‘Cadillac Desert’ Reconsidered
This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
If there is a single book that put me on a path to becoming a journalist and writer, it is Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner. As someone raised in the Four Corners region of southern Utah and Colorado in a family of river runners, this history of the development of the American West, particularly its water projects, was a revelation: witty, superbly written, and packed full of riveting stories.
The book came out in 1986, the year I was born, as it happens. In recent years, I have developed some skepticism of the environmental movement as it developed in the 1970s and ’80s. So I recently reread Cadillac Desert to see if it holds up.
I must conclude that, while the book is extremely enjoyable and well worth reading, its basic framework is highly outdated and in places infected with Reaganite politics. Reisner evinces a deep skepticism of government and often relies on neoliberal economics. And this perspective dogs the climate movement to this day.
The basic argument of the book is that the American settlement of the West—that is, more or less everything west of the 100th meridian—was largely a mistake that never should have happened. “Westerners call what they have established out here a civilization, but it would be more accurate to call it a beachhead. And if history is any guide, the odds that we can sustain it would have to be regarded as low.”
Now, I must admit that a scathingly critical view of Western water development is entirely justified. As the book shows in detail, the median water project in the mid-20th century was senseless at best, and many of them were outright atrocities. Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona flooded one of the greatest scenic wonders in the world, on a river that was already over-allocated by the time of its completion in 1963. Lake Powell, created by the dam, has not been full since 1999.
America is crying out for a coherent national water policy, and the states would be an obstacle to this no matter how their boundaries were drawn.
In the book’s most heartrending story, Garrison Dam on the Missouri River in North Dakota flooded the best land of the Mandan, the Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, splitting the remaining reservations in half, as part of a set of awkwardly stapled-together pet projects from the Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation. The projects, as usual, grossly violated previous treaties the government had signed with the tribes, and as Reisner put it, made “a whole whose parts, according to their earlier testimony, would cancel out each other’s usefulness.”
Reisner is an exceptionally gifted reporter and storyteller, though the occasional serious error—he claims at one point that the New Deal Public Works Administration “was also known as the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration,” which is not true at all, those were three different agencies—makes one doubt his frequent sweeping assertions.
More important, Reisner is a product of the dominant ideologies of his time. For instance, he endlessly criticizes the Bureau of Reclamation for setting up funding schemes whereby hydropower revenues from “cash register” dams would subsidize irrigation projects. “It was as if a conglomerate purchased a dozen money-losing subsidiaries while operating a highly profitable silver mine—a case of horribly bad management which, nonetheless, still leaves the company barely in the black,” he writes. Details of individual projects aside, this idea that public works projects should each pay for themselves individually is straight out of neoliberal dogma.
Reisner’s assumption is that government agencies should behave “like a business,” with every effort measured by its success at producing a profit in the market. But it is the details of the projects that matter—not the fact that they were set up with subsidy schemes.
That’s obviously not the only way to conceive of government policy. For instance, part of the regulatory structure of the Civil Aeronautics Board prior to airline deregulation in 1978 was taking revenue from high-traffic routes to support service to low-traffic ones. The government wanted profits roughly consistent with the public good—successful airline companies to be sure, but also a decent standard of living for airline workers, as well as knitting the nation together with a strong network of flights and airports.
Another problem with Reisner’s analysis is his distaste for cities. A lengthy chapter of the book is dedicated to Los Angeles’s endless thirst for water, especially its (admittedly appalling and arguably criminal) appropriation of the water in the Owens River Valley. “It is the only megalopolis in North America which is mentioned in the same breath as Mexico City or Djakarta—a place whose insoluble excesses raise the specter of some majestic, stately kind of collapse,” he writes with a clear sense of longing.
But the actual problem with water use in the West, as is eventually made clear by Reisner’s own reporting, is the titanic quantities of water dedicated to relatively low-value crops, especially livestock feed. That water would be far better used for cities; or for high-value, nutritious vegetables, fruits, and nuts; or for recreation and conservation. The water-heavy crops—alfalfa and cotton in particular—can be grown in the Eastern United States with rainwater, rather than heavily subsidized irrigation water in the scorching Western desert.
Cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix use only a small fraction of their states’ water. In California, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of water used by homes and businesses; in Arizona, it is 74 percent of all water use total. Across the entire Colorado River Basin, cattle feed alone accounts for nearly half of water use.
Furthermore, personal water consumption can be reduced through conservation rules, tiered pricing so profligate users pay more, wastewater recycling, and so on. Phoenix has reduced its consumption per resident by almost 30 percent since 1990, meaning roughly flat water use despite a booming population. And when it comes to residential energy use for heating and cooling, even Arizonans in the brutally hot desert use less on average than folks in Minnesota or Boston, because so much is required for heating in cold climates. California is even better.
Therefore, while Reisner’s repeated implications that population growth projections for Southern California are on a “horrifying march,” it really doesn’t hold up. A relatively minor diversion of certain agricultural products would be more than sufficient to sustain Western cities’ water needs well into the 2100s. The sustainability problem with Western cities involves hideously inefficient, car-dependent sprawl and the resulting carbon emissions, not population growth.
CADILLAC DESERT REMAINS INSTRUCTIVE about the dysfunction in American politics. As Reisner notes, his hero John Wesley Powell (who led the first river expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon) argued that Western states should be drawn up based on watershed boundaries to avoid conflicts over water rights. They were not—in fact, several of them were drawn on lines of latitude and longitude, about the most senseless option imaginable. Sure enough, Western states have been fighting like cats in a sack over water rights ever since.
The problem of state boundaries is made worse by the structure of the federal government. We do not have a truly federalist system where authority over certain matters is delegated to the regional and local level, but one in which random depopulated rural states get enormously disproportionate power over national policy. That is so because each state gets two senators regardless of population, who can and do seize outsize power for themselves. One of Reisner’s villains, for instance, is Sen. Carl Hayden (D-AZ), who used his chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee to dole out pork-barrel water projects to the districts of favored allies across the country. Sure enough, many of those projects were disastrous.
I would go further than Reisner, however. America is crying out for a coherent national water policy, and states would be an obstacle to this no matter how their boundaries were drawn. After all, there is no inherent reason why water in one watershed should not be used for another, simply because of geographical happenstance. The Central Valley in California, for instance, heavily relies on Colorado River water (where usage rights are admittedly heavily concentrated among a handful of wealthy families, but that is a separate problem). California farmers, mostly in that valley, grow a third of the vegetables in this country, and two-thirds of the fruits and nuts.
The core problem is that the United States does not have a true democracy, and as a result struggles mightily to do logical national planning. The Senate is an abject affront to the principle of “one person, one vote.” We are now seeing the scourge of gerrymandering in the House, where lawmakers choose their own voters. The system of so-called checks and balances between Congress, the executive branch, and the judiciary in practice makes it extremely difficult to pass decent policy.
Reisner’s failure, like so many other liberals of his generation, was that he did not outline a positive agenda for government’s purpose.
In particular, the judiciary has evolved into a dominant force. Rather than water policy—or health care, or voting rights, or the environment, or whatever—being consistently ironed out by the people’s elected representatives, it is just as often decided by the random whim of whoever in a black robe happens to be ruling by decree.
A related problem is the American habit of almost never clarifying or streamlining the federal agency system. Because it is so difficult to pass bills, housecleaning measures are deprioritized or forgotten entirely. Rather than agencies and programs being regularly overhauled to fit changing times or new priorities, or just to make logical sense, they are typically piled on top of each other in an ever-increasing tangle of legislative cruft, leading to endless corruption, delays, waste, and confusion. For example, instead of a single water projects agency with a clear set of responsibilities, we have the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, with vague and overlapping mandates.
Cadillac Desert demonstrates, albeit implicitly, how a hypertrophic judiciary combines with America’s deadlocked legislature to make vast swaths of Western water policy dependent on 19th-century legal norms. Back in those days, whoever bought up the water first got to claim dibs, and if they didn’t use their whole allotment it was forfeited. With some exceptions, those norms hold to this day.
