Quotes from Marc Reisner

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

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.

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