Cadillac Desert Is Still the Book to Read About California Water
Marc Reisner’s 1986 Cadillac Desert tells how the American West moved its rivers to grow, and what it cost. Nearly 40 years later, it’s more relevant than ever.
Updated
If you want to understand California, you have to understand water, and the best place to start is still a book published in 1986: Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It tells how a dry region became one of the most productive farming areas and fastest-growing places on Earth by moving rivers around, and what that cost. Nearly 40 years later, it’s still the book everyone in California water politics has read.
It picks up where Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian left off. Stegner told the story of John Wesley Powell, who warned in the 1800s that the arid West couldn’t be farmed like the East. Reisner showed how completely those warnings were ignored, and he did it with real anger, going after the dam-building boom and what it did to the land and the people’s money.
Colorado River
At its heart, the book is an investigation of how the West moved its water. Reisner covers the dams, reservoirs and aqueducts that turned desert into an economic powerhouse, from the Colorado River to the Los Angeles Aqueduct to California’s Central Valley, and he’s clear about who paid for it: rivers, wildlife, Indigenous communities and future generations.
One of the central stories is the Owens Valley. In the early 1900s, Los Angeles quietly bought up land and water rights there, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct sent the valley’s water south to the city, leaving farms and Owens Lake to dry up. It’s a story of backroom deals, broken promises and furious locals, some of whom literally dynamited the aqueduct. At the center is William Mulholland, the self-taught engineer who built LA’s water empire and whose name stands for both its triumph and its arrogance. The same saga later inspired Chinatown, the Roman Polanski film about LA’s dark thirst for growth.
Marc Reisner (Water Education Foundation)
Then there’s the Colorado River, which may be the most dammed, fought-over and lawyered-up river on Earth. Reisner traces the building of Hoover Dam and the canals and reservoirs that spread its water across seven states. The river was promised more water than it actually carries, and with decades of drought on top of that, it’s in worse shape now than when he wrote the book.
Hoover Dam in 1936 (United States Bureau of Reclamation)
Reisner also takes apart the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, the two enormous systems that move water from wet Northern California to the dry south and made the state a farming superpower. He doesn’t let them off easy: drained wetlands, salt building up in farm soil and a system that, he argues, favors huge agribusinesses over small farmers and city dwellers.
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What makes Cadillac Desert great is the writing. Reisner was a meticulous reporter and a terrific storyteller. Mulholland and Floyd Dominy, the brash, cigar-chomping commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, jump off the page. And underneath it all is a simple, uncomfortable question: can a society built on this much borrowed water last?
Owens River in the Eastern Sierra (Erik Olsen)
The book changed the conversation. It fired up environmentalists and policymakers, became a PBS documentary series and helped turn the era of big dams into an era of arguing about them. In California, where water fights still drive politics, it’s as relevant as ever.
With worse droughts and a warming climate, it looks more prophetic every year. California is still overpumping groundwater, patching aging canals and dams and fighting over who gets water. The book’s central question, how much can we bend nature before it bends back, is still open.
California Aqueduct (Erik Olsen)
Reisner died of cancer in 2000, at just 51. It’s a shame he didn’t live to see how right he turned out to be.
If you live in California and haven’t read Cadillac Desert, read it. You’ll never look at a faucet, or a green lawn in the desert, the same way again.
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