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56 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential History, February 4, 2002
I am somewhat ashamed to have read this book only recently. I should have read this one years ago. Well, better late than never, and I am pleased to report that it deserves its enduring reputation. ...But let me assume that I am writing this "review" for an audience that is neither familiar with Reisner's book nor aware of the role water development has played in every aspect of the history of the American West, particularly of California. Briefly, the history of water development contains the whole story of the West, from start to present. Early modern irrigation worked miracles and opened to the plow land previously unavailable for agriculture -- land that now feeds the nation and much of the world. If it were not for these early, massive hydro-projects, not one of the great cities of the West would be even conceivable, millions upon millions of people would and could never have considered settling the western half of the continent. Of course, there was a massive cost accompanying all of these benefits, measurable in human as well as environmental terms, but in those days the cost-benefit analysis was easy. Building upon early irrigation successes, two government agencies -- the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, may they both live forever in infamy -- garnered unto themselves massive power and independence, which they used to keep on building dam after dam after dam. The problem was not so much (at the time the dams were built) that the environmental costs were higher with every dam, until there now remains no wild river beyond the hundredth meridian of any significance whatsoever, precious little habitat for migratory birds, mass extinctions, etc., etc., tragically etc.; the real problem (at the time the dams were built) was that the new dams brought no benefits whatsoever to stack up against their costs. Each new dam represented gratuitous environmental catastrophe, effected simply because water projects became the currency of pork barrel Congressional politics. And that's not the worst of it. Except for the Egyptian (the Nile River being a very special case), every civilization founded upon irrigation has always ended -- abruptly -- almost certainly due to the sudden and permanent despoliation of irrigated agricultural soil through concentration of salts, which is the inevitable result of irrigation. No previous irrigation civilization has ever worked on such a grand scale, or with soil already so alkaline, as ours. Death by salinity is happening with alarming rapidity in the American West even now. The end of agriculture as we know it in the West is coming, and coming soon; all the experts know it; nothing is being done. Reisner doesn't suggest much in the way of solutions. But as history -- explaining patterns of human settlement, the effects of that settlement on the region's geography, the patterns of flow and accumulation of wealth in the West, and what may be the greatest crisis our whole nation is facing and ignoring today -- Cadillac Desert can't be beat.
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by Marq de Villiers
by Char Miller
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