Reddit reviews Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition
We found 6 Reddit comments about Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
"Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner is a great read if you really are into the history of water rights in the west and the Colorado River Compact.
It's full of lying, cheating, cronyism, bribery, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001RTKIUA
Probably a lot of readers of /r/water have read Cadillac Desert.
I own a copy of, and have made two false starts reading, The King Of California as recommend by the anonymous author of the blog On The Public Record.
I highly recommend A Great Aridness, a worthy heir to Cadillac Desert.
Also on my to-read list is Rising Tide. I would like to find a book that does for the Great Lakes what Marc Reisner did for water in the American West with his book Cadillac Desert.
A few things I've read this year that have little to do with water:
EDIT: Oh, and Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Unrelated, except in a tangential way, if you want to read some absurd shit that we've done in the past with regards to moving water from one place to another there's a book about water and the politics surrounding it called Cadillac Desert. It's a little dated in that it was written in 1986. But the facts that it covers are still true.
He does make some projections that haven't either yet come true or we've missed that particular bullet. I'd like to think that maybe some of it was due to what he wrote.
The point of my reply in regards to your post was the enormous, expensive effort we had to make to get water from one place to another using expensive pumping technologies to "lift" water over places that we probably shouldn't have. But we did.
There were many take-aways from this book. Many. Seriously, read it if you want to have an insight into how truly fucked our water policies were. And are. Growing rice in the semi-arid desert of California? Rice paddies in California? Second largest rice producing state in the US. Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas.
What do those states, besides CA have in common? Lots of water. Even in Texas the rice is grown south of Houston in what is essentially wetlands.
CA? Semi-arid desert. Yeah, they say that some of the soils are great for rice. Clayey, so it holds water nicely. But there's no fucking water there unless you divert it.
The thing that I think aggravated me most, and in part I understand the short-term thinking. Kind of. But, no.
We took some of the most fertile land in the world, which was in and around the Tennessee Valley and put it underwater. This was for flood control and some hydro-electric. I think, but I don't honestly recall, that it was part of the WPA.
At the same time we were taking what is literally semi-arid desert in California, and diverting huge amounts of water by hook, and definitely by crook (see Mulholland), to turn it into huge farmlands that still exist today.
A recap. We drowned some of the best, fertile land. Then we took land that wasn't suited for it and turned it into a major crop center.
Ingenious? Well, the work put into it was. But we're reaping what we've sown, so to speak.
Truly, I can't recommend this book highly enough. The politics will make you sick or angry, or both. But it is a fascinating journey of how we got from there to here.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001RTKIUA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
My guess is that, and I say this tongue in cheek, that the only way we're going to unfuck ourselves over water is to invade Canada and then build giant pipelines to get "our" water. Water is the next oil. And Canada has an abundance of water. Don't think some government or corporation hasn't already thought of this. Fuck. Now I sound like I need to adjust my tinfoil hat.
Read about what Nestle is doing? Yeah, we'll go to war with a candy company so that Las Vegas and Phoenix, neither of which should even exist, can continue to have a resource that is unnatural, given their location and populations.
Do I know what I am talking about? I don't know. Honestly, all I can say is I've read a bunch of books and articles about water, water usage, water rights, water politics.
If you don't think water is going to be a major problem in the next 20 years, I think you're living in a tree. It's an issue now. But, please, do educate yourselves on this. Me? I'm dead and gone by then. I'm not sure why I even care. I just don't seem to be able to stop. Caring, that is. Who the fuck wants to think of a dystopian world existing, even after I'm dead and gone? I don't. Not that I'll be thinking or caring. I'd just rather not have to get on Elon's big ships to Mars because we've no other choice. / s
I had these text books:
one, two, three, four
And I loved this book Cadillac Desert ; there's a lot more .....
Cadillac Desert (Marc Reisner): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001RTKIUA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Available on FindLaw (http://lp.findlaw.com/):
Hadacheck v. Sebastian, 239 U.S. 394 (1915)
Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926)
Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26, 75 S. Ct. 98 (1954)
City of Eastlake v. Forest City Enterprises, Inc., 426 U.S. 668 (1976)
St. Bartholomew's Church v. City of New York, 914 F.2d 348 (2nd Cir. 1990)
Pennsylvania Coal Co. V. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922)
Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 438 U.S. 104 (1978)
Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp., 458 U.S. 419 (1982)
San Diego Gas & Electric v. City of San Diego, 450 U.S. 621 (1981)
First English Evangelical Lutheran Church of Glendale v. County of Los Angeles, 107 S. Ct. 2378 (1987)
Nollan v. California Coastal Com'n., 107 S. Ct. 3141 (1987)
Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 112 S. Ct. 2886 (1992)
Dolan v. City of Tigard, 114 S. Ct. 2309 (1994)
Lingle v. Chevron, 544 U.S. 528 (2005)
Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469, 125 S. Ct. 2655 (2005)
I really assumed that would be Cadillac Desert.