Cadillac Desert Was Too Effective
(Note: This post is thematically similar to a previous post found here. I wrote this one because I wanted to address Cadillac Desert more directly and because of a conversation I had which helped me to clarify some of my ideas.)
"The more one tries to make sense of this, the less success one has," Marc Reisner writes in the Afterword to the revised 1993 edition of Cadillac Desert. Specifically, he is writing about the amount of water that goes toward feeding cattle: "In California, for example, enough water for greater Los Angeles was still being used, in 1986, to raise irrigated pasture for livestock... Feeding irrigated grass to cows is as wasteful a use of water as you can conceive." More generally, I believe this is the strongest theme that emerges out of that book: none of this makes any sense.
As a work of activism, the book is a tour de force. In fact, it was so effective in this regard that its conclusions have come to define the conventional wisdom about water in the West. The book still gets frequently recommended for anyone wanting to understand Western water. But as Reisner admits in the Afterword, he is unable to make sense of it himself.
To be clear, the book is valuable for Reisner's prodigious research and reporting, which took him the better part of a decade. The chapters are full of good information, and academics even cite the book -- rare for a work of general nonfiction. But the overall framing is flawed for a few different reasons. While Reisner was not responsible for every reader's takeaways, I contend that the book is designed to mobilize people more than to give an accurate understanding of the problems with water in the West.
As a historian, one of the problems that stands out to me is Reisner's misleading characterization of different periods of irrigation in the West. While the book shines in its account of the post-World War II Bureau of Reclamation, it fails to demonstrate how that period fits in a longer history of the region. Reisner reaches for a grand narrative about hubris and the tendency of humans (across time and space) to build too big. The book's introduction alludes to the collapse of desert civilizations -- including the prehistoric Hohokam, notable irrigators of the US Southwest. What follows, then, is made to fit into this downward trajectory of a civilization built on a treacherous foundation. Seen on this vast timeline, the difference between the Reclamation Service in its uncertain first decades and the powerhouse agency under Floyd Dominy in the 1960s may seem insignificant, but these differences are key to understanding the region's resource policy.
One of the consequences of this misunderstanding is that the Reclamation Service's early subsidies and lenient repayment plans for farmers appear to be of a piece with the alleged graft of the later Bureau. A Daily Beast post titled "If You Only Read One Book About the Water Crisis: 'Cadillac Desert'" states, "The book's great value is to illuminate ... how the system's design and operation has been driven from the beginning by big-money politics and macho rivalries... more than by any concern for the common good, much less for healthy ecosystems." This is a perfectly reasonable takeaway from the book, but it is historically inaccurate. The "macho rivalries" refers to that of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, but this would require a "beginning" some time in the 1940s. "Big-money politics" similarly can hardly account for much that happened in Western resource policy prior to the New Deal. On the contrary, the Reclamation Service tried in earnest (in my view) to provide opportunities for the "actual settlers" that could not continue to homestead in the arid West. It was only as a matter of necessity, as those settlers failed to make profitable farms on marginal lands, that the Service turned toward providing water for established farms on private lands and to stretch out repayment contracts -- while Congress hammered the agency on its deficits. Additionally, the golden age of the Bureau of Reclamation had basically come to a close by the time the book was first published in 1986, something that the revised edition acknowledges. But even then the book's updated Afterword undersells it. The Bureau itself declared in 1988 that "The arid West essentially has been reclaimed." The same year the 1993 edition was published, Daniel Beard was appointed as commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation; Beard would later go on to call for the bureau's abolition and for the Glen Canyon Dam's decommissioning.
This more complex -- and accurate -- history dulls some of Reisner's barbs. As the historian Norris Hundley writes in his renowned history of California water, The Great Thirst:
Some critics have attributed California's (and the West's) land, water, labor, and environmental problems generally to "immense centralized institutions" ruled by oppressive bureaucratic elites who have manipulated water resources in their own self-interest... [But] to see California's water leaders as part of a "centralized" group or ruling through "a coercive, monolithic, and hierachical system" runs directly contrary to the reality of a war of fragmented authorities. More compelling explanations are found in a compound of interest-group pressures, local and regional considerations, political trade-offs, and the larger context of American political culture in which the national culture and its reverberations within California help explain actions that may otherwise be incorrectly attributed to a conspiratorial power elite.
