Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

Originally published in 1986, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner illustrates how precarious the American West’s water supply is. This reality was something few people, including Westerners, realized at the time. The book was listed as one of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th century and was nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. It was also made into a PBS documentary. There is a 1993 edition followed by a 2017 postscript edition; the latter is the source material for this guide and provides updates on water issues in the American West over the last two decades.

The book’s title, Cadillac Desert, contains an ideological dualism, with one word standing for luxury, boldness, and victory, and the other one describing one of the most inhospitable places on the planet for humans. This revisionist history focuses on the fallout of human desire to constantly expand into the desert and the costly task of creating water projects, such as dams and aqueducts, that allowed for this expansion. Reisner suggests that the entire system is founded on political greed and corruption and a desire to be victorious over the desert, a place where humans cannot easily survive.