Cadillac Desert (93 page)

In an arid or semi-arid region, you can irrigate low-value, thirsty crops such as alfalfa and pasture grass only if you have cheap water—if your fields are riparian, or if your dams and aqueducts were built decades ago, or if you get your water subsidized by the taxpayers, as one of every three of the far West’s full-time irrigation farmers does. If you need forty or fifty thousand pounds of water in places like California and Colorado to irrigate enough fodder to raise two dollars worth of cow, you can’t even consider it if forty thousand pounds of water costs seven or eight dollars (as it would if you bought it from the California Water Project). But it makes perfectly good sense if the government sells you the same quantity for thirty or forty cents—as it does if the Central Valley Project is your source.

If free-market mechanisms—which much of western agriculture publicly applauds and privately abhors—were actually allowed to work, the West’s water “shortage” would be exposed for what it is: the sort of shortage you expect when inexhaustible demand chases an almost free good. (If someone were selling Porsches for three thousand dollars apiece, there would be a shortage of those, too.) California has a shortage of water because it has a surfeit of cows—it’s really almost as simple as that.

The urban areas in the West have been slow to recognize all this, but lately they have begun to recognize it with a vengeance. The Metropolitan Water District is flooding its millions of customers with literature that shows how a thousand acre-feet of water used in high-tech industry can create sixteen thousand jobs, and how the same thousand acre-feet of water used on pasture farms creates eight jobs. Eight. This kind of stuff infuriates the San Joaquin Valley, its erstwhile ally in the water wars, so valley mouthpieces respond in a manner that inspires the Met not just to anger but to retribution. All the old alliances are falling apart. Southern California wants nothing more to do with the San Joaquin; its water barons would rather scheme over sushi with environmentalists, because they represent the new nexus of power. Even the rice growers in the Sacramento Valley want little to do with the San Joaquin Valley; they raise lots of waterfowl food on acreage that the birds of the Pacific Flyway have come to depend on, and most conservationists now acknowledge that fact, and some have even begun to like rice—so why should the rice industry, which gets little subsidized water, carry the San Joaquin Valley’s hod?

Meanwhile, all kinds of new alliances are beginning to form. The Sacramento Valley has its own water lobby, which has begun to hold meetings with the salmon fishermen, searching for solutions to
their
water shortage—which is devastatingly real. Las Vegas and Reno, which represent 95 percent of Nevada’s economy but use 10 percent of its water (alfalfa growers use most of the rest), may fight like hyenas over monstrous gambling palaces that Japanese companies want to build, but they are in sweet accord on water policy. The new chief of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, a forceful woman named Patricia Mulwray (the murdered hero in
Chinatown
had the same last name), also happens to be chairman of a new Washington lobby group representing most of the urban water agencies in the western states. Its agenda is simple: more water for cities, more for the environment, and less for agriculture—especially water-gorging, low-value agriculture, which usually means cows. “It’s not really the irrigators’ water,” says an urban water agency lobbyist, still too cautious to let me use his name. “It belongs to the people of the states. They have allowed the growers to put all that water to a reasonable and beneficial use. But those words could mean something entirely different in the future. What’s so reasonable and beneficial about ruining salmon rivers to raise subsidized surplus crops while industries that employ lots of people decide to relocate to wetter states?”

The irrigation lobby still has a few things going for it, mainly sentimentality, tradition, and law. In many western states, it’s the irrigation districts that set water policy: They can forbid sales of water rights from farms to cities beyond the district boundaries, and many of them do. And the irrigation lobby still has a few people convinced that, if it doesn’t get almost all the region’s water, then the whole world will starve. But the growers and their allies (anyone who wants to build more dams) are fighting a rearguard battle, and they know it. A number of states have legitimized water transfers, and a number of others—notably California—are going to soon. With George Miller now presiding over the House Interior Committee, the growers may be lucky to get any more subsidized federal water at all.