This more convoluted history is more difficult for the general public to follow and harder to wield as a goad. And while I'm truly sympathetic to those who lack the interest or ability to read academic history, the public's embrace of the more sensationalized, conspiratorial history, while based partly in fact, has led to mixed results.
There is a message at the core of Cadillac Desert for which few people need much convincing: "They're ripping you off." There is enough evidence in the average person's life for this idea that an antecedent is not strictly needed; someone somewhere is ripping you off. In the mid-twentieth century, this was a bit of a tough sell for Westerners. The federal government was pouring money into the region, and the Bureau of Reclamation was only one avenue for investment, along with Cold War military spending, the interstate system, university research contracts, subsidized loans for single family homes, and so on. If anything, Westerners felt like the deal they were getting was too good to be true (and Eastern members of Congress tended to agree). Yet there was indeed something suspicious going on. Reclamation budgets were genuinely dodgy. Political scientists cottoned on to this in the 1960s, leading to theories of the "iron triangle" or "water subgovernment" to explain the outsized generosity of federal budgets toward farmers in the rural West. (Remember too that the 1960s were part of a period of lavish federal budgets more generally, and the stagflation of the 1970s hastened the dismantling of the New Deal state.) The iron triangle theory posited that three sets of actors at the federal level -- Western representatives, Western states' special water districts, and Reclamation -- could each gain something by cooperating outside of the public eye. In other words, while Reclamation's budgets had to be approved by Congress, the iron triangle served an interest of its own, not necessarily the public interest.
There are some nuances here to be careful of. For one, a political mechanism that operates outside of the public's purview does not necessarily act contrary to the public interest (however one assesses that), regardless of the implication. I also contend that the iron triangle articulation functions best as an explanation of how Western water projects obtained their funding, but that it has shortcomings as an answer to the question of why. The difference is apparent in considering an explanation of a car's drivetrain; understanding how an engine translates force to turn the wheels does not tell us anything about why people drive cars. But with accusations of "pork barrel" spending ubiquitous in the late twentieth century, it is easy to see how people would veer into conspiratorial thinking.
"They're ripping you off." This is also one of the main messages of Damming the West, the precursor to Cadillac Desert. The product of a Ralph Nader Study Group, the report was issued in a preliminary form in 1971 and then published in 1973. One of its targets was the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a Reclamation project that attracted much scrutiny -- for good reason. As a bit of muckracking, Damming the West exposed the Bureau's tendency to submit fanciful budgets to Congress for approval, a practice that doesn't deserve defending. And because the CAP required a coal-fired power plant to pump water up out of the Colorado River Basin into the Phoenix-Tucson metro area -- a construction project that faced considerable setbacks -- controversy surrounding the project was not limited to its price tag.
But the study group was paddling upstream in the early 1970s. As the report admits: "Oddly enough, despite the high project M&I [municipal & industrial] water prices, the cities have been supporting CAP." The prices here refer to a rate hike that urban water customers would pay to help finance the construction of the project. This represents one of the subsidies that Cadillac Desert readers should already be familiar with; farmers received cheap irrigation water through Reclamation projects because urbanites were paying more for their water or electricity. (Because people derive all sorts of inaccurate interpretations from the mention of the word "subsidies," I have to stress that this is not a taxpayer subsidy. The taxpayer subsidy from Reclamation projects consists of the interest-free loans that the Treasury provided over decades in the contracts for irrigation water. And yes, farmers have been obligated to pay back those loans, and have done so in full on many projects by this point. It is also worth mentioning that demands for interest-free loans date back to the irrigation movement around the turn of the 20th century, which is in line with Reclamation's original purpose of extending homesteading into the arid West; this was not a giveaway hatched through a mid-century, backroom conspiracy.) But urbanites were providing this subsidy willingly, and in raw numbers, they were reaping the majority of the benefits. Historian and Reclamation expert Donald Pisani writes, "Westerners supported water projects not because they had been duped or deceived, but because those projects stimulated economic growth in what appeared to be a 'capital starved' region."
