ObituaryMarc Reisner
The man who blew the whistle on America's western water scandalWater has always been more important than gold or silver in the history and development of the American west, but unlike the fever over precious metals it was difficult to understand or make interesting. Marc Reisner, who has died of cancer at the age of 51, changed all that.
His 1986 book, Cadillac Desert: The American West And Its Disappearing Water, did a similar job for its subject to that of Rachel Carson's seminal work on pesticides, Silent Spring (1962). Both changed the law but, more importantly, they brought the issue of a threatened environment into political prominence. Reisner's book was ranked by the Modern Library as 61st on a list of the 100 most notable English-language books of the 20th century.
As a television documentary series, often beautiful as well as revelatory, it was screened in America in 1997, and was shown abroad, including in Britain. Its black and white photographs of the men who built the massive Hoover dam, on the Colorado river near Las Vegas, were as compelling por traits of human endeavour and courage as images from the second world war.
Reisner had the remarkable ability to explain entertainingly the complex, and often numbing, deals and disputes in the "water wars" that have plagued the west, particularly California, for nearly 200 years. Tourists on their way to Death Valley today sometimes pause to look at the aqueduct that carries water from the once-fertile Owens valley more than 300 miles to Los Angeles. They have read Reisner's book, which describes how the water was stolen, how the Owens lake, which once bore paddle steamers, was turned into a dustbowl, and how the canal was bombed by local people in the 1920s.
Reisner recounted the drama of the collapse of the Saint Francis dam in a valley of shale, north-west of Los Angeles, in 1928. It had been built by the legendary William Mulholland, a self-taught hydro-engineer, who presided over the aqueduct from Owens valley and was a popular hero. When the dam crumbled, it sent a 200-ft high wall of water to the sea, killing more than 400 people and destroying 1,200 homes. It also ruined Mulholland, after whom the home of film stars, Mulholland Drive, is named.
Such follies and tragedies were only part of Reisner's argument, still debated today, that much of the west is simply too arid to permit extensive development, and that eventually nature will have her revenge. Yet only this year have developers been forced to demonstrate how they will provide water before erecting houses.
Another forecast Reisner made is still largely ignored, but irrefutable - that the massive dams across the west, such as Hoover, Parker and Glen Canyon, will one day cease to provide electricity, and turn into spectacular waterfalls as the lakes behind them fill with silt. He also reported that no irrigated community has existed for longer than 400 years. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and other neon-lit monuments to humanity are approaching the halfway mark.
Reisner was born in water-abundant Minneapolis, the son of a lawyer and script- writer. He earned a bachelor's degree at a private college in Indiana. Interested in environmental politics from those early days, he worked for two years in Washington on the staff of Environmental Action and the Population Institute, before moving to the Natural Resources Defence Council, in New York, from 1972 to 1979.
That year he obtained funds to research his masterpiece, and found a treasure trove in the formerly secret files of the Bureau of Reclamation, the villains of Cadillac valley (together with the Army Corps of Engineers) in their zeal to line with concrete every free- flowing river in America.
In 1990 Reisner co-wrote Overtapped Oasis: Reform Or Revolution For Western Water, following it a year later with Game Wars: The Undercover Pursuit Of Wildlife Poachers, a study of 200 federal agents and their fight against illegal seizure of wildlife in the south.
In his later years, environmentalists criticised Reisner for his association with two private companies, one storing water underground for profit - still better than dams, he said - and the other promoting the use of rice fibre. He had changed his mind about rice paddies in the west, he said, because they provided wetlands for birds that had otherwise been deprived of habitat. But the dispute was silly in comparison with his achievement.
Reisner is survived by his wife Lawrie Mott, a biochemist, and their daughters, Ruthie and Margot.
Marc Reisner, environmentalist and writer, born Sept-ember 14 1948; died July 21 2000
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