The West’s real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth. As Wallace Stegner wrote, somehow the cow and the cowboy and the irrigated field came to symbolize the region, instead of the bison and the salmon and the antelope that once abounded here. Stegner said that he spent much of his writing career breaking lances against windmills turned by the cowboy mystique. You needn’t even get rid of the cowboys, who add color and relief to a culture that is becoming depressingly urbanized and, worse, suburbanized. But they might be driving bison, in reasonable numbers, instead of cows, and raising them, for the most part, on unirrigated land—which bison tolerate far better than cows. In a West that once and for all made sense, you might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states’ rain.

You would have a West where most people live in contained cancers called cities (as they already do, anyway), and where more rural people would provide the opportunities for people from the cities—for people from all over the world—to enjoy the region’s splendors as they once were. A region where people begin to recognize that water left in rivers can be worth a lot more—in revenues, in jobs—than water taken out of the rivers. Maybe even a region where a lot of people really don’t give a damn how much money a river can produce.

At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future rather than forward to the past.

M.R.

October 1992

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It would have been absolutely impossible for me to write this book without the love, support, and indulgence of my wife, Dorothy Lawrence Mott.

Second only to hers was the faith and support of my agent and dear friend F. Joseph Spieler, who talked me out of quitting several times, and not for selfish reasons; and of my parents, Konrad and Else Reisner, who rescued me from insolvency more than once.

I must also acknowledge and thank my brother-in-law, Roald Bostrom, who convinced me that I should try to write for a living in the first place.

This book managed to consume three editors in the process of being written. Alan Williams liked the idea, bought the book, and provided much encouragement at the beginning. William Strachan offered moral support and advice along the way. I am most grateful, however, to Dan Frank, who replaced Bill Strachan when the book was nearly completed but treated it as if he had been with it from the beginning. His aesthetic sensibility, resonant judgment, and clear thinking rescued many parts of the book that had managed to beach themselves on the shoals of muddleheadedness, and he wouldn’t have tolerated a hackneyed metaphor like that if I’d showed it to him first.

I owe a tremendous debt to the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which got me going; to E. Philip LeVeen and Robert Wolcott of Public Interest Economics, who helped keep me going; to Robert Rodale and the Rodale Foundation, who helped keep me going a while longer; and to the now-defunct American Edition of
Geo
magazine, whose generous expense policy helped fund a good bit of the research.

I can’t imagine how the book could have been written had it not been for a handful of people who were extraordinarily generous with their time, candid in their observations, and forthcoming with memoranda, anecdotes, documents, and private letters. I would especially like to thank C. J. Kuiper for many hours of his time and a superb memory and storytelling flair. I am much in debt to Floyd Dominy, another great storyteller, who believes in open files and is as fearless of consequences as his reputation suggests. H. P. Dugan, Daniel Dreyfus, and Jim Casey, all former high officials of the Bureau of Reclamation, were also exceptionally candid and helpful.

Peter Carlson of the Environmental Policy Institute is as knowledgeable as anyone alive on the subject of water projects, and answered countless questions over the telephone. John Leshy of the Arizona State University Law School and Tom Graff of the Environmental Defense Fund were also especially helpful, not only in answering questions but in reviewing portions of the manuscript. A lot of thanks are also owed to James Flannery, Jim Free, Robert Edgar, Alan Merson, Patrick Porgans, Robert Smythe, David Shuster, Jim Cook, and Jan van Schilfgaarde.

