Rather, we inhabit it with an uneasy truce, one that is turning against our favor. From these opening chapters, Reisner illustrates how Americans have not conquered the desert.
Reisner goes on to talk about how white men came to explore the land through various expeditions, including the Powell Geographic Expedition in 1869. The Introduction and Chapter 1 focuses on the exploration and settlement of the American West, which began with a Spanish conquistador stumbling upon the land during his quest for gold. Reisner condemns the American obsession with asserting control over nature, determining that it has led to many environmental disasters, the deterioration of some of America’s greatest bodies of water, and destruction of rural communities, especially Native American communities. Reisner suggests that the entire system is founded on political greed and corruption and a desire to be victorious over the desert, a place where humans cannot easily survive. This revisionist history focuses on the fallout of human desire to constantly expand into the desert and the costly task of creating water projects, such as dams and aqueducts, that allowed for this expansion. She demonstrates how they have created the need for conservation methods that will protect Earth's water for the next century.The book’s title, Cadillac Desert, contains an ideological dualism, with one word standing for luxury, boldness, and victory, and the other one describing one of the most inhospitable places on the planet for humans. The final episode is drawn from Sandra Postel's book, Last Oasis (1992), which examines the global impact of the technologies and policies that came out of the United States' manipulation of water.
It explores the triumph and disaster, heroism and intrigue, and the rivalries and bedfellows that dominate this little-known chapter of American history. The first three episodes are based on Marc Reisner's book, Cadillac Desert (1986), that delves into the history of water use and misuse in the American West. It brought abundance and a legacy of risk created in the United States and abroad.
The film chronicles the growth of a large community in the western American desert. Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature is a 1997 American four-part documentary series about water, money, politics, and the transformation of nature.
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