So when the authors declare that the "project's chief beneficiaries" were "a small number of irrigators, politicians, and bureaucrats, not the majority of Americans or even of central Arizonans," this should be read as a persuasive argument from activists, not an accurate interpretation of the water situation. (Similarly direct language is used on the book jacket copy: the "billion-dollar Central Arizona Project... will serve no public purpose.") Pisani writes that this sort of conspiratorial argument "pays far too little attention to the public support water projects enjoyed before the 1970s. The public had a far greater say in these policies than ... [critics like] Reisner admit." In the context of the time, the rhetoric of Damming the West was meant to cause Westerners, who were otherwise clamoring for federal investment in their region, to look the gift horse in the mouth. For environmentalists concerned about the impact of Reclamation's dams on pristine wilderness vistas, this economic argument became a toehold for discussing the rather niche concern, at the time, of riparian ecosystems.
One reason I point to the rhetorical power of this conspiratorial interpretation is because one of the arguments of both Damming the West and Cadillac Desert has almost entirely slipped through the cracks. Damming the West contains a whole chapter titled "Indians Sold Down the River," and Cadillac Desert contains an extended account of the catastrophic effects of the Pick-Sloan Project on Native American reservations in the Upper Missouri River area. I don't see how any honest accounting of Western reclamation projects can place the most adverse impacts on anyone but the Indigenous peoples of the region. Yet as we Anglos continue to get incensed about every aspect of Western water, "we're ripping them off" has not yet become a talking point, for reasons that should be apparent.
Along those lines, the experience of Indian irrigation projects in the West highlights an important fact about Reclamation projects. The Bureau submitted budgets that sometimes left out whole categories of expenses, something that Damming the West and Cadillac Desert both lean on to great effect. Everyone admits that Reclamation did this strategically to get the projects approved; when the projects ran out of money, Reclamation would simply go back to the trough. But it goes underdiscussed that this was a risky strategy unless the Bureau had full confidence that more money was forthcoming. As a comparison, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has never completed an irrigation project. The most direct explanation is that the projects simply ran out of money, as is fairly typical of large, complex civil engineering projects. But when the money stopped, construction stopped. This represents a stark difference between the BIA and Reclamation, and it demonstrates that spinning up an iron triangle (as the Army Corps of Engineers purportedly did when it saw the success of the Bureau of Reclamation) is not as easy as Reisner implied. The implication that Floyd Dominy and his Bureau were corrupt is less compelling in my opinion than the opposite theory: Dominy rushed these projects through because he genuinely believed in them and wanted to get ahead of environmentalist resistance.
This gets us to the shortcomings of making an agenda out of innuendo and imprecision. The reason why I believe Reisner's main argument is "this doesn't make any sense" rather than "they're ripping you off" is because he writes -- very well -- in an ironic, elusive style that masks whatever commitments he holds. There are examples of this in his diction, in which he tends to hedge his prescriptions: "If free-market mechanisms... were actually allowed to work, the West's water 'shortage' would be exposed..." Notice the "if" there and consider whether we can construe this as a full-throated recommendation of adopting free-market mechanisms. Another example is in the introduction:
Politicians of every stripe have sacrificed their most sacred principles on the altar of water development. Barry Goldwater, scourge of welfare and champion of free enterprise, was a lifelong supporter of the Central Arizona Project, which comes as close to socialism as anything this country has ever done (the main difference being that those who are subsidized are well-off, even rich)... Alan Cranston, once the leading liberal in the U.S. Senate, the champion of the poor and the oppressed, successfully lobbied to legalize illegal sales of subsidized water to giant corporate farms, thus denying water--and farms--to thousands of the poor and oppressed.
Point taken, but what exactly are Reisner's most sacred principles? Do we imagine that Reisner sympathizes with the ideals of Cranston? with Goldwater? I can't say. The entire thrust of the book, after all, unfolds beat-by-beat according to a familiar narrative for twentieth-century Western conservatives: a well-meaning government agency tasked with improving the general welfare of the country turned into an out-of-control bureaucracy, sucking up taxpayer money to preserve itself and enrich its co-conspirators. This conservative approach seems out of step for an environmentalist like Reisner. My initial impression was that this was designed to taunt Republicans in the Reagan era by exposing their hypocrisy, but I'm not entirely sure that Reisner disagrees with them. This sort of ambiguity allows the reader to connect the dots in their own preferred way, broadening the book's appeal and solidifying a consensus around the absurdity of Western water.
