Name: Cadillac Desert
ISBN: 9780140178241

Marc Reisner

Details the achievements of creating a desert civilization and projects on the future problems of limited groundwater reserves, silting up of reservoirs, and contamination of soil

The American West and Its Disappearing Water

Cadillac Desert

Lizzy Jensen

Confronted by the desert, the first thing Americans want to do is change it.

Powell…wanted the West settled slowly, cautiously, in a manner that would work. If it was done intelligently instead of in a mad, unplanned rush, the settlement of the West could help defuse the dangerous conditions building in the squalid industrial cities of the East. If it was done wrong, the migration west might go right into reverse.

…Alexis de Tocqueville had captured the raw new country's soul: "To clear, to till, and to transform the vast uninhabited continent which is his domain, the American requires the daily support of an energetic passion; that passion can only be the love of wealth; the passion for wealth is therefore not reprobated in America, and, provided it does not go beyond the bounds assigned to it for public security, it is held in honor." In Powell's day, that passion for wealth had if anything grown more intense. A pseudoscientific dogma, Social Darwinism, had been invented to give predatory behavior a good name. Darwin could not be taught in the schools; but a perversion of Darwin could be practiced in real life.

What TR and FDR did have in common was an acute awarenes of the limits of capitalismn. The former Roosevelt saw the seeds of capitalism's self-destruction in monopoly and rapacious business pracrice, the latter saw them in chronic depression and unemployment.

Cadillac Desert The American West and Its Disappearing Water