Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner

This is the kind of book that people in the Western part of the United States should read at night, if they want to have apocalyptic nightmares.  There is no nightmare worse than grim reality, and if you want grim reality about the not-distant-future of the United States, this weighty and damning book will provide more of it than most people would be willing to stomach.  In fact, it provides so many horrifying apocalyptic scenarios and so much to infuriate someone like me, schooled in civil engineering and descended from farming families who never made a penny off of agricultural subsidies, that one scarcely knows where to begin.  I will save the worst of the apocalypse scenarios for a future entry, after I sleep it off to make it less horrifying, but this book is horrifying enough.

The book as a whole is ominous, starting with some serious reflection on the nature of the desert of the Western United States and the history of its early Mormon irrigation efforts and its early theft of water on a private or municipal scale.  Where things begin to get much more dark and ominous is when the book starts to discuss the dam building efforts of the 1930’s and the early work of the Bureau of Reclamation, which throughout this book appears more like the Bureau of Damnation with its subsidization of wealthy farmers, it’s complete disregard for authority or legality, and its large (and largely unknown) contribution to the massive debt burden of the United States.

By the time the book starts talking about the wholesale destruction of nearly every major and minor river system of the West, the environmentalist (latent or active) of the reader is likely to be furious.  But with that furor comes a horrible sense of complicity–complicity not only in terms of having depended on the cheap power of the Grand Coulee Dam for aluminum production key in winning World War II, or for Hoover Dam in providing jobs and a sense of victory during the depths of depression, but a sense of complicity in having gone along with the fake image of a Californian Mediterranean Paradise, of having felt the lure of City of Angels, of being an accessory to its crimes without being aware of the magnitude of what has happened.

The book is very detailed about the corruptions engaged in by the Bureau of Reclamation as well as the Corps of Engineers, whose destruction of my beloved Florida rivers (like the Kissimmee) is more personally familiar to me as someone from the Eastern United States, who engaged in a rivalry to see who could subdue nature the most brutally in the Western United States, bidding for the support of corrupt congressional delegations and wealthy farmers engaged in highly illegal practices.  The result is a chilling and deeply unpleasant tale.  Shockingly, two of the biggest comparative heroes in this tale are Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, though one is shown as biting off more than he can chew by provoking a Congressional overturn of his vetoes because so many representatives and senators were on the take, and the other is shown as being lukewarm to conservation but not a huge fan of dams and expensive water projects either.

By the time the book winds down with the disaster at the Narrows Dam, the impending collapse of the water supply of the Ogallala aquifer basin, extending from West Texas well into the Great Plains, and the sorry state of the Colorado River and other basins, the inevitability of massive reservoirs filling up with silt, as well as the book’s closing touch, an examination of plans to steal Canada’s water to save our own civilization from destruction (!), it is hard not to think of the horrifying and spectacular destruction of the pride and power of American civilization over the issues of water and salt.  And it is horrible not to feel somehow to blame, for letting it go on for so long without questioning or demur.  For the choices that we may live to be forced to make are so horrifying that it can scarcely even be considered–all the worse because this book was written in the early 1980’s, before the truly horrifying debt burden of this country is faced, and the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure in every possible way staggers the imagination.  It would take a miracle to avoid a truly dismal fate, but such a miracle seems unlikely in a climate where there is not even the slightest hint of remorse or repentance for what has been done, or what may need to be done to keep up appearance for just a little bit longer.  May God have mercy on us all.