Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

The concluding chapter of Cadillac Desert provides vivid examples that illustrate how truly precarious the West’s water crisis is. The first example is the Ogallala Aquifer, extending from South Dakota to Texas. Overnight, West Texas, one of the poorest farming regions in the United States, transformed into one of the wealthiest due to groundwater from this aquifer. This region now raises nearly half of beef cattle in the country. Due to overdraft, water from the aquifer will run out in decades when it should have lasted hundreds of years. Reisner reinforces that West Texas, and other areas that depend on the aquifer, chose immediate gain over long-term economic stability. Water importation projects have been of interest to West Texas, but the costs would be astronomic. Despite this, it is hard for individuals to give up on this idea. Reisner notes, “such is our reluctance to let nature regain control, to suffer the fate of nearly all the irrigated civilizations of antiquity” (454).

Civilizations dependent on irrigation all have one thing in common: Salt was their demise. In recent years, concentrations of salt have increased drastically in some of the world’s rivers and most productive agricultural land. Canals and aqueducts divert rivers and spread water over farmland. As water percolates through the soil and returns to the river, it passes through thick deposits of mineral salt. This phenomenon is common in the West. This process coupled with high rates of evaporation seen at the man-made lakes (e.g., Lake Powell) and dams (e.g., Glen Canyon Dam), which leaves salt behind, substantially increases the salinity of the rivers. Water that has high salinity spells death for most crops. There is now more land going out of production from high salinity than new irrigated fields coming into production. Desalinization plants are being built, but these are extremely expensive.

The final vulnerability Reisner discusses is silt. While engineers have safeguarded dams from floods, earthquakes, and landslides, they have not found a cure for silt. As silt increases, it reduces dams’ water capacity. The dams in the West are all silting up. Desilting dams is incredibly expensive. For example, estimates for desilting Lake Mead are $29 million. The blame lies with humans who tried to control rivers to make a home where they should not have.

The Epilogue recapitulates many of the central themes of the book. To Reisner, it is hard for people to think about the vulnerable aspects of the American West’s desert civilization since they remain an abstraction. However, groundwater mining, salt poisoning of the soil and waters, and silting are real threats. The threat of disintegration of the desert civilization lies in the federally funded dam construction projects, because without these projects there never would have been a desert civilization. By offering cheap water, the Bureau created a monster that it cannot fix. Subsidies are at the root of many of these issues. Water is still so cheap that there are no incentives for Western farmers to conserve. Taxpayers continue to subsidize some of the most productive farmland in the world, which generates more revenue than actual crop production. The Bureau originally set out to help small farmers. In the end, however, it made rich farmers wealthier, at the expense of these small farmers. 

The West must now try new solutions to solve its water crisis, such as cities buying surplus water from farmers and regulation of groundwater pumping. These are things the region should have tried decades ago. However, despite everything we have learned over the last 150 years, there are still some who see water importation as the only way to save the West, even if this is just for a few hundred years more. The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), in theory, would pump water from British Columbia to the American West. Unsurprisingly, an engineer for the Los Angeles water department was the project’s mastermind. The environmental consequences would be immense, including the damming of major rivers in Canada, the drowning of tens of millions of acres of wilderness and wildlife habitat in both countries, and relocating hundreds of thousands of people. Despite the astronomical economic and environmental costs, there are still some who prefer this plan over conservation in the American West.