Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert

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 cont

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ong the river. The greatest impact was felt in the upper desert of Southern California, which had formerly been nonarable but which became an important agricultural center. The catch in all of this was that the happy few in the West would be subsidized by vast public works projected financed by American taxes more generally. 5. This chapter deals in detail with the great variety of public works projects, especially the great dams of the Colorado and Columbia rivers, undertaken by FDR in response to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl of the Great Plains in the period. Hoover and Grand Coulee, respectively, were key projects. In addition to being New Deal make-work projects, however, the dams were used for flood control and electric power, and sometimes to foster navigability. They persisted from the 1930s well into the 1950s and beyond, the "go-go" years of water projects and growing rivalry between two agencies of such projects: the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. One result was to enable even more population to come into the West and Northwest (the hydroelectric-plant dam: if you build it they will come). Another was to foster a bias in national Congressional politics in favor of myriad home-district water

Category: Science - M