Studebaker Desert

Published Sept. 9, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The other night I was scanning my bookshelves for pieces I might have left out of my collection of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good.  When my eyes lit on it, my fingers reached for Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, a book so dense with the common bad of water politics it could take a month of reading to find a few pages to excerpt.

     Published in 1986, the book was described as “a savagely witty history of America’s reckless depletion of its water resources,” in Newsday.  The Washington Post Book Review called it “a highly partisan, wonderfully researched portrayal of the damming, diverting and dirtying of western rivers.”  Publishers Weekly said “This timely and important book should be required reading for all citizens.”

     Although I think Publishers Weekly was right, I doubt the book was well read here in the Valley.  Almost 30 years later many of our citizens are still making the same kind of arguments for more dams that Reisner showed were reasonless and irrational, in massive denial of the facts of water’s availability and the costs to develop it.  The reason for making those arguments still exist - that dams can make a few people temporarily rich - but 30 years later those people are even smaller in number.  Unfortunately, they may be more powerful.

     I grew up in the 1950’s, when big water projects like the CVP here and Bonneville in the Pacific Northwest were viewed as heroic and totally positive undertakings designed to create and spread wealth among the western citizenry.  I remember watching newsreels in school about their physical construction and economic contributions, and I believed every word of it.  I chose Grand Coulee Dam as the subject of the first report I wrote in grade school.  A decade earlier that same spirit had captured Woody Guthrie, who worked for the feds for a month putting this heroism and hope into song.

     But by the 1980’s the promises showed their true colors and the costs had begun to show up.  In Reisner’s introduction, “A semidesert with a Desert Heart,” we can see why:

            “One does not really conquer a place like (California.)  One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it.... 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... 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-sized section green - and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater.  But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels . . . 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,” he continues, “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.”

           

     How to live here in this place, within the limits nature provides and God or someone has allowed us to stretch well beyond, is a question this drought has provided for us to ponder.  If we respond rightly, I think we may be finding ourselves downsizing and going backward to something once more common than the Cadillac.

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Trudy Wischemann is an old car lover who writes.  You can send her your more politically correct water conservation ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.