself might be altogether depleted. Citing the record of official government sponsorship of exploration and exploitation of the American West that began with the Lewis and Clark expedition in Jefferson's administration, Reisner takes the view that the ever-increasing range and depth of exploitation ...