I just finished Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, a fascinating documentation of how the west was tamed through massive federally funded water development projects. If you have ever been to California, you may have noticed the strange contrast between the natural semi-arid landscape and the miles and miles of fertile farmland. California has the most lucrative farming industry of the United States, and yet it really should not exist. Neither should cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas surrounded as they are by desert. Yet they continue to grow. How was all of this made possible? As Marc Reisner elucidates, largely due to a large group of engineers with a strong desire to build monumental structures and huge amounts of federal subsidies in pork-barrel projects.
The West, and especially California, offered early Americans a frontier to start over and create a new and profitable life. California's fertile soil mild climate made it ideal for growing high value commodities like citrus, almonds, and avocados. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad making crops deliverable across the continent, farmers who had previously barely made a living growing wheat in the mid west were growing rich on California soil. But all of this wealth was severely limited by lack of water to irrigate croplands. Even with the bonanza the farmers were experiencing, they did not have the kind of huge capital necessary to build irrigation projects on the massive scale necessary to bring water to the Central Valley.
Now, whatever your thoughts are on 'Big Government" or when or who began it, the beginning really started with the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau began in the early 1900s to build irrigation projects to help provide water, really really cheap water, to small farmers out west. It's counterpart, and rival, was and is the Corp of Engineers who's primary goal to build flood control projects. Both of these agencies were made up of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of engineers who were paid to build dams. And they really liked to build dams. Not only did it provide their bread and butter, but who would not love the ability to tame the mighty ragging Colorado River with a structure as monumentally impressive as Hoover Dam? While the Bureau was charged with conceiving projects which would create economic growth for the country by encouraging settlement of the west and the growth of small farmers, its personal goal was to get as many dam projects through Congress as possible so it could continue to build. It and the Corps both twisted the economics behind irrigation and flood control projects to get projects built that would turn out to be economic sink holes, open land to irrigation farming that had no business being farmed, flood communities and destroy countless amounts of wildlife habitat and scenic rivers. Dams were built that sold farmers water for 10 cents on the dollar of what the water actually cost, which means the American public paid for the other 90 cents on the dollar growing the same surplus crops Eastern farmers were being paid not to grow.
Not that it was all bad. Water development created enormous amounts of wealth (though often for a small group of people) and the hydroelectric power the went along with many of the projects is probably one of the most important resources we possessed that allowed us to out produce and hence beat Germany in World War II. But deceitful tactics used to get most of these dams built represent the worst of bureaucratic waste - agencies and projects that were initially valuable and necessary but came to function merely to keep their own existence alive.
Why was this allowed to happen? Mainly because Congressmen encouraged it. Getting a dam built in your district, while it may have cost the American public as a whole a huge and unnecessary amount of money, brought jobs and money to that district. So dam projects became the ultimate pork barrel tool. Presidents like Carter and Reagan who tried to squelch the dam pork barrel machine met harsh resistance, and all efforts eventually failed.
Through the combination of massive inflation, rising national debt, and a growing environmental movement dam development has dropped precipitously in the past three decades, though California and much of the other western states will soon have to deal with their continual water issues. Why is all of this important for the average citizen to know? Because whatever water development projects anyone is trying to sell or discredit in your area, it's important to not listen to the politics and rhetoric and look at the facts to decide if a project really makes sense. While Colorado may have huge fields of alfalfa growing in its arid landscape, if the crop is worth only a couple of hundred million dollars a year, while Colorado's tourism industry brings in well over five BILLION dollars a year, does it really make sense to divert most of Colorado's water at huge expense to water these crops?
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