Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [310]
In his book Modern Hydrology, Rafael Kazmann has written:
[T]he reservoir construction program, objectively considered, is really a program for the continued and endless expenditure of ever-increasing sums of public money to combat the effects of geologic forces, as these forces strive to reach positions of relative equilibrium in the regime of rivers and the flow of water. It may be that future research in the field of modern hydrology will be primarily to find a method of extricating ourselves from this unequal struggle with minimum loss to the nation.... The forces involved ... are comparable to those met by a boy who builds a castle on the sandy ocean beach, next to the water, at low tide.... [I]t is not pessimism, merely an objective evaluation, to predict the destruction of the castle....
EPILOGUE
A Civilization, if You Can Keep It
In May of 1958, while testifying at Senate hearings on the acreage provisions of the Reclamation Act, the then Associate Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Floyd Dominy, departed both from the issue at hand and from his prepared remarks to lecture some critical eastern Senators on what the federal irrigation program has meant to the American West.
“My people came here as farmers and settled in East Hampton, Long Island, in 1710,” Dominy began. “As the generations progressed they moved westward as public lands were opened up and as the West was developed, until my grandfather, Lafayette Dominy, in 1845, was born on a farm in LaSalle County, Illinois, carved from the wilderness by his own father and grandfather. When Lafayette Dominy reached maturity and married and had his first child, who was my father, he wanted a farm of his own but discovered that within his means he could not acquire one in Illinois.... He borrowed $2,000 from a preacher in 1876 and migrated with his small family to Nebraska and took one of the 160-acre homesteads about which we have been speaking.
“Now as to the adequacy of that homestead I would like to have you know that they lived in a sod house. They lived out beyond medical attention, without any of the modern facilities that we feel are desirable for all Americans today. They lost all the girl children in the family to diphtheria. The three male children survived, or else I would not be here.
“I want you to know that on that 160-acre homestead it took that man from 1876 to 1919 to pay off the $2,000 that he borrowed.... [W]hen my father reached maturity he took a homestead in the same area, 160 acres. On that farm six of us children were born and six of us reached maturity on the substance of that 160-acre homestead. We had outside plumbing. We did not have deep freezers, automobiles, school buses coming by the door. We walked to school in the mud. We maybe had one decent set of clothes to wear to town on Saturday....
“You take 160 acres that has to provide automobiles, modern school facilities, taxes for school buses, for good roads, to provide deep freezers, electric stoves, electric refrigerators, the modern conveniences that the farm housewife ought to have and deserves, it puts a much greater demand on the income of that land than was necessary to support us at a subsistence level, prevailing for my father or grandfather....
“[When] I became a county agricultural agent ... I saw the results of people who had decided ‘this is the Utopia for which we seek,’ and they had left Missouri and Iowa and other places where land was not available—they put their belongings in immigrant cars, and they went to Wyoming and Montana. They took out what was promised to them as an abundant chance for a great family living, 640 dryland acres. I want everyone in this room and I want this committee to know that most of those 640 acres could not sustain a family under any reasonable economic conditions that have prevailed then or now. I saw family after family, after devoting fifteen or twenty years of valiant effort ... forced to sell out and start anew.”
Considering all this, Dominy went on, how could you view the federal Reclamation