Home > Author > Marc Reisner

Marc Reisner QUOTES

Marc Reisner QUOTES

1 " In 1904, the newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power issued its first public report. 'The time has come,' it said, 'when we shall have to supplement the supply from another source.' With that simple statement, William Mulholland was about to become a modern Moses. But instead of leading his people to the promised land, he would cleave the desert and lead the promised waters to them. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

2 " By erecting thirty thousand dams of significant size across the American West, they dewatered countless rivers, wiped out millions of acres of riparian habitat, shut off many thousands of river miles of salmon habitat, silted over spawning beds, poisoned return flows with agricultural chemicals, set the plague of livestock loose on the arid land--in a nutshell they made it close to impossible for numerous native species to survive. "

― Marc Reisner

3 " In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

4 " Reason is the first casualty in a drought. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

5 " Well, I’ll tell you. You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathé. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathé. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop the goddamned waste! "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

6 " Great American Desert appeared to have retreated westward across the Rockies to the threshold of the Great Basin. Such a spectacular climatic transformation was not about to be dismissed as a fluke, not by a people who thought themselves handpicked by God to occupy a wild continent. A new school of meteorology was founded to explain it. Its unspoken principle was divine intervention, and its motto was “Rain Follows the Plow. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

7 " To some conservationists, the Colorado River is the preeminent symbol of everything mankind has done wrong—a harbinger of a squalid and deserved fate. To its preeminent impounder, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, it is the perfection of an ideal. The "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

8 " Throughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

9 " And these were just the main-stem dams. As they were going up, the Columbia tributaries were also being chinked full of dams. Libby Dam on the Kootenai River. Albeni Falls and Boundary dams on the Pend Oreille. Cabinet Gorge and Noxon Rapids dams on the Clark Fork. Kerr and Hungry Horse on the Flathead. Chandler and Roza dams on the Yakima. Ice Harbor Dam, Lower Monumental Dam, Little Goose Dam, Lower Granite Dam, Oxbow Dam, Hells Canyon Dam, Brownlee Dam, and Palisades Dam on the Snake. Dworshak Dam on the North Fork of the Clearwater. Anderson Ranch Dam on the South Fork of the Boise. Pelton and Round Butte dams on the Deschutes. Big Cliff, Foster, Green Peter, and Detroit dams on the three forks of the Santiam River. Cougar Dam on the South Fork of the McKenzie. Dexter, Lookout Point, and Hills Creek dams on the Willamette. Merwin Dam, Yale Dam, and Swift Dam on the Lewis River. Layfield and Mossyrock dams on the Cowlitz. Thirty-six great dams on one river and its tributaries—a dam a year. The Age of Dams. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

10 " It was one of those details that dwell in a special kind of obscurity reserved for the perfectly obvious. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

11 " the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.   The "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

12 " Western Congressmen, in the 1970s, were perfectly willing to watch New York City collapse when it was threatened with bankruptcy and financial ruin. After all, New York was a profligate and sinful place and probably deserved such a fate. But they were not willing to see one acre of irrigated land succumb to the forces of nature, regardless of cost. So they authorized probably $1 billion worth of engineered solutions to the Colorado salinity problem in order that a few hundred upstream farmers could go on irrigating and poisoning the river. The Yuma Plant will remove the Colorado’s salt—actually just enough of it to fulfill our treaty obligations to Mexico—at a cost of around $300 per acre-foot of water. The upriver irrigators buy the same amount from the Bureau for three dollars and fifty cents. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

13 " Homesteads fronting on streams went like oranges aboard a scurvy-ridden ship. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

14 " In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

15 " Ours was the first and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locale. —Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, on sailing up the Colorado River to a point near the present location of Las Vegas, in 1857 "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

16 " In the West, however, climatic differences far more striking than these may occur within the same state, even within the same county. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, a farmer can raise a number of different crops without irrigation; there is usually a summer drought, but it is short, and even if he decides not to depend entirely on rainfall, a few inches of irrigation water—instead of the hundred inches used by some farmers in California and Arizona—will usually do. Two hours away, on the east side of the Cascades, rainfall drops to a third of what the Willamette Valley ordinarily receives; not only that, but the whole of eastern Oregon is much higher than the section west of the Cascades, and lacks a marine influence, so the climate is far colder as well. It can be forty above zero in Eugene and ten below zero in Bend, a two-hour drive to the east. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

17 " a place that receives seven inches or less—as Phoenix, El Paso, and Reno do—is arguably no place to inhabit at all. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

18 " During the following winter, superstorms such as this were routine. In the Sierra Nevada, the standing snowfall record of 750 inches, set in 1906, was eclipsed by fifteen feet. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

19 " For the first time in their history, Americans had come up against a problem they could not begin to master with traditional American solutions -- private capital, individual initiative, hard work -- and yet the region confronting the problem happened to believe most fervently in such solutions. [...] When they finally saw the light, however, their attitude miraculously changed -- though the myth didn't -- and the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

20 " One modest example of how the farmers managed to deceive the Bureau was provided by the case of Russell Giffen, one of the big landowners in the Westlands district. A Fresno rancher who stitched together seventy-seven thousand acres of valley property—about seven times the acreage of Manhattan Island—Giffen was the largest cotton grower in the world: nationally, he also ranked just behind Boswell and one other farming company in the combined federal farm subsidies he received. In the 1970s, Giffen decided to clean up his estate for probate, and sold most of the land for $32.5 million. "

― Marc Reisner , Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water