Among the hundreds of others I interviewed, I want to single out a few dozen for special thanks. They are Philip Bowles, Helen Ingram, Frank Welsh, Robert Witzeman, Don and Karen Christenson, Richard Wilson, James Watt, Tom Barlow, John Gottschalk, Gilbert White, Bill Martin, Sam Steiger, Stewart Udall, David Brower, Dorothy Green, Phil Nalder, Steven Reynolds, Herbert Grubb, Arleigh West, former Governor Edmund G. Brown, Sr., John Erlichman, Nathaniel Reed, Pete van Gytenbeek, Derrick Sewell, Wayne Wyatt, William Gookin, Mohammed El-Ashry, Richard Madson, the late Horace Albright, Jack Burby, Willoughby Houk, George Baker; Jeffrey Ingram, Ronald Robie, Oliver Houck, Lynn Ludlow, Joe Moore, Barney Bellport, Kendall Manock, John Lawrence, George Ballis, Michael Catino, Keith Higginson, Peter Skinner, Edwin Weinberg, Ben Yellen, Samuel Hayes, Myron Holburt, Don Maughan, Moira Farrow, Bob Weaver, Sandy White, Felix Sparks, Russell Brown, Terry Thoem, Glenn Saunders, Robert Curry, Gus Norwood, Mason Gaffney, John Bryson, Bill Dubois, Mark Dubois, Alex Pesonen, the late Paul Taylor, Gilbert Stamm, Daniel Beard, Irving Fox, Lorelle Long, Stanford P. McCasland, John Newsom, Mary Ellen Morbeck, Brant Calkin, Carolina Butler, and W. R. Collier.

The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming is a hospitable, if not luxurious, place to work and contains a monstrous trove of archives relating to the settlement of the West and water development; I would like to extend special thanks to Gene Gressley and his staff. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at the University of Texas, Austin, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the main library at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Interior Department Library in Washington, D.C., were also most helpful in providing source material.

For many favors and services rendered I am grateful to Tom Turner, the staff
of Not Man Apart,
and the now-defunct San Francisco office of Friends of the Earth. Thanks also to Donna Wilcox and the Washington office of the Natural Resources Defense Council; to John Adams for many favors; to Elyse Axell and Janice Cornwell for indenturing themselves as underpaid and underemployed typists; to Jerold Ordansky for the index; to Joe Kane; and to Il Fornaio, Edible Delights, and the Howard Johnson’s in Mill Valley for providing thousands of coffee refills and a pleasant place to go to write.

NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER ONE: A Country of Illusion

Wallace Stegner’s
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,
the preeminent source for this chapter, remains one of the finest biographies in print. It covers not only the life of John Wesley Powell but the lives of those in his circle—some of the most interesting Americans of the nineteenth century; how such things as laws and climatic aberrations influenced the settlement of the West in the nineteenth century; and the ideas that formed much of our present policy regarding natural resources. There are several Powell biographies, but Stegner’s is the best.

Hamlin Garland’s A
Son of the Middle Border
is as good a portrayal of life on the plains and the imperative that drove people there as has been written. See also O. E. Rolvaag’s
Giants in the Earth
and Fred Shannon’s
The Farmer’s Last Frontier.

Bernard De Voto, along with Stegner, is probably the finest of the modem western historians.
The Course of Empire
and
Across the Wide Missouri
were both a great help.

Walter Prescott Webb’s
The Great Plains
is scholarly, prickly, readable, and as clean a dissection of the huge body of myth that has been built up around this region as anyone ever wrote. Fascinating visual imagery of the virgin West is contained in
Artists and Illustrators of the Old West,
edited by Robert Taft.

An interesting biography—really a hagiography, which makes it all the more interesting—of Henry Miller, the most acquisitive land baron in California history, is Edward Treadwell’s
The Cattle King.
Though he is remembered mainly for his 1,090,000 acres, much of it acquired through a dubious legality, Miller’s real contribution to history is
Lux
v.
Haggin,
a legal case which, to a considerable degree, formed the doctrine of western water law. The lawsuit pitted Miller and his lifelong partner, Charles Lux, against Lloyd Tevis and James Ben Ali Haggin, two rival land barons with a fiefdom of their own near the Kern River, who were prevented from irrigating when Miller tried to invoke his riparian water rights. Haggin and Tevis argued, unsuccessfully, that riparian doctrine would doom most of California’s best land to dryland ranching, and that land-owners with river frontage should not be allowed to hog all the water. Public reaction against Miller and Lux’s victory was so strong that most western states who hadn’t already opted strongly for the “appropriative”-rights doctrine soon did. (This doctrine awarded water rights to anyone who used them first, even if his acreage did not border water.) California, for its part, has modified its legal code to allow a complex coexistence of riparian- and appropriative-rights doctrine.