This opaque, unfair, byzantine system selects for politicians, judges, and bureaucrats who are good at backroom maneuvers. Rather than power flowing through channels voters can understand, it pools in the hands of obscure, well-placed individuals who are expert at working the mysterious levers of government. All our supposed checks and balances lead to a government where obscure bureaucrats and judges wield enormous authority, with little or no accountability.
ANOTHER OF REISNER’S VILLAINS IS FLOYD DOMINY, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation from 1959 to 1969. His behavior bears a striking resemblance to that of Robert Moses as described by Robert Caro in The Power Broker. Dominy was an ambitious, domineering man who became an expert at Machiavellian scheming, cultivated close relationships with powerful politicians like Hayden, and wielded the resulting power to get what he wanted.
As Reisner shows, the division of responsibility between the Corps and the Bureau combined with the 19th-century legal framework for water use to create an array of terrible water projects. The two agencies fought aggressive turf wars to hoard as many projects for themselves as possible, knowing that whoever got their projects built first would have legal priority. The Missouri River projects were so bad in part because the two agencies got in such a bitter catfight over priority that President Roosevelt threatened to turn them over to a new Tennessee Valley Authority–style agency, after which they hurriedly agreed to just build both plans at once.
But Reisner dismisses the possibility of a single, democratically accountable water agency implementing a clear national plan. Without the rivalry between the Bureau and the Corps, he suggests, things would have been even worse. Had they “really cooperated … there is no telling what they might have built,” he writes.
This anti-government attitude was deeply ingrained in the 20th-century environmental movement, where it remains to this day. The implicit assumption was that if the government wanted to build something, it would be an environmental disaster. That was often correct in the 20th century, but today, with climate change tearing up the country, swift government action to slash carbon emissions is vital, and an anti-government approach is not helping. A transmission line carrying power from a huge New Mexico wind farm to Phoenix broke ground in 2023 after 17 years of administrative delays, many stemming from environmentalist lawsuits.
The environmental movement’s key legislative achievement, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), does not lay out any direct environmental protection goals. Instead, it merely requires agencies to publish costly and time-consuming environmental impact statements, which are a toehold for lawsuits, leading to slow administrative processes as agencies attempt (often futilely) to lawsuit-proof their work product. Plus, because the judiciary is a structurally conservative institution, NEPA-style proceduralism privileges those with elite connections and money above ordinary citizens or even the executive branch.
Donald Trump, of course, is doing all he can to make climate change worse, including ripping up NEPA via executive order, with assistance from right-wing judges. That will surely harm the climate on net, as Trump has indicated a desire to strangle new renewable-energy projects in additional red tape, and his “Big Beautiful Bill” both cuts off wind and solar subsidies while adding new ones for oil and coal. Still, if and when Democrats do take power again, American infrastructure projects can no longer be so much more costly and slow than those of other nations, especially with the need so pressing. There might be an opportunity to reset American environmental policy away from the courts, and toward a federal government that can act quickly while also protecting the national heritage.
Again, Reisner was largely correct to say that 20th-century Western water policy was done terribly. His failure, like so many other liberals of his generation, was that he did not outline a positive agenda for government’s purpose. As Paul Sabin writes in Public Citizens, “The enduring failure of 1970s liberalism was not that liberals failed to blindly defend traditional New Deal institutions and political coalitions, but rather that liberals failed to adapt and respond effectively to their own substantive critique of the ways that the postwar administrative state threatened nature, community, and individual well-being.” This played into the hands of conservatives, by arguing that government as such could not be trusted to do good, and that the judiciary could be trusted to advance justice.
Today, the federal government and states in the Southwest struggle mightily to deal with chronic water shortages in the Colorado River Basin. Efforts abound to balance the needs of farmers, native wildlife, American Indian tribes, the many cities in the region, and much more. But those efforts are tremendously hampered by America’s sluggish and hyper-litigious government, and the burdensome legacy of ancient, nonsensical legal precedents.
Climate change does not obey circuit court timetables. What may end up deciding Western water policy is federal emergency decrees going entirely around the usual legal process when the intakes on reservoirs start sucking air and a decision simply must be made. No one, especially not environmentalists, should welcome that outcome. Better to recognize the inevitability of government action and build up state capacity for democratic planning.
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