The history of engineered water projects in the American West hasn't altered Santa Cruz County as much as places like Los Angeles or the San Joaquin Valley, but the ideologies and politics described in Cadillac Desert: the American West and Its Disappearing Water are still locally relevant, 30 years after the book's 1986 publication. In a state increasingly worried about water shortages, it's important to understand how we got here, even as our county remains one of the few in California that neither imports nor exports water. As the saying goes, those who fail to learn from history are likely to repeat it.
The enduring popularity of Cadillac Desert owes a lot to the writing skill of its author, environmental journalist Marc Reisner. In a way that dry technocratic reports and academic research papers rarely do, Reisner created that sense of impending crisis that keeps readers turning the pages, like in a suspense thriller novel. Rachel Carson arguably created the template for this kind of "wake-up call" environmental writing in 1962 with Silent Spring. It worked, calling attention to the threats to American birds - especially predators and scavengers - from pesticides like DDT, which has since been banned. The recent renaming of the former College Eight at UCSC recognizes the seminal nature of Carson's work.
Cadillac Desert tried to do the same thing for water - especially irrigation-farming water, with some success. Every headline today about how the West will soon dry up and blow away owes its impact to Reisner. Even though such outcomes are just as avoidable as eagle extinction, the continued force of "eco-disaster" writing is a good reason to reread Reisner's book 30 years later. It's also good to be reminded how much special interests are still able to direct government (especially federal) water-project spending into sketchy projects that benefit only a handful of wealthy land owners.
Both the strength and the weakness of eco-disaster writing lie in its projection of worst-case scenarios where bad ideas and bad policy are never recognized and changed, leading us off an environmental cliff of our own making. What in fact happens is that someone like Reisner eventually succeeds in telling the story in such a compelling way that a critical mass of desire for change is created. Politics and policy follow the votes, while rising costs, diminishing returns, and environmental damage dampen the enthusiasm for resource-exploitation projects. Unfortunately, a certain amount of not-easily-reversible damage remains, especially salt buildup/intrusion.
Water politics in California and other western states is shifting away from the big-engineering thinking that built Hoover Dam, toward a recognition of limits and a new definition of water conservation. Cadillac Desert describes how "waste" used to mean letting rivers flow all the way to the ocean, and "conservation" used to mean building dams to stop it. Thanks to this book and others like it, we're learning to appreciate and support "sustainable" water policy that benefits everyone. As we struggle with development pressures, water rationing, salt-water intrusion into aquifers, and an uncertain climate future, we need to pay attention to the lessons in Cadillac Desert.
P.S. For an actual suspense thriller novel set in the grim, dry western future foreseen by Cadillac Desert and climate change fears, read The Water Knife (2015), very well-written by Paolo Bacigalupi.
P.S. For an actual suspense thriller novel set in the grim, dry western future foreseen by Cadillac Desert and climate change fears, read The Water Knife (2015), very well-written by Paolo Bacigalupi.
