Reddit Reddit reviews Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

We found 33 Reddit comments about Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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American History
United States History
U.S. State & Local History
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition
history of the water wars in the western US
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33 Reddit comments about Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition:

u/fields · 13 pointsr/California

The gold standard on this topic is definitely Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244

u/wainstead · 12 pointsr/reddit.com

Seconded; for a great history of this, check out Cadillac Desert

Also, one problem I have with this graphic is how the United States is treated as a single entity. While the West is running out of water, the Great Lakes region sits on 1/5 of the world's available fresh water. To this day one of America's strengths is abundant natural resources.

u/degeneration · 9 pointsr/bayarea

You might be interested in Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. It’s a little old but he does an amazing job of laying out the issues with California’s water system.

u/CardboardSoyuz · 8 pointsr/dataisbeautiful

I can't offer you squat on job hunting, but I used to be a water lawyer here in California and if you want to read an insanely interesting book, that will always up your interest with anyone in any part of the water business in the US (or probably Canada, too), read Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, which all about the history of the aquafication of the West. Looks like you are Europe-based from your job applications, but it is a fascinating story well worth your time.

https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244

u/siberian · 6 pointsr/DestructionPorn

Cadillac Desert is a great book that talks about this Dam and the general messed up water policy in the America West that led to it (and many other misguided projects).

Fascinating read that gives a lot of context to just messed up water policy is in the USA.

u/SickSalamander · 6 pointsr/water

According to the beef industry, it takes somewhere between 450-850 gallons water/pound of beef. Less biased research has put that number as high as 5,000 gallons water/pound of beef. Even at 450 gallons water/pound of beef it is still pretty ridiculous.

The vast majority of this water is consumed by irrigating fields to produce feed for cows. And this is no small portion of total water supplies. In CO, 30% of the total water use in the state goes directly to the livestock industry.

Cadillac Desert put it very succinctly "The West’s water crisis — and many of its environmental problems as well — can be summed up, implausible as this may seem, in a single word: livestock." As a restoration ecologist working in the western US, there is no greater hurdle I face than damage from cattle and cattle related activities.

u/username-ugh · 6 pointsr/news

Cadillac Desert, one of the greatest books pn the topic of vanishing water and the American West.

u/smavonco · 5 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

I recommend to everyone on this thread to read Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244

"Whiskey is for drinking, Water is for fighting"

u/wildly_curious_1 · 5 pointsr/todayilearned

The book Cadillac Desert is an excellent read on water rights in the western US--I quite highly recommend it!

u/Tangurena · 5 pointsr/environment

There are a lot of water rights disputes going on in court all the time. When it is one state suing another state, they have to start at the US Supreme Court, like Montana v. Wyoming (pdf). If you are ever in a law class and they ask you if the US Supreme Court could be the first court a case is held in, state vs state is it.

In this case, farmers in Wyoming switched from flood irrigation to sprinkler irrigation, and this resulted in less water running back into the river (and thus less water flowing to Montana). Wyoming still only took the same amount of water they always took, which was what the 1950 treaty/compact allowed. Montana claimed that the water treaty didn't allow this sort of behavior, but the Supremes ruled that if the treaty was going to work the way Montana wanted, it would have been written that way (and they gave examples of other state treaties that were written that way).

One older book that discusses how badly we've screwed our water up in the Western US is Cadillac Desert.

u/GEN_CORNPONE · 5 pointsr/UnresolvedMysteries

> that people on the downstream side of the watershed will not have enough water

...or more likely agribusiness, state/local governments, NA tribes, or other highly organized interests. A horrifying but thorough analysis of the Western water crisis can be found in Marc Reisner's 'Cadillac Desert.'

u/Raineythereader · 4 pointsr/RWBY

Added a new chapter to Five for Iron, set five years before canon. (Here's the ff.net link, for anyone who prefers that site.) Anywho, this chapter is my first from Winter's POV, and I'm hoping I did an OK job with that, while still keeping the premise engaging.

Reading:
I finished Cadillac Desert this week, and I've gotten about 100 pages into Animal, Vegetable, Miracle since then. Both are brilliantly written and wonderfully subversive, but considering my line of work I may be a smidge biased.

u/CowardiceNSandwiches · 3 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Well, one can like getting carrots for $0.99 a bag and still recognize that they're being delivered by a very suboptimal, screwed-up system of production that really needs to change. Problem is, not a lot of people seem to recognize that.

If you find this sort of subject interesting, and you've not read it before, you ought to pick up a copy of Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.

It gets a little dry sometimes when he gets into the nuts-and-bolts details, but overall it's a great, incisive look at how utterly FUBAR water policy in the West actually is.

u/mikepurvis · 3 pointsr/science

Relevant: I recently started reading Cadillac Desert, which is a really interesting treatise on the irrigation of the American West.

u/mack2nite · 3 pointsr/California

I read this book years ago and it talks all about the water shortage in the west. It has always been a problem and we've been slowly depleting underground stores for generation.

u/The_richie_v · 2 pointsr/MapPorn

In Cadillac Desert (I believe, I read it a while ago and could be mistaken on my source), there was a suggestion that the American west be divided along watersheds. That seems like a geographical feature that is not used very often, but causes quite a few problems between countries.

u/DustyShoes · 2 pointsr/urbanplanning

I'd suggest taking a look at Cadillac Desert by Mark Reisner. It's an excellent read in my opinion, more of an ecology book with it's central focus of water availability in the west. Having said that, the history, economics, and conflicts water policy/availability has created has had a huge impact on planning policy and how the western US developed.

