Based on his observation of western drylands and the hardships suffered by mid-nineteenth century homesteaders, Powell realized that water would always be a limiting factor west of the one-hundredth meridian.
Geological Survey, who is best known for leading the first river expedition through the Grand Canyon. Reisner's history of western water development is set against the early advice of John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), a one-armed American Civil War veteran and the second director of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, who became a lightning rod for critics of federal water policy and was also featured prominently in John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. An entire chapter is devoted to Floyd Dominy, a former commissioner of the U.S. Francis and Teton dams, the contentious Colorado River Compact, and agribusiness subsidies. The six hundred pages of Cadillac Desert include accounts of the ethically questionable techniques used to obtain long-term water supplies for Los Angeles, engineering triumphs such as the Depression-era construction (under budget and ahead of schedule) of the Hoover Dam, tragic failures of the St. Reisner describes the vast and largely inhospitable landscape as a prelude to his critical history of efforts to create a desert civilization by way of water projects heavily dependent upon government subsidies and political maneuvering.
The introduction to Cadillac Desert begins with an account of the barren Western landscape as seen through the window of an airliner on a cross-country flight. He received a Pew Foundation fellowship to work on Pacific salmon issues but was unable to complete the project before his death. Reisner was active in conservation and habitat protection activities with several organizations and served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Davis. He worked for several environmental policy organizations before receiving an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship to support the work that would eventually become Cadillac Desert. Reisner was born in Minneapolis and earned a degree in political science from Earlham College. The most widely known is Cadillac Desert, a critical account of the policy, politics, financing, and engineering behind large-scale government water supply projects in the American West.
New York: Viking Penguin, 1986.Ībout the Author: American author Marc Reisner (1948–2000) wrote three notable books about water and natural resources. "A Semidesert with a Desert Heart." Cadillac Desert.
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