Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
“In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them.”
Reisner traces the political, economic, and environmental history of water development and use in the American West. He exposes the people and agencies responsible for unsound and unsustainable water policies and resource development, a slippery foundation our seemingly “Edenic” American western civilization was built on and rests on even today.