Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [4]
One does not really conquer a place like this. One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it. New England was completely forested in 1620 and nearly deforested 150 years later; Arkansas saw nine million acres of marsh and swamp forest converted to farms. Through such Promethean effort, the eastern half of the continent was radically made over, for better or worse. The West never can be. The only way to make the region over is to irrigate it. But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move. And even if you succeeded in moving every drop, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. John Wesley Powell, the first person who clearly understood this, figured that if you evenly distributed all the surface water flowing between the Columbia River and the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have a desert almost indistinguishable from the one that is there today. Powell failed to appreciate the vast amount of water sitting in underground aquifers, a legacy of the Ice Ages and their glacial melt, but even this water, which has turned the western plains and large portions of California and Arizona green, will be mostly gone within a hundred years—a resource squandered as quickly as oil.
At first, no one listened to Powell when he said the overwhelming portion of the West could never be transformed. People figured that when the region was settled, rainfall would magically increase, that it would “follow the plow.” In the late 1800s, such theories amounted to Biblical dogma. When they proved catastrophically wrong, Powell’s irrigation ideas were finally embraced and pursued with near fanaticism, until the most gigantic dams were being built on the most minuscule foundations of economic rationality and need. Greening the desert became a kind of Christian ideal. In May of 1957, a very distinguished Texas historian, Walter Prescott Webb, wrote an article for Harper’s entitled “The American West, Perpetual Mirage,” in which he called the West “a semidesert with a desert heart” and said it had too dark a soul to be truly converted. The greatest national folly we could commit, Webb argued, would be to exhaust the Treasury trying to make over the West in the image of Illinois—a folly which, by then, had taken on the appearance of national policy. The editors of Harper’s were soon up to their knees in a flood of vitriolic mail from westerners condemning Webb as an infidel, a heretic, a doomsayer.
Desert, semidesert, call it what you will. The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-size section green—and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater. But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels, the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers, has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska. What they seem not to understand is how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made. Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success we have had in reclaiming the American desert. But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history—Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia; the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam—before they collapsed.
And it may not even have been drought that did them in. It may have been salt.
The Colorado River rises high in the Rockies, a trickle of frigid snowmelt bubbling down the west face of Longs Peak, and begins its fifteen-hundred-mile, twelve-thousand-foot descent to the Gulf of California. Up there,