In my reading -- and I sincerely apologize if I cross a line into putting words in the mouth of a person now deceased -- I suspect that Reisner held a position that he knew was too radical for most people to embrace. As with many environmentalists of his generation, he was very concerned with overpopulation. In a 2000 interview, he stated that population growth "eclipses the next five most significant environmental problems combined." In Cadillac Desert he writes that the Progressive creed of "'the greater good for the greatest number'... also happens to be the progressivism of cancer cells." His distaste for agriculture in the West was evident, but he also compared cities to "cancers." In fact, in that 2000 interview, he states, "Unfortunately, there's plenty of water for 150 million Californians," and "If sprawl is what you get by moving water out of agriculture, I think I'll stick with alfalfa." Perhaps he viewed his prediction in the book's introduction, that civilization's "beachhead" in the West would probably not be sustained, as a salutary result. He seems to relish the prospect that the drought beginning in 1989 was not part of a natural climatic cycle but, as he writes, "punishment meted out to an impudent culture by an indignant God." It is hard to imagine, though, that the book's fans, diverse as they are, would wish for some sort of calamity that would result in the near total depopulation of the region.
In the 1990s, Reisner became involved as an entrepreneur in private, underground water storage projects, which he termed "green capitalism." This tracks with his (tentative?) support of "free-market mechanisms" in Cadillac Desert. In the interview he says, "I guess we're making progress... We're allowing water markets to develop slowly and gradually." But he also knew that such a thing would turn off some of his environmentalist compatriots. Maybe he sold out. But to make that assessment, we would have to assume that "green capitalism" ran counter to his original values, and, again, I'm not sure that's the case.
I think that interview from 2000 provides valuable insight, for the reasons already discussed, but also because it potentially shows an evolution in thinking as Reisner became personally more involved in the region's water economy. Storing water for later use in dry seasons begins to make sense to this, post-Cadillac Desert Reisner. He makes a qualified defense of irrigated alfalfa and rice fields, borne out of his admirable work in helping to form a coalition between farmers and conservationists: "Rice, for example, is a pretty good substitute for the wetlands that used to be there before the ricelands... In the rice region, ducks by the tens, maybe hundreds, or thousands nest in the alfalfa fields." In other words, he is finally able to start making sense of water use in the region. If, as I contend, Cadillac Desert's primary argument is that resource usage here is nonsensical, this interview is an implicit refutation of the book.
Yet it is possible that Reisner, like many others who live here, was compartmentalizing and making exceptions for himself. This is a danger in building an argument around bad actors: nobody will willingly lump themselves in with the crooks and thieves who are really responsible for the problem.
The book's other main rhetorical coup was making a convincing connection between political graft and wanton use of natural resources. But this connection was always tenuous. Now, forty years on, the connection is downright illusory. If the iron triangle theory explained the alleged misallocation of water in the West, then we have to seriously account for the fact that the Bureau of Reclamation has been wrapping up the business of building dams for at least three decades now. Is there such a thing as an iron line segment? Utah political scientist Tim Miller wrote in 1995, "The behind-the-scenes basis of water subgovernment has been replaced by a contentious and highly visible conflict over basic policy... The decline of the iron triangle is the foremost elemnt of the new reality in federal water policy." Yet the general understanding of water in the West still relies on this outdated model, like Wile E. Coyote before he looks down and realizes he's standing on air.
As a pseudonymous blogger and California water professional put it, writing in 2011: "Read Cadillac Desert for an understanding of how things were thirty years ago [now forty years ago]. It isn't accurate now (in fact, the book made itself obsolete), but Cadillac Desert fundamentally shaped the lay view of water in CA. When a layperson has some outraged simplistic solution to water problems in CA, it'll be from Cadillac Desert." Water journalist and professor John Fleck calls the conspiratorial narrative that informs Cadillac Desert a "blind alley" that clashed with "the messy reality [his] journalism encountered daily." (I strongly recommend reading Fleck's book Water is for Fighting Over as a companion to Cadillac Desert.)
