TEXT MYSTERY One does not really conquer a place like this. One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy true with it. New England was completely forested in 1620 and nearly deforested 150 years later; Arkansas saw nine million acres of marsh and swamp forest converted to farms. Through such Promethean effort, the eastern half of the continent was radically made over, for better or worse. The West can never be. The only way to make the region over is to irrigate it. But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move. And even if you succeeded in moving every drop, it wouldn't make much of a difference. John Wesley Powell, the first person who clearly understood this, figured that if you eventually distributed all the surface water flowing between the Columbia River and the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have a desert almost indistinguishable from the one that is today. Powell failed to appreciate the vast amount of water sitting in underground aquifers, a legacy of the Ice Ages and their glacial melt, but even this water, which has turned the western plains and large portions of California and Arizona green, will be mostly gone within a hundred years- a squandered resource as quickly as oil. At first, no one listened to Powell when he said the overwhelming portion of the West could never be transformed. People figured that when the region was settled, rainfall would magically increase, that it would "follow the plow". In the late 1800s, such theories amounted to Biblical dogma. When they proved catastrophically wrong, Powell's irrigation ideas were finally embraced and pursued with near fanaticism, until the most gigantic dams were being built on the most miniscule foundations of economic rationality and need... Desert, semi-desert , call it what you will. The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-sized section green- and that conversion has been wrought mainly with non renewable ground water. But the goal of many westerners and their federal archangels, the Bureau of Reclamation, and Corps of Engineers, has
long been to double, triple, quadruple, the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska... - Mark Reisner Cadillac Desert