Cadillac Desert is all about the damming of the West, done mostly by the Bureau of Reclamation. Reisner is a concerned environmentalist, and a strong critic of New Deal waste. He identifies a critical problem with spending plans- that they can't ever stop. Once a congressman gets funding for a major project in his district, another congressman wants the same. Reisner writes that "Congress without water projects would be like an engine without oil; it would simply seize up." The even more critical problem is the combination of the tremendous desire of Americans to move West and tame the high plains and deserts with agriculture with the unyielding power of nature to destroy those plans. Simply put, there are some places that nature forbids to man, and while we can make them work for us for some decades, we cannot do so in the long run. That is what this book is about.
This book details what goes on beyond the isohyet (line connecting regions of equal rainfall) running through Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, where satellite maps show a quick transition from green to brown. The book proceeds in a more or less chronological order. The stories told stretch back into the later nineteenth century, but some of the difficulties in dealing with nature stretch back into eternity. For example, the Laramie Plains of Wyoming, imagined by pioneers as fertile, virgin land for farming like in Ilinois, are actually five thousand feet higher than comparable lands in Illinois, have a growing season fifty days shorter, and receive only a third as much rainfall. Naturally, when farmers settled these lands, they became dependent on lobbying for massive federal subsidies to maintain their existence. The results were a massive federal irrigation program and a half-century "rampage" of dam development at public expense. Reisner writes that, "The permanence of our dams will merely impress the archaeologists; their numbers will leave them in awe." He notes that a quarter of a million dams of one size or another have been built in the United States in the 20th century. Most are just small earthen plugs cross streams to divert water or raise fish. Fifty thousand are "major works" that dam rivers of real size, and even without those, there are still a few thousand truly big dams that stagger the imagination when one tries to conceive of their construction.
Early portions of the book feature John Wesley Powell, a geologist of great influence of the later 1800s. But his influence did not control Congress. Whereas he recommended that inhospitable regions of the West be used for raising livestock, giving settlers 2,560 acres of land but water enough to only irrigate twenty, Congress passed the Reclamation Act in 1902, giving everyone 160 acres (or 320 for a man and wife) regardless of whether they settled in Mediterranean-like regions of California or the cold, high plains of Wyoming. You could grow a lot on those 160 acres in the central valley of California, but in Montana, you would come to nothing. Even in parts of California, there is more desert than people realize: Los Angeles is drier than Beirut and San Francisco is just slightly rainier than Chihuahua. There was not a single tree growing in San Francisco when the Spanish arrived- the aridity and the wind saw to that.
To solve some of California's water issues, the state worked with the federal government on the Central Valley Project starting in the 1930s. Using dams, canals, wells, and pumps, the project sought to irrigate the area from Redding to Bakersfield. The project doesn't have any "end," and it has been a massive success in many ways. But its success has also been its failure. Through induced demand, California is no more water secure today than when the project was initiated. Take one test well in the southern Tulare Basin for example, where the aquifer had dropped sixty feet between 1920 and 1960, when the first CVP water arrived. From 1960 to 1969, the water table rose twenty feet, but just three years later, it had dropped by thirty-three feet. Why? Because farmers had just become accustomed to using more water and more farmers had moved in. In Kern County as an example, the average famer went from pumping from 275 feet during WWII to pumping from 460 feet by 1965. There was three times as much irrigated land in production in the 1960s as there was in the 1930s. The effect of the CVP was essentially not to make better use of water, but to dramatically expand water usage along with its availability. Induced demand!
Miscellaneous Facts:
- During the four decades following the Civil War, 183 million acres were sold or given by the federal government to railroad companies
- If the Colorado River stopped flowing, people could survive four years based on the carrying capacity of reservoirs before people would need to evacuate from California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah.
- The Colorado River is not a big river in terms of annual flow, by which it does not feature even in the top twenty-five in the United States.
- Hoover Dam was originally called Boulder Dam.
- The Hoover Dam was so large and heavy that the dam's size and weight would create superpressures inside of it that would generate and retain heat such that, left to its own devices, the dam would take over 100 years to cool down and settle, remaining a superhot liquid on the inside until then. To solve that problem, engineers filled the dam with pipes that ran cold water through it as they built the dam.
- There is some significant NIMBYism present in California water law. Former Governor of California Edmund Brown Sr. admitted that part of why he wanted to send water south to LA was because he was from Northern California and he didn't want more people moving up north.
- Part of the reason that Louisiana and New Orleans are sinking into the sea (which I read all about in The Control of Nature by John McPhee) is that all the silt that used to travel down the Mississippi River is now trapped behind dams, which may also have an effect on the Mississippi River trying to change course down Athafalaya way.
- British Columbia has the 3rd, 4th, 7th, 8th, and 19th largest rivers in North America and holds between four and ten percent of the world's accessible and renewable fresh water, receiving over 200 inches of rain annually.
