The cheapest sites with the most capacity to deliver water already have water projects. The additional water deliveries from new major dam or canal projects are typically small and expensive. Almost all books and scholarship following Cadillac Desert have adopted or been underlain by these themes (such as The Great Thirst, 1992, The King of California, 2005, and Managing California’s Water, 2011).īut much has changed since Cadillac Desert was written (and revised in 1992).įederal and State agencies no longer drive major water project construction. Although these ideas were not new to well-read scholars, they were timely, well-written, and influential. Marc Reisner’s themes are now conventional wisdom.

In many ways, the water infrastructure of the Western US was over-developed, or at least mal-developed for contemporary society’s water management objectives.

The West’s large water infrastructure systems have profoundly transformed and damaged the natural environment and pre-existing rural communities, particularly Native American communities.

The large federal and state agencies have largely lacked political and financial support needed to develop new talented and ambitious people to effectively lead these institutions in better adapted directions.

The public institutions responsible for the successes and failures of the big infrastructure era were incapable of adapting to new conditions.

But contemporary and likely future politics and economics can no longer support continued traditional water project development. In fact, they proved to be more important than traditional engineering (my field) in shaping water management.

Why do we expect anything as important as water to not be political? The individuals, sociology, economics, and politics behind the era of large water infrastructure construction were fascinating and important.

The 50-year era of building large regional and multi-state water projects was largely over (by 1987).

The main lessons from the book (for me) were: Mark Reisner provided an exclamation mark. The era of large dam and water projects in the US had clearly ended, and needed a punctuation mark. Cadillac Desert fell in the tradition of Muddy Waters (1951), Dams and other Disasters (1971), Rivers of Empire (1985), and Water and Power (1983), all written by giants in the field critical of Western water development, but was much better written and marketed (though less scholarly) and the time was ripe for publication of such a thoughtful, popular work.

Reisner cadillac desert