The problem that I see in contemporary Western water discourse -- and it is a substantial problem -- is that the narrative of waste and corruption is so seductive because it allows us to believe that everything could be fine if only all that precious water was pried out of the hands of the fat cat farmers. A lot of people seem to believe that there is an enormous amount of water that continues to be misused due to subsidies that distort its rational allocation. This is simply not the case. Again, consider the decades that have passed since Reisner published his bestseller. Today, what exactly is standing in the way of this type of needed water reform? If it sounds implausible that Wyoming alfalfa farmers have a continuing stranglehold on federal budgets, that's because it is. (As a quick example of how a selective focus across a very large and diverse region can distort conclusions, two rural counties in Utah left the Central Utah Water Conservancy District ahead of the 1992 Central Utah Project Completion Act because the project had removed any plans to irrigate new acreage. Farmers were in a huff over how much water had been redirected from their desired irrigation systems toward the urban Wasatch Front -- and forty environmental and outdoors groups gave their thumbs up to the 1992 legislation. The reality has been more nuanced than many believe, especially in the last few decades.)
Yes, agriculture uses something like 80 - 85% of the region's surface water. But believe it or not, that represents the sector's lowest share in history (with the caveat that we do not have hard numbers on surface water consumption going back to the last half of the 19th century, or really even the first half of the twentieth century. But since permanent settlement in the West has an agrarian foundation -- that is, in irrigated agriculture -- I feel very comfortable making that claim.) Since large dam construction slowed in the late twentieth centurty, the agricultural sector has held the water reserve that continues to allow Western cities to grow. This means that, obviously, everything here runs on water. The development of water facilitates growth, and growth means money. Any conspiracies are happening out in the open, not in backroom deals. The grand irony of it all is that the conspiracy narrative actually helps perpetuate the deleterious status quo.
To return to my original point, the way that water works in the West does in fact have a logic to it. That does not mean I support everything about it; on the contrary, I believe that an accurate understanding of the problem is ultimately more valuable in changing things than a quick and dirty one that gets people shouting. Believe it or not, people in the region do generally understand the value of water. This makes the problem more difficult, because nearly every acre-foot of water is actually doing something, and therefore redirecting it sends ripple effects through the complex organic machine that humans have constructed. The idea that "subsidies" and "waste" and "fraud" are preventing us from tapping into large amounts of misused water is a compelling story, but it is just a story.
References:
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Viking, 1986.
Richard L. Berkman and W. Kip Viscusi, Damming the West: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on the Bureau of Reclamation. New York: Grossman, 1973.
Donald J. Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Donald J Pisani, “Federal Reclamation and the American West in the Twentieth Century.” Agricultural History 77, no. 3 (2003): 391–419. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3745040.
Donald J. Pisani, “Federal Reclamation in the Twentieth Century: A Centennial Retrospective.” The Bureau of Reclamation: History Essays from the Centennial Symposium, Reclamation: Managing Water in the West, 2 (2008): 611–32.
Norris Hundley, The Great Thirst: Californians and Water: A History, Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Daniel McCool, Native Waters: Contemporary Indian Water Settlements and the Second Treaty Era. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002.
John Fleck, Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West. Washington DC: Island Press, 2016.
Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Tim Miller, "Utah Water Politics in a National Perspective" in Daniel McCool, ed., Waters of Zion: The Politics of Water in Utah. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995.
Andrew Ross, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Franck Poupeau, Brian O’Neill, Joan Cortinas Muñoz, Murielle Coeurdray, and Eliza Benites-Gambirazio. The Field of Water Policy: Power and Scarcity in the American Southwest. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2021.
Read more:
A Short History of Water in the US West
The Agrarian Foundations of the Western Water Crisis (1620 - 1902)
The 100th Meridian: Where "Free Land" Requires "Free Water" (1862 - 1923) How (Not) to Make the Desert Blossom as the Rose (1847 - 1860)Free-for-All in the Uinta Basin (1879 - 1920)
Race to the Bottom -- The Law of the River
The Sinful Rivers We Must Curb
Our Last Major Water Resource -- The Central Utah Project
Water for City and Country in the Late 20th Century