This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 6, from 1991.
One of the problems for skeptics is that the field is so limited. It seems like we go round and round in circles: parapsychology, psychics, spiritualism, New Age, astrology, UFOs, on and on. Of course, there’s no reason why we can’t branch out a bit. Fuzzy reasoning is fuzzy reasoning, whether it’s applied to the paranormal or to more commonly accepted cultural myths.
It seems to me it was about a year ago that I saw reviews of Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, appearing in the UK press, although the book was actually published in the US in 1986. I finally found the book on my last visit to the US. Cadillac Desert is one of those rare books which you think must be the product of endless years of passionate research. Lovingly written, it rivals the world’s finest books in its use of language and vivid imagery. It also details one of the most scandalously irrational misuses of natural resources known to man, affecting the lives of millions of people. I long to write the screenplay. The western half of America is what they call ‘near desert’. However, settlers, moving westward across the continent, thought they could solve this problem. Till the soil, they believed, and the climate would change; ‘Rain follows the plough’, went the folk saying.
For a time, it seemed as though they might be right. Just as the natural cycle of terminal and chronic illness can make people believe they have been healed by ineffective treatments, the natural cycle of rain and drought made the settlers of western America believe that they had conquered the land.
When they found out they were wrong, they set themselves to mining ground water – a resource Reisner calls as precious and irreplaceable as oil. At the rate they were going, he says, the water that took thousands of years to build up would be gone by the end of the century. The next step was water projects. All those famous dams, built one after another from the 1930s onward: Boulder, Hoover, Grand Coulee, and many, many others. In one area of California, people actually fought a small war – with guns – over the allocation of water rights. By now, there are no rivers left in western North America that haven’t been dammed, diverted, or developed; one even runs backwards.
Many myths contributed to this extravagance, which, by building expensive projects and selling the water at prices far lower than cost, laid the foundations of today’s trillion-dollar national debt. When Europeans settled North America, they came with the presumption that the climate wasn’t actually very much different than the one they had at home. There was, for a time, a theory that similar latitudes perforce had similar climates. Even the dams themselves generated a special mythology: that we could conquer Nature and the desert Dams became a religion to the people – the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers – who built them, to the point where even after all the good sites were gone the building continued. Dams were built beyond reason, on sites that were doomed, with costings that could never be paid back.
Then there is the myth of the small farmer, who needs that water to survive. In fact, the farmers who benefited from this artificially cheap water tended to be little people like Standard Oil. Artificially cheap water led to profligacy, the growing of such water-demanding crops as rice, and the founding of large western cities. We laugh at Los Angelenos because they believe in things like the New Age and flee their city whenever Nostradamus predicts an earthquake. But in fact LA’s entire water supply passes over one of the more vulnerable areas of the San Andreas fault.
When, or if, the Big One comes, LA’s entire water supply will almost certainly be cut off. The city is huge, rich, important, and unbelievably precariously balanced. These days, the talk is of bringing water down by aqueduct from Alaska – more than 1,000 miles north of LA. The energy consumption of such a project alone is immense. But water projects win politicians – particularly western politicians – votes.
One of the biggest political mistakes President Carter made, says Reisner, was to declare a ‘hit list’ of all the water projects he wanted to cancel. This list, Reisner believes, contributed as much to his defeat by Reagan as the Iranian hostage crisis. The history of water management in the US has every kind of faulty reasoning known to man or skeptic, from mythology, to dishonesty, to absolute unwillingness to admit a mistake. The lives of millions of people depend on giving up their most cherished myth, that man can reclaim the desert.
But there’s more than that, says Reisner: desert civilisations have failed throughout history. The reason? Salt, which accumulates in the land as the irrigation water evaporates. In the western US, he says, it’s happening already.
