Marc Reisner

"The definitive work on the West's water crisis." --Newsweek The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruption and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecological and economic disaster. In his landmark book, Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the competition to transform the West. Based on more than a decade of research, Cadillac Desert is a stunning expose and a dramatic, intriguing history of the creation of an Eden--an Eden that may only be a mirage. This edition includes a new postscript by Lawrie Mott, a former staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, that updates Western water issues over the last two decades, including the long-term impact of climate change and how the region can prepare for the future.

The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

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.

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