Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [315]
In a sense, the Bureau is right. If blame is laid anywhere, it ought to be laid at Congress’s door. Congress authorized the Central Valley Project; Congress approved the Westlands contract; Congress persistently refused to reform the Reclamation Act in any way except to enlarge the subsidies and to permit subsidized water to be sold to bigger farms; Congress, instead of offering incentives to conserve water, issued a multibillion-dollar license to waste it in the form of more and more dams. What cynic can blame it? To Congress, the federal water bureaucracy has been the closest thing to a schmoo, the little creature out of “Lil’l Abner” that reproduced mightily and lived only to be eaten by us. The dams created jobs (how efficiently is another matter) and made the unions happy; they enriched the engineering and contracting firms, from giants like Bechtel and Parsons to small-time cement pourers in Sioux Falls, and made them happy; they subsidized the irrigation farmers and made them happy; they offered enough water to the cities to make them happy; they gave free flood protection to the real estate developers who ran the booming cities of the West out of their pockets and made them happy; and as a result of all this, the politicians were reelected, which made them happy. No one lost except the nation at large.
What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere, grew at mad rates, and ended up as Frank Lloyd Wright’s sanitary slums; while they were being rescued from the tyranny of the desert they gave themselves over as slaves to the automobile. Millions of people and green acres took over a region that, from appearances, is unforgivingly hostile to life. It was a spectacular achievement, and its most implacable critics have to acknowledge its positive side. The economy was, no doubt, enriched. Population dispersion was achieved. Land that had been dry-farmed and overgrazed and horribly abused was stabilized and saved from the drought winds. “Wasting” resources—the rivers and aquifers—were put to productive use.
The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. Thus far, nature has paid the highest price. Glen Canyon is gone. The Colorado Delta is dead. The Missouri bottomlands have disappeared. Nine out of ten acres of wetlands in California have vanished, and with them millions of migratory birds. The great salmon runs in the Columbia, the Sacramento, the San Joaquin, and dozens of tributaries are diminished or extinct. The prairie is civilized and is dull; its last wild features, the pothole marshes in the Dakotas, could all but disappear at the hands of the Garrison Diversion and Cendak projects, if they are ever built. And it didn’t happen only in the West. Much the same thing happened in the East, especially in the South, where an incredible diversity and history and beauty in the old river valleys lies submerged under hundreds of featureless reservoirs. The vast oak and cypress swamps of the old South have been dried up, courtesy mainly of the Corps of Engineers, and converted to soybean fields (another crop of which we have an enormous glut). In fact, the Corps of Engineers is responsible for creating a lot more artificial farmland, wisely or unwisely, than the Bureau of Reclamation; by its own estimate, it has converted some 26 million acres of marshy or flood-threatened land, most of it in the East, into permanent crops. Depending on one’s point of view, this achievement has been a monstrous travesty against nature, a boon to the local economies, or—the viewpoint