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In the American West, water doesn't flow downhill. Water flows towards money.
Cadillac Desert is an absolute monument, equal to any of the great damns the Reisner discusses and derides. This history, of settlement, irrigation, and the cruel legacy of dam building, is a comprehensively footnoted assassination against an ideal of the American west. The family farm is the image American democracy is built around. West of the rain line, the barrier on the Great Plains where annual rainfall is less than 20 inches annual, the family farm is cruel lie. Dryland farming can't sustain a family on the homestead of 160 acres, aside from a few sites on streams. Irrigation needs complex and expensive capital investments. Dams and canals and pumps.
The target of Reisner's ire is the Bureau of Reclamation, a rogue bureaucracy riddled with faulty numbers, blind corruption, and headless of oversight. The Bureau of Reclamation builds dams, spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to drown canyons and streams, argue that it's efforts are profitable through criminally poor accounting, and then sell power and water to immense agricultural conglomerates at prices that are basically free, a few dollars an acre-foot. Irrigated farms in California, Arizona, Idaho, and other western states have received incalculable subsidies to grow crops which farmers in the east are being paid not to grow; cotton, alfalfa, corn, and other low-value water-intensive crops. The byzantine world of water districts, senior rights, and and agricultural flows is a trillion ton beast, distorting sensible land and environmental policy in the West.
This book is detail heavy, it took me a solid week, and that's a rare thing. But over thirty years on, it reads like current events, like things that have happened yesterday. And in many ways, Reisner won. Dams in the west have come down. Three Gorges in China is perhaps the last superdam the world will ever build. This doesn't make up for the ecological impacts or the monetary waste, but he's won.
This book is vital reading for anyone who lives west of the Rockies. Reisner writes like a Jeremiah, crying out against immanent apocalypse. And if his doomsday hasn't yet come to pass, a killing Dust Bowl 2 drought, soil poisoned by accumulated salts, famine and refugees, it has not been avoided, only pushed off a little bit. And as an aside, I went to grad school in Tempe. I remember calculating that the incremental cost of a gallon of water on my utilities was something like a tenth of cent.
Cadillac Desert is an absolute monument, equal to any of the great damns the Reisner discusses and derides. This history, of settlement, irrigation, and the cruel legacy of dam building, is a comprehensively footnoted assassination against an ideal of the American west. The family farm is the image American democracy is built around. West of the rain line, the barrier on the Great Plains where annual rainfall is less than 20 inches annual, the family farm is cruel lie. Dryland farming can't sustain a family on the homestead of 160 acres, aside from a few sites on streams. Irrigation needs complex and expensive capital investments. Dams and canals and pumps.
The target of Reisner's ire is the Bureau of Reclamation, a rogue bureaucracy riddled with faulty numbers, blind corruption, and headless of oversight. The Bureau of Reclamation builds dams, spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to drown canyons and streams, argue that it's efforts are profitable through criminally poor accounting, and then sell power and water to immense agricultural conglomerates at prices that are basically free, a few dollars an acre-foot. Irrigated farms in California, Arizona, Idaho, and other western states have received incalculable subsidies to grow crops which farmers in the east are being paid not to grow; cotton, alfalfa, corn, and other low-value water-intensive crops. The byzantine world of water districts, senior rights, and and agricultural flows is a trillion ton beast, distorting sensible land and environmental policy in the West.
This book is detail heavy, it took me a solid week, and that's a rare thing. But over thirty years on, it reads like current events, like things that have happened yesterday. And in many ways, Reisner won. Dams in the west have come down. Three Gorges in China is perhaps the last superdam the world will ever build. This doesn't make up for the ecological impacts or the monetary waste, but he's won.
This book is vital reading for anyone who lives west of the Rockies. Reisner writes like a Jeremiah, crying out against immanent apocalypse. And if his doomsday hasn't yet come to pass, a killing Dust Bowl 2 drought, soil poisoned by accumulated salts, famine and refugees, it has not been avoided, only pushed off a little bit. And as an aside, I went to grad school in Tempe. I remember calculating that the incremental cost of a gallon of water on my utilities was something like a tenth of cent.