A Classic A Quarter Century Later
| Author | G. Tracy Mehan III |
| Position | Principal with The Cadmus Group, Inc., an environmental consulting firm |
| Pages | 6-7 |
Page 6 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2011, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, May/June 2011
“I don’t give a damn whether a project
is feasible or not. I’m getting the money
out of Congress, and you’d damn well
better spend it.”
—M W. S, Franklin
Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Recla-
mation
Marc Reisner’s master-
piece Cadillac Desert:
e American West
and Its Disappearing
Water is as compel-
ling today as it was on publication
in 1986. It was, clearly, advocacy
journalism, but journalism
of the highest order forti-
fied with a tremendous
amount of research, study,
and numerous face-to-face
interviews. It documented
the transformation of John
Wesley Powell’s vision of a
federal irrigation program
into a perverse reality of
pork-barrel spending and
environmental devastation.
Recent scientific analysis
has confirmed most of the
book’s prognostications.
e year before Reisner’s
untimely death at age 51, Cadillac
Desert was 61st on a list of the 100
best nonfiction books in English in the
20th century, as compiled by a panel
from the Modern Library, a division
of Random House. It was a finalist for
a National Book Critics’ Circle Award
and inspired an award-winning docu-
mentary by the same name which was
first broadcast in 1997.
So much of the waste and destruc-
tion perpetrated by the federal Bureau
of Reclamation and the Army Corps
of Engineers, which were engaged in a
dysfunctional competition with each
other for decades, were predicated on
the “myth of the independent yeo-
man farmer,” according to Reisner.
is Jeffersonian ideal, ultimately,
morphed into rank rent-seeking by
wealthy growers, big engineering and
construction firms and urban water
departments — all of whom were ad-
ept at “farming the government.”
States were not without culpabil-
ity either. Reisner described Califor-
nia’s State Water Project as “one of the
country’s foremost examples of social-
ism for the rich.”
“With huge dams built for him
at public expense, and irrigation ca-
nals, and the water sold for a quarter
of a cent per ton — a price which
guaranteed that little of the public’s
investment would ever be paid back
— the West’s yeoman farmer became
the embodiment of the welfare state,
though he was the last to recognize
it,” wrote Reisner. “And the same
Congress which had once insisted he
didn’t need federal help was now in-
sisting that such help be continued, at
any cost.”
Reisner, warming to his theme,
continued: “Released from a need for
justification, released from logic itself,
the irrigation program Powell had
wanted became a monster, redoubling
its efforts and increasing its wreckage,
both natural and economic, as it lost
sight of its goal.” Powell’s vision was
one of limited bounty on a tiny frac-
tion of land suitable for irrigation. “It
is hard to imagine that the first ex-
plorer of the Colorado River would
have welcomed a future in which
there might be no rivers left at all.”
Having only just read Cadillac
Desert, and having learned about it
primarily through the writings of
conservationists and environmental-
ists, this reviewer was pleasantly sur-
prised, ecstatic really, by how much of
the book is focused on the economic
outrages of congressional pork-barrel
spending and water projects which
were a joke in terms of cost-benefit
analysis. And this is before you get to
the environmental costs, the removal
of Indians from tribal lands, outright
graft, and political venality.
e book appeals to audi-
ences as diverse as the Sierra
Club and the Tea Party.
Given its origins in the
New Deal’s push for public
works projects, the recla-
mation and flood control
exertions of the Bureau and
Corps soon transformed
themselves into a syn-
drome of monomaniacal
dam building as almost an
end in itself. Literally, tens
of thousands of dams, i.e.,
“water projects,” many built
on the flimsiest of justifications, were
routinely ordered up, with the active
encouragement of the federal agen-
cies, by politicians across the political
spectrum — Republican and Demo-
cratic, conservative and liberal, green
or brown, except for poor Jimmy
Carter.
Having decided, for very sound
reasons, that the age of water proj-
ects should come to an end, President
Carter, in a classic case of political
over-reach, drafted an extensive “hit
list” of dozens of big dams and ir-
rigation projects for withdrawal of
Cadillac Desert: The
American West and Its
Disappearing Water. By Marc
Reisner. Penguin Books; 582
pages; $18.00.
IN THE LITERATURE
A Classic A Quarter Century Later
By G. Tracy Mehan III
To continue reading
Request your trial