Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [352]
Lynn Ludlow of the San Francisco Examiner has done an excellent job of chronicling abuses of the Reclamation Act in California. So has George Baker of the Sacramento Bee, whose coverage of the Peripheral Canal wars was also the best in the state.
Patrick Porgans of Red Tape Abatement, Inc., a private research and consulting firm, provided considerable assistance in understanding the financial aspects of the State Water Project. E. Philip LeVeen and Rob Stavens of Public Interest Economics have also published much useful material, as has Dorothy Green of WATER and the Contra Costa County Water Agency. Anyone trying to fully understand the project should also consult the annual reports of the Department of Water Resources.
Carey McWilliams’s California: The Great Exception is highly recommended for its portrayal of how agribusiness, banking, food processing, the university extension system, cheap imported labor, and publicly subsidized water have created a huge economic juggernaut in the state. It may be the best general book written about California. The best essayist rooting around where California culture and politics meet, in my opinion, is not Joan Didion, but her husband, John Gregory Dunne. His “Eureka! A Celebration of California” is especially fine, though Didion’s more famous essay, “Holy Water,” is not to be missed.
A sense of the concentration of agricultural wealth in California can be gained from “Getting Bigger,” by the California Institute for Rural Studies, which profiles the 211 largest farming companies in the state (the smallest of the 211 is a 5,000—acre operation). The study, a superb piece of research, reveals a good deal about interlocking directorates, holding companies, vertical integration in the food market, parent companies, hidden partnerships, market penetration, and so on. Most of the information on the big growers benefiting from the State Water Project comes from CIRS.
It is almost impossible to understand water and California history without consulting the California Water Atlas, a huge (in dimension), beautifully produced work that really does deserve to be called unique. To anyone with a keen interest in the subject, the LANDSAT photos and graphs (depicting river flows, rainfall records, floods, droughts, irrigation deliveries, pumping energy consumed, etc.) will be fascinating. The text is persistently neutral when discussing the political wars.
For thirty or forty years, a Berkeley professor named Paul Taylor kept up a largely futile but unflagging effort to reform the enforcement of the Reclamation Act (rather than “reform” the Act). His essays on the subject are meticulous and readable, especially when they delve into the social effects of agricultural giantism. Much useful information on the acreage limitation, and violations thereof, has also been published by National Land for People; though it is portrayed by the growers as a “radical” organization, its only real goal is enforcement of one of the most poorly enforced laws in the nation.
Important interviews for this chapter: Ronald Robie, Dorothy Green, Lorelle Long, Tom Graff, George Ballis, Kendall Manock, Edmund G. Brown, Sr., Gerald Meral, Ellen Stern Harris, Lawrence Swenson, Patrick Porgans, E. Philip LeVeen, Myron Holburt, Jack Burby, Willoughby Houk, Paul Taylor, David Weiman, H. P. Dugan, Robert Pafford, Michael Catino, David Shuster, Jim Cook, Kenneth Turner, Richard Wilson, Philip Bowles, David Kennedy, James Flannery, John Bryson, John Leshy, Ben Yellen.
BOOKS
Bakker, Edna. An Island Called California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Berkman, Richard, and W. Kip Viscusi. Damming the West. New York: Grossman, 1973.
Caughey, John, and Laree Caughey. California Heritage. Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock, 1971.
Chall, Malca. California Water Issues, 1950—1966. Berkeley: Bancroft Library Oral History Program, 1981.
Eisen, Jonathan,