u/Fuzzy_Thoughts · 2 pointsr/mormon

The book list just keeps growing in so many different directions that it's hard to identify which I want to tackle next (I also have a tendency to take meticulous notes while I read and that slows the process down even further!). Some of the topics I intend to read about once I'm done with the books mentioned:

u/ejector_crab · 2 pointsr/dataisbeautiful

That was anything but a free market purchase of water rights. LA used massive amounts of political muscle to get those water rights. Cadillac Desert has a really detailed account of this, but wikipedia has a decent summary

Some pretty shady shit went down to build the LA Aqueduct.

u/itsalldark · 2 pointsr/books

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is about water infrastructure in the American West and its politics.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is fiction but talks about human-nature relations.

u/chashiineriiya · 2 pointsr/LosAngeles

The Reluctant Metropolis by William Fulton. Not only does he talk about development and history of Los Angeles, but also how it relates to Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, and Las Vegas.

If you're interested in water and politics of the American west including Los Angeles, I also recommend Cadillac Desert -- pretty relevant in this multiyear drought

u/ebbflowin · 1 pointr/bayarea

If you haven't read the book 'Cadillac Desert' or seen the film, you absolutely should.

u/BeowulfShaeffer · 1 pointr/worldnews

Much longer than that. Cadillac Desert is 20 years old this year. Chinatown will be 40 years old next year.

u/gigamosh57 · 1 pointr/water

There are plenty of people whose careers (mine included) that revolve entirely around western water law, supply, growth, etc. It is pretty cool stuff.

Cadillac Desert is a good book to start learning about some of these issues.

u/CactusJ · 1 pointr/AskSF


Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.

http://www.amazon.com/Season-Witch-Enchantment-Terror-Deliverance-ebook/dp/B005C6FDFY/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Cool, Gray City of Love brings together an exuberant combination of personal insight, deeply researched history, in-depth reporting, and lyrical prose to create an unparalleled portrait of San Francisco. Each of its 49 chapters explores a specific site or intersection in the city, from the mighty Golden Gate Bridge to the raunchy Tenderloin to the soaring sea cliffs at Land's End.

http://www.amazon.com/Cool-Gray-City-Love-Francisco-ebook/dp/B00D78R550/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1451757678&sr=1-1&keywords=cool+grey+city+of+love

Not a book, but this American Experiance episode is fantastic.

In 1957, decades before Steve Jobs dreamed up Apple or Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, a group of eight brilliant young men defected from the Shockley Semiconductor Company in order to start their own transistor business. Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman who would co-invent the microchip -- an essential component of nearly all modern electronics today, including computers, motor vehicles, cell phones and household appliances.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/

Also, not related to San Francisco directly, but focusing on California and the west, if you want to understand why California is the way it is today, this is on the list of essential reading material.

http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244

u/shibbolething · 1 pointr/boulder

Thanks, I'll read the book mentioned in the article. A good starter/companion reader for those interested in water history out here is Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It's older, but it's been revised over the years and is a great place to start.

https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244

u/infracanis · 1 pointr/geology

It sounds like you have an Intro Geology book.

For a nice overview of historical geology, I was enraptured by "The Earth: An Intimate History" by Richard Fortey. It starts slow but delves into the major developments and ideas of geology as the author visits many significant locales around the world.

Stephen Jay Gould was a very prolific science-writer across paleontology and evolution.

John McPhee has several excellent books related to geology. I would recommend "Rising from the Plains" and "The Control of Nature."

Mark Welland's book "SAND" is excellent, covering topics of sedimentology and geomorphology.

If you are interested in how society manages geologic issues, I would recommend Geo-Logic, The Control of Nature mentioned before, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, and Cadillac Desert.

These are some of the texts I used in university:

  • Nesse's Introduction to Mineralogy
  • Winter's Principles of Metamorphic and Igneous Petrology
  • Twiss and Moore's Structural Geology
  • Bogg's Sedimentology and Stratigraphy
  • Burbank and Anderson's Tectonic Geomorphology
  • Davis's Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology
  • Burbank and Anderson's Tectonic Geomorphology
  • Fetter's Applied Hydrogeology
  • White's Geochemistry (pdf online)
  • Shearer's Seismology
  • Copeland's Communicating Rocks
u/ollokot · 1 pointr/books
u/hashtag_hashbrowns · 1 pointr/EarthPorn

Since the issue seems to be coming up a lot in the comments, anyone interested in the water politics (and history) of the American West should read this book. It is a long read and can be hard to follow at times, but it's absolutely fascinating.

u/DayDreaminBoy · -1 pointsr/California

no one has a right to property and in order change that, you're moving away from our most fundamental principles, all men created equal and what not, and moving toward the the imperialistic hierarchies that we fought against. we'd create a california class that would make it even harder for someone to be a part of. when purchasing goods and services, we're all equal. anyone out of state with the money and resources to live here has just as much of a right to do so as you do. i get it, life isn't fair sometimes, but is there a more fair system that doesn't restrict the opportunities and rights of others?

> I have never even had the chance to visit another state so I don't know where I would go.

unless you're native american, the vast majority our ancestors, so most likely yours too, had never been to the U.S. before moving here but they did it without the internet or any of our modern conveniences yet here you are.

> The state has more than enough room to support everyone

room, maybe... but resources? have you looked into our water issues? you might want to check out the book Cadillac Desert. there's indicators that show the potential is maxed out.