Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [311]
It is a question worth thinking about. Nevada is the one western state without any mentionable rivers at all, and perhaps the closest approximation of how things could have remained if the landscape had suffered no improvement: its settlements a hundred miles apart, its economy rooted, for lack of a better alternative, in what used to be called sin, its ghost towns as numerous as those that managed to survive. Of course, in the states with rivers there was plenty of irrigation going on before the Bureau arrived on the scene, but an appalling number of those private ventures were destined to collapse. There were, as Dominy said, tens of thousands of heart-rending farm failures, and catastrophic overgrazing on the dryland ranches; irrigation helped put an end to both. There were all those rivers just wasting water to the Gulf and Pacific; there was the virgin Colorado, as Dominy liked to say, “useless to anyone.” Did one prefer the tawdry mirage of Las Vegas to the palpable miracle of the Imperial Valley? Did one prefer a wild and feckless Colorado to one that measures out steady water and power to ten million people? Should we not have built Hoover Dam?
There are those who might say yes, who would argue that the West should have been left pretty much as it was. At the distant other end of the spectrum are the water developers and engineers who cannot rest while great rivers like the Yukon and the Fraser still run free, for whom life seems to hold little meaning except to subjugate nature, to improve it, to engage it in a contest of wills. For the rest of us, contemplating the modern West presents a dilemma. We mourn what has been lost since Lewis and Clark—the feast of wilderness, the mammoth herds of buffalo, the fifty thousand grizzly bears and the million antelope that roamed California, the coastal streams that one could cross on the backs of spawning salmon. On the other hand, to see a sudden unearthly swath of green amid the austere and mournful emptiness of the Mojave Desert or the Harney Basin is to watch one’s prejudices against mankind’s conquering instinct begin to dissolve. So we want to know, even if it seems an academic matter now, what it all amounts to that we have done out here in the West. How much was sensible? How much was right? Was it folly to allow places like Los Angeles and Phoenix to grow up? Were we insane or farsighted to build all the dams? And even if such questions seem academic, they lead to an emphatically practical one: What are we going to do next?
It isn’t easy to get people to think along these lines, at least not yet, because the vulnerable aspect of our desert empire remains for most people, even most westerners, an abstraction, like the certainty of another giant earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. Drive through Los Angeles and see the millions of lawns and the water flowing everywhere and the transformation seems immutable: everything rolls along nonstop like the seamless ribbons of traffic; it all seems permanent. But then catch a flight to Salt Lake City and fly over Glen Canyon Dam at thirty thousand feet, a height from which even this magnificent bulwark becomes a frail thumbnail holding back a monstrous, deceptively placid, man-made sea, and think what one sudden convulsion of the earth or one crude atomic bomb or one five-hundred-year flood (which came close to occurring in 1983 and nearly destroyed a spillway under the dam) might do to that fragile plug in its sandstone gorge, and what the sudden emptying of Lake Powell, with its eight and a half trillion gallons of water, would do to Hoover