One area of focus is the first water disputes in Southern California, and Los Angeles specifically, where the theft of water from the Owens River not only annihilated the Owens Valley but fueled Los Angeles’s unquenchable thirst for water. In Chapters 2-4, Reisner explores the origins of the United States’ obsessive drive to build dam after dam and how politics and money, rather than good sense, have guided water policy in the West.
The desert communities and the farmland we have established are unsustainable and have led to disputes over land and water ownership, which will continue into the foreseeable future. Rather, we inhabit it with an uneasy truce, one that is turning against our favor. From these opening chapters, Reisner illustrates how Americans have not conquered the desert. Reisner goes on to talk about how white men came to explore the land through various expeditions, including the Powell Geographic Expedition in 1869. The Introduction and Chapter 1 focuses on the exploration and settlement of the American West, which began with a Spanish conquistador stumbling upon the land during his quest for gold. Reisner condemns the American obsession with asserting control over nature, determining that it has led to many environmental disasters, the deterioration of some of America’s greatest bodies of water, and destruction of rural communities, especially Native American communities. 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.
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. 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.
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