Last night, as promised a few weeks ago, I finished Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It is a recognized classic in both studies of water usage and the revisionist history of the U.S. West. The thesis, broadly speaking, is that the arid and semi-arid portions of the country have been "civilized" at an incredible expense in terms of both money and environmental impact. By and large, the benefits have gone to large-scale agriculture and large Western cities such as Denver, Phoenix, and particularly Los Angeles.

The L.A. portion of the story comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen Chinatown, but particularly intriguing to me was the way we have subsidized irrigation--often creating farmland at enormous taxpayer expense while selling the actual water to farmers at incredibly cheap rates. As a matter of law, these benefits were often limited to small-scale operations; as a matter of fact, they have often been realized only by very large-scale operations.

Central to the story are two arms of the federal government: the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and to a lesser extent the Army Corps of Engineers. The Reclamation Bureau existed to build dams, and according to Reisner it has had little interest in anything else, including deciding that a particular dam might not need to be built or is even possibly dangerous. The Corps tended to focus on the goal of creating navigable rivers, but both agencies ultimately ended up competing to build large projects, often with differing or even contradictory goals, and in some cases actually built projects that cancelled each other out.

The information in this book is top-rate and provides a lot of practical political lessons, especially focusing on the central importance of dams and other water projects in creating our system of pork-barrel politics (which, admittedly, may have been a good bit more out of control here in the mid-'80s when this book was written than it is now). I feel as if I got a real education from this book, and even at over 500 pages it left me wanting more.

Organizationally, the book is a bit of a mess. Reisner is a reporter, not a historian, and his twelve chapters read as if they were just twelve chapters rather than one book. People come up in one chapter at some length, then appear again later with a lengthy introduction as if we hadn't seen them before. The book is not organized chronologically, nor is there any introduction that lays out why Reisner structured the book in the way he did. I chalk all this up to sloppy editing, and I did find it distracting in places.

Ideologically, I need some more time to digest this book. Reisner has a "plague on both their houses" approach to partisan politics--he is equally inclined to attack a New Deal big project mentality as he is to point out the hypocrisy of conservatives who, as he aptly says in one section, "get up in arms when someone uses food stamps to buy mouthwash," but insist on millions of dollars of generously subsidized water. Reisner comes off as a quintessential muckraker, constantly in attack mode and taking aim at targets left and right. On the other hand, there are times when he seems to accept that some dam-building has worked out for the best--he seems mostly satisfied that Hoover Dam was ultimately a good thing, and he even argues that the massive amounts of electricity generated by the Grand Coulee Dam may have been the decisive factor in World War II. What it comes down to is that his biggest bugaboos are irrigating land that can only be farmed at much greater expense than they produce, dam-building for the sake of dam-building (and for the sake of bureaucratic self-perpetuation), and the growth of Western megalopolises. I think I'm right there with him on the first two, but on the third I tend to like L.A. so I can't totally get with the program. And just in general I tend to see the old-fashioned family farm as a pretty lousy way to live and as a very inefficient institution at this point in history, so I don't really support the subtle favor in which Reisner holds small farming.

What I am sure of, after reading Cadillac Desert, is that water politics have been absolutely central to the creation of the American West and to Sun Belt migration--certainly one of the three or four most important social phenomena of post-WWII America--in general. And if what Reisner says is true, as our dams silt up and our aquifers dry up, water will continue to be a central issue in our politics (even if it's not in the headlines) for the foreseeable future.