Examination of Water-Related Changes and Improvement

Citing the record of official government sponsorship of exploration and exploitation on the American West that started from the Lewis and Clark expedition in Jefferson's administration, Reisner takes the view how the ever-increasing quantity and depth of exploitation with the West's water resources might have begun partly as a frontier adventure and partly as being a heroic frontier enterprise but had the long-term effect of generating the present-day prospect that agricultural, urban-population, and wilderness interests would collide, even as the sheer availability of water decreased and even as water-related ecology in the region--affected by pollution, overuse, mismanagement, and misallocation deteriorated at progressively higher rates.

The truth that the United States was a lot more or a smaller amount in a position to settle the West with out interference from the residue of European colonial interests owes a thing to chance--first, the chance that the conquistadors under Coronado failed to discover the gold deposits of Arizona by only several miles and second the chance that Napoleon would need to divest France with the Louisiana Purchase so that you can prosecute his individual European wars. This latter fact, combined with what can be noticed as Jefferson's foresight in adding vast territory to A

Epilogue. Reisner acknowledges in this chapter that development from the West was an inevitability that could not had been avoided, that with all of the issues created by doing water a lot more accessible and arable and the foundation of development, it's nonetheless tough to imagine a pristine West locked into medieval subsistence patterns. But the failure to look at long-term consequences in favor of short-term outcomes where water projects are concerned makes those really outcomes fragile. The determination to manipulate and control water over a big scale as soon as smaller-scale and additional sensible planning would have led to additional great use of country and water alike ought to be acknowledged as getting benefited corporate capital and moneyed interests, in addition to pork-barrel members of congress throughout the century. The biggest losers: environment, taxpayers, and, ultimately, the farmers themselves. In an ironic passage, Reisner describes plans to tap Canadian waterways in British Columbia (forget Washington's Columbia River) for augmentation, whilst they have not yet come to fruition; the concepts of development, however, don't seem to get altered.

This chapter describes the heedless water-project response an ethos of control and diversion to natural cycles of drought and flood, while the control in the type of dams has always led to engineering so bad that dams have broken and caused death and destruction. During the background of this has been a pattern in Reclamation or Corps of ignoring advice from geologists and others who from time to time have warned against building dams in geologically unsound areas; hence the breaking of the Teton Dam in Idaho.

 

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