Summary Of The American West And Its Comparing Water By Marc Reisner

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by: Marc Reisner. "When archaeologists from another planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may conclude that our temples were dams," Reisner is referring to the American quest to attempt to turn the inhospitable and dry Western America into an utopic oasis. Reisner attacks the US Bureau of Reclamation by explaining how it became "one of the most self-serving of bureaucracies." The agency that was once seen as a vast public works program quickly turned into an employment program for engineers; fraudulent economics to justify projects, manipulated Congress, nearly flooding the Grand Canyon, and plans to bring water to the West from as far as Alaska. Reisner

Reisner dedicates an entire chapter to the dirty water politics that embodies the state of California. In this excerpt from chapter ten, the audience is almost able to feel the utter disgust that Reisner holds towards the gluttonous Californian water politics: "The whole state thrives, even survives, by moving water from where it is, and presumably isn't needed, to where it isn't, and presumably is needed. No other state has done as much to fructify its deserts, make over its flora and fauna, and rearrange the hydrology God gave it. No other place has put as many people where they probably have no business being. There is no place like it anywhere on earth. Thirty-one million people (more than the population of Canada), an economy richer than all but seven nations' in the world, one third of the table food grown in the United States---and none of it remotely conceivable within the preexisting natural

The tone of this is set in the very first few pages of the book, Reisner speaks of how, "thanks to irrigation, thanks to the Bureau [of Reclamation] states such as California, Arizona, and Idaho became populous and wealthy; millions settled in regions where nature, left alone, would have countenanced thousands at best," and that despite all of the effort and money spent to turn these dry Western lands into a makeshift Garden of Eden, what's left to show for is still "untrammeled, unirrigated, depopulate in the