''Cadillac Desert'' (1986), is a history by American Marc Reisner about land development and water policy in the

western United States The Western United States (also called the American West, the Far West, and the West) is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term ''the We ...

. Subtitled ''The American West and Its Disappearing Water'', it explores the history of the federal agencies,

Bureau of Reclamation The Bureau of Reclamation, and formerly the United States Reclamation Service, is a federal agency under the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees water resource management, specifically as it applies to the oversight and opera ...

and

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers , colors = , anniversaries = 16 June (Organization Day) , battles = , battles_label = Wars , website = , commander1 = ...

, and their struggles to remake the American West in ways to satisfy national settlement goals. The book concludes that the development-driven policies, formed when settling the West was the country's main concern, have had serious long-term negative effects on the environment and water quantity. The book was revised and updated in 1993.

Topics discussed

* Army Corps of Engineers *

California Aqueduct The Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct is a system of canals, tunnels, and pipelines that conveys water collected from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and valleys of Northern and Central California to Southern California. Named after Califo ...

* California Water Wars *

Central Arizona Project The Central Arizona Project (CAP) is a 336 mi (541 km) diversion canal in Arizona in the southern United States. The aqueduct diverts water from the Colorado River to the Bill Williams Wildlife Refuge south portion of Lake Havasu ne ...

Colorado River The Colorado River ( es, Río Colorado) is one of the principal rivers (along with the Rio Grande) in the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The river drains an expansive, arid watershed that encompasses parts of seven U.S. s ...

Colorado River Storage Project The Colorado River Storage Project is a United States Bureau of Reclamation project designed to oversee the development of the upper Colorado River basin. The project provides hydroelectric power, flood control and water storage for participat ...

David Brower David Ross Brower (; July 1, 1912 – November 5, 2000) was a prominent environmentalist and the founder of many environmental organizations, including the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies (1997), Friends of the Earth (1969), Earth ...

Floyd Dominy Floyd Elgin Dominy (December 24, 1909 Adams County, Nebraska – April 20, 2010 Boyce, Virginia) was appointed commissioner of the United States Bureau of Reclamation from May 1, 1959, to December 1, 1969, by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dominy joi ...

Garrison Dam Garrison Dam is an earth-fill embankment dam on the Missouri River in central North Dakota, U.S. Constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1947 to 1953, at over in length, the dam is the fifth-largest earthen dam in the world. The re ...

* Glen Canyon Dam *

Grand Coulee Dam Grand Coulee Dam is a concrete gravity dam on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington, built to produce hydroelectric power and provide irrigation water. Constructed between 1933 and 1942, Grand Coulee originally had two powerh ...

* Hoover Dam * Klamath Diversion *

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest municipal utility in the United States with 8,100 megawatts of electric generating capacity (2021-2022) and delivering an average of 435 million gallons of water per day to more ...

* Manifest Destiny *

Mono Lake Mono Lake ( ) is a saline soda lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in an endorheic basin. The lack of an outlet causes high levels of salts to accumulate in the lake which make its water a ...

* Native Americans * NAWAPA *

Ogallala Aquifer The Ogallala Aquifer () is a shallow water table aquifer surrounded by sand, silt, clay, and gravel located beneath the Great Plains in the United States. One of the world's largest aquifers, it underlies an area of approximately in porti ...

Owens Valley Owens Valley ( Numic: ''Payahǖǖnadǖ'', meaning "place of flowing water") is an arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States. It is located to the east of the Sierra Nevada, west of the White Mountains and Iny ...

Powell Geographic Expedition of 1869 The Powell Geographic Expedition of 1869, led by American naturalist John Wesley Powell, was the first thorough cartographic and scientific investigation of long segments of the Green and Colorado rivers in the southwestern United States, includi ...

Rain follows the plow Rain follows the plow is the conventional name for a now-discredited theory of climatology that was popular throughout the American West and Australia during the late 19th century. The phrase was employed as a summation of the theory by Charles ...

" *

St. Francis Dam The St. Francis Dam was a concrete gravity dam located in San Francisquito Canyon in Los Angeles County, California, United States, built from 1924 to 1926 to serve Los Angeles's growing water needs. It catastrophically failed in 1928 due to a d ...

* Snail darter controversy * Stewart Lee Udall *

Teton Dam The Teton Dam was an earthen dam in the western United States, on the Teton River in eastern Idaho. It was built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, one of eight federal agencies authorized to construct dams.Perrow, Charles. '' Normal Accid ...

William Mulholland William Mulholland (September 11, 1855 – July 22, 1935) was an Irish American self-taught civil engineer who was responsible for building the infrastructure to provide a water supply that allowed Los Angeles to grow into the largest city in Ca ...

Adaptations and representations in other media

A portion of the 1993 update was printed in the 1994 inaugural edition of the '' Hastings West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law and Policy''.Marc Reisner, "Deconstruction in the Arid West," ''1 West-Northwest 1'' (1994) A four-part television documentary based on the revised book was produced in 1996 by

KTEH KTEH may refer to: * KTEH-LP, a low-power radio station (98.9 FM) licensed to serve Los Molinos, California, United States * KQEH, a television station (channel 50, virtual 54) licensed to serve San Jose, California, which held the call sign ...

, the PBS affiliate in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

This book has been referred to in 21st-century fiction about the

effects of climate change The effects of climate change impact the physical environment, ecosystems and human societies. The environmental effects of climate change are broad and far-reaching. They affect the water cycle, oceans, sea and land ice ( glaciers), sea le ...

(so-called

climate fiction Climate fiction (sometimes shortened as cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change.Glass, Rodge (31 May 2013).Global Warning: The Rise of 'Cli-fi' retrieved 3 March 2016 Generally speculative in nature but scientifically-grounded, wor ...

), such as Paolo Bacigalupi's ''

The Water Knife ''The Water Knife'' is a 2015 science fiction novel by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is Bacigalupi's sixth novel, and is based on his short story, ''The Tamarisk Hunter'', first published in the news magazine '' High Country News''. It takes place in the ...

'' (2015), a thriller set in the near-future. Several characters refer to ''Cadillac Desert'' as having anticipated the environmental decline they are living through. The physical book also plays an important role. Claire Vaye Watkins refers to ''Cadillac Desert'' as a source in her acknowledgments for her novel, '' Gold Fame Citrus'' (2015).

References

1986 non-fiction books Water in California History books about the United States Books about California Viking Press books {{US-hist-book-stub