Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

One of Reisner’s central arguments in Cadillac Desert is how precarious the water situation in the West is. This situation is not something new. The Hohokam, a civilization that lived near the confluence of the Salt, Verde, and Gila rivers, thrived for over 1,000 years. They were one of the first agricultural societies in the Southwest and practiced irrigation. The area they called home is one of the hottest in Arizona and North America more broadly. One possible reason the Hohokam were able become agriculturalists in this region is the climate is thought to have been considerably wetter. When it turned back to dry, the civilization vanished. The Hohokam might also have waterlogged their fields due to the abundance of water, causing salt buildup, which eventually poisoned parts of the land. This scenario might also have contributed to their demise. As Reisner notes, “the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little or used too much” (257). This is exactly the problem that the West faces today.

Like the Hohokam, the United States built a desert civilization during wetter years. The Colorado River Compact’s negotiators based their allotment amounts for the basin states on the river’s having a 17.5-million-acre-foot yield. This estimate was based on flow during years with higher precipitation. Serious doubt was cast on this number starting in the 1950s, with one hydrologic engineer suggesting that the average annual flow was closer to 11.7 million acre-feet since the 1930s. This difference matters, because Colorado Basin states have been building and planning as if the Compact estimate was conservative. Thus, people and the economy are at serious risk. For many years, the Bureau refused to listen to experts and continued building projects on the Colorado. This process has led to ideas about diverting distant rivers, such as the Klamath in California, into the Colorado. To the Bureau, “The Klamath was wasting twelve million acre-feet to the sea with hardly a claim on it. Its principle appropriators were salmon, steelhead, and bears” (268). Fortunately, the Klamath Diversion “was dumped on the scrapheap of human dreams” (271).

The national dam construction project that allowed civilization to bloom in the desert also contains the seeds of its demise. Without the federal government, there would not have been projects like CAP, Hoover Dam, and the Central Valley Project. Without these projects, population and revenue would not have increased in the western states. Farmers’ access to cheap water, which allowed them to plant non-native crop species, has turned a desert into an oasis. All of this rests on the availability of water, which was already precarious and, with climate change, has become even more so. Reisner emphasizes that we have created an economic and environmental calamity that will cost billions to solve, if it is even solvable.