There is a widely held view that Los Angeles simply went out to the Owens Valley and stole its water. In a technical sense, that…
Posts published by “Marc Reisner”
There are those who would argue that the West should have been left pretty much as it was. At the distant other end of the…
For all their breathtaking immensity, dams are oddly vulnerable things—a vulnerability that is shared and greatly intensified among the millions of people who depend on…
In California, when the issue is water, the ironies seem to string out in seamless succession. Bill Warne, the man who built the California Water…
The rapid rise of the federal irrigation movement in the early 1890s was due in part to a succession of overawing flood-related catastrophes. But it…
When archaeologists from some other planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude that our temples were dams. Imponderably massive,…
In December of 1964, California was hit by floods that were even wilder than the great floods of 1955. In three days, from December 21…
The American West was explored by white men half a century before the first colonists set foot on Virginia’s beaches, but it went virtually uninhabited…