Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [110]
“Before white men came to North America,” the General began, “it is estimated that about one million Indians inhabited the region between the Canadian border and the Gulf of Mexico. The streams were unpolluted, the forests still stood, and the plow had not broken the plains. They had the resources of a continent at their disposal, and about four hundred acres of arable land for every man, woman, and child. Yet they often starved—because they lacked the capacity to develop their resources.
“In the 1890s,” Cassidy continued, “the United States had about seventy-seven acres of cultivated land per person. Before World War I, about four acres. Today, we have only about two acres of cultivated land per person. Yet the United States maintains the highest level of living known to history, it exports food to other nations, and it has even accumulated substantial surpluses of a few crops. This is the result of increasingly intensive resource development.”
But all of this resource development had been a mere warm-up exercise compared with what was still to come. “During the next twenty years,” Cassidy went on, “we estimate that we will have to provide some 320 million acre-feet of reservoir storage at a cost of about $15 billion; about thirteen thousand miles of new or improved inland waterways; about sixty new or improved commercial harbors; thirty million kilowatts of hydroelectric power-generating capacity; some eleven thousand miles of levees, floodwalls, and channel improvements; and recreational facilities for perhaps 300 million visitors at our reservoirs....” If all of that seemed “unduly large or visionary,” Cassidy admonished, “let us remember the responsibilities our nation is facing.”
It is worth taking a moment to put some of these figures in perspective. In 1962, the total amount of federally built reservoir storage in the nation was somewhere around 300 million acre-feet. In twenty years, Cassidy wanted to more than double that. Every year, the Mississippi River carries about 355 million acre-feet of water out to sea, the runoff of most of the United States from Pennsylvania to Montana. In twenty years, according to the Corps of Engineers, we were going to put the equivalent of 90 percent of that water behind dams. In 1962, there were 37,342 megawatts of installed hydroelectric generating capacity in the United States; by 1982, that figure was nearly to double. By 1962, nearly all the major rivers in the United States—long reaches of the Mississippi, the Snake, the Columbia, the Illinois, the Missouri, the Sacramento, the Susquehanna, the Red, the Delaware, the Tennessee, the Apalachicola, the Savannah—had been dredged, realigned, straitjacketed, riprapped, diked, leveed, stabilized, and otherwise made over in order to accommodate barge and freighter traffic. In twenty years, we were going to add or “improve” thirteen thousand more miles.
And this Promethean agenda was going to be possible, according to the director of civil works, because we were “about to enter an era of unprecedented cooperation in planning water resource development to meet future needs.... The walls which formerly separated various spheres of interest are crumbling under the pressure of manifold needs.”
Even allowing for the temper of the times, Cassidy’s prophecy, in retrospect, seems one of derangement more than vision. Nineteen years later, the $15 billion which was to construct 320 million acre-feet of reservoir storage would barely suffice to build ten million acre-feet of new storage in California—had it been politically possible to do it. It was hard to imagine thirteen thousand miles of new or “improved” navigable waterways without envisioning barges bumping against the Rocky Mountains or poking into bulrushes at the headwaters of southern streams. Even had there been money to build all those reservoirs,