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Cadillac Desert
1997 · TV series · documentary · 1 season
Documentary on water usage, money, politics, the transformation of nature, and the growth of the American west, shown on PBS as a four-part miniseries.
9 positive2 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
Anytime water and the southwest comes up I always recommend the documentary series Cadillac Desert, based on the book. It's on YouTube and tells the story of how the southwest became livable due to the damming of many major rivers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU
So basically pump seawater up from the Gulf of California across the border over a flat floodplain to the Salton Sea (south of joshua tree) and use cheap PV to run desalination plants that will restore one of our biggest environmental disasters https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/sea-worth-salt back into a vacation hotspot greater than Palm Springs.
Costs of the PV and desal (relatively cheap but still absurdly expensive in absolute terms at this scale) will be offset by real estate development and hand-wavey mineral extraction from the sea water.
Environmental impacts of desal's salty waste stream is hand-waved away.
I mean, economic math miiight pencil out. But basing the speculative prosperity of an entire region on a bunch of water and energy machines seems... well... fragile? Full of hubris? Seems like a really expensive way of maintaining an otherwise-unsustainable Potemkin vacation village.
But then again, that's basically the story of the american southwest, so, /shrug? (see Cadillac Desert and all the water stories out there...)
If anyone hasn't watched the documentary 'Cadillac Desert' on the importance of water in the history and development of the United States Southwest, then I would highly recommend putting it on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU
Cadillac Desert, about the construction (and some unethical manoeuvrer) of California's water infrastructure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert_(film)
The book Cadillac Desert and the documentary of the same name (narrated by Alfre Woodard) woke me up to this problem. (I live in CA but grew up back east). It's astonishing that we use so much imported water on our lawns (including during Winter) while watering lawns is not even necessary elsewhere.
I like to follow a thematic thread with books and movies. Here are a few recent ones that might interest the HN crowd:
* water issues/climate change in the Southwest:
- *Chinatown* (film) - *The Water Knife* by Paolo Bacigalupi (sci-fi novel, described as "*Chinatown* meets *Mad Max*)
- *The Cadillac Desert* by Marc Reisser (nonfiction, part of a plot element in *The Water Knife*
- *Cadillac Desert* PBS documentary[1]
* Dark espionage thrillers:
- *The Night Manager* by John LeCarre (novel, honestly not one of his best)
- *The Night Manager* (TV miniseries--much better than the book!)
- *The Ghost Writer* by Robert Harris (novel)
- *The Ghost Writer* (movie)
- *An Officer and a Spy* by Robert Harris (excellent and extensively researched historical novel, based on the Dreyfus Affair in Paris circa 1900)
- *J'Accuse (An Officer and a Spy)* (movie)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkbebOhnCjA
Marc Reisner's book _Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water_, written in 1987 (a third of a century ago), documents part of this experiment, including actions of Los Angeles to get water, and the rivalry between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, among others.
I believe PBS did a 5-part miniseries with the same title "Cadillac Desert" in 1997. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118279/
There's a reason the modern environmental movement largely started in California.
Cadillac Desert, a history of modern water policy, will turn any one into a treehugger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert_(film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR2BSGQt2DU
The histories for air, land, and sea are similarly shocking, depressing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars : California water wars.
Relatedly on a more entertaining note: Chinatown..1974 movie by Roman Polanski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)
And Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert
Water in the American West is one of those topics that sounds boring on the surface, but gets more interesting the further down you go.
A good introduction is the "Cadillac Desert" documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0444F9186975498D
I didn't know about California City, but the parent post also makes me think of the classic movie Chinatown, inspired by the California Water Wars.
On the same topic, another inspiration for fiction is the book Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert
FWIW, there is a four-hour PBS style documentary based on the book. This book is the most prescient thing about the biggest issue ( multiply prescience by the size of the issue and it sorts to the top ) I probably will ever read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert_%28film%29