Quotes from Marc Reisner

I believe that anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn't spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money.

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.

simple matter of physics, then, made the Central Arizona Project even worse, in an economic sense, than the Colorado River Storage Project. But politics demanded that it be built, and in the 1960s, Arizona had power.

That project, the State Water Project, more than anything else, is the symbol of California's immense wealth, determination, and grandiose vision -- a demonstration that it can take its rightful place in the company of nations rather than mere states. It has also offered one of the country's foremost examples of socialism for the rich.

More than anyplace else, California seems determined to prove that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a lie.

To easterners, "conservation" of water usually means protecting rivers from development; in the West, it means building dams.

OZYMANDIAS I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand

Had humans never settled in Los Angeles, evolution, left to its own devices, might have created in a million more years the ideal creature for the habitat: a camel with gills.

United Western Investigation

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.

Reason is the first casualty in a drought.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Then came cheap oil, electricity, and the motorized centrifugal pump. Finally freed from all constraints but nature's (irrigation would last only as long as the finite aquifer held out), the farmers began pumping in the finest California tradition—which is to say, as if tomorrow would never come.

Brower had pioneered the route up the most impressive of them, Shiprock in New Mexico); the amphitheater basins ringed

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

On a map of Arizona, the Colorado River can be seen making a wide circle around the northern and eastern half of the state.

the Sierra Club took out full-page advertisements attacking the dams in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. One of the Bureau's arguments for building the dams, an argument which it would later regret, was that tourists would better appreciate the beauties of the Grand Canyon from motorboats. "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel," asked one advertisement, "so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?

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

Brower had said that he wouldn't mind dams in the Grand Canyon as long as the Bureau built a comparable canyon somewhere else. He received a standing ovation—in Denver.

Up close, the Granite Reef Aqueduct seems almost too huge to be real. Where will all the water come from? From the air, however, the aqueduct and the river it diverts are reduced to insignificance by the landscape through which they flow