Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Marc Reisner

Quote by Marc Reisner

“In 1904, the newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power issued its first public report. 'The time has come,' it said, 'when we shall have to supplement the supply from another source.' With that simple statement, William Mulholland was about to become a modern Moses. But instead of leading his people to the promised land, he would cleave the desert and lead the promised waters to them.”

Quote by Marc Reisner

Book:Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Create image

Work

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

This book delves into the complex relationship between water and human development in the arid regions of the American West. It examines the historical and contemporary challenges of water allocation, irrigation, and the ecological consequences of large-scale water projects. The narrative covers the political, economic, and social aspects of water use, highlighting the struggles and successes of communities in managing their water resources. more

Author

Marc Reisner
Marc Reisner

Marc Reisner was an American writer renowned for his works on water resources. His writings delve into issues of water management, environmental policy, and the impact of human activity on nature. His masterpiece, 'Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water', provides a detailed account of the human relationship with water and the complexities of water resource management. more

You May Also Like

“It is too often the case,' Crook said, "that border news-papers disseminate all sorts of exaggerations and falsehoods about the Indians, which are copied in papers of high character and wide circulation, in other parts of the country, while the Indians' side of the case is rarely ever heard. In this way the people at large get false ideas with reference to the matter. Then when the outbreak does come public attention is turned to the Indians, their crimes and atrocities are alone condemned, while the persons whose injustice has driven them to this course escape scot-free and are the loudest in their denunciations. No one knows this fact better than the Indian, therefore he is excusable in seeing no justice in a government which only punishes him, while it allows the white man to plunder him as he pleases.”

American HistoryAmerican WestNative IndianFalse Narratives
Book:Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
Create image

“Joshua took a gulp of his own brew. “Need I have some other cause, when this plague could devastate so many of my patients and neighbors? When, if some of the reports prove true, we might see the town reduced painfully in size, as farmers abandon their holdings and flee to the East?” If the thought of one particular family leaving town, of Clara Brook’s tall figure climbing aboard a wagon and vanishing beyond the horizon, gave him a peculiar twinge, he was hardly obliged to say so.”

Historical RomanceNebraskaAmerican WestGrasshopper Plague
Book:What Heals the Heart
Create image

“Along the way, decisions about interpretation and presentation were made. Very clearly, it was decided the Osage viewpoint would prevail - it would hold the center stage. If I have erred I have tried to err on behalf of the Osages. Some will accuse me of being biased in favor of the Osages. My answer is, “it is time for some bias in favor of the Osages - there has been so much bias against them.” Another priority is to avoid the “Lo! The poor Indian,“ practice, which seeks to point to the great evils committed against Indians. If this were all it did, it would not be so repulsive, but it also points the accusing finger at all who have descended from those people who treated Indians so shabbily. It is an outright bid for sympathy and relieves one of the need to comprehend. The Osages do not need or want sympathy, but they desperately need understanding.”

HistoryNative AmericanAmerican IndianAmerican WestOsage
Book:A History of the Osage People
Create image

“To be attracted to another man in a violent place seems akin to a ticking bomb, logging, strip-mining, fracking. The American West is the playground for the country’s obsession with exploitation and destruction, with most extractive economies near Native American reservations. There are increased rates of birth defects. Higher rates of cancer. Violent people who mimic the violence done to the land. BOOM. And where there’s danger, there’s room for trespassing. And where there’s trespassing, there’s room for mischief.”

GayFrackingExtractionAmerican West
Book:Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
Create image

“With each surge of westward movement a new community came into being. These communities devoted themselves not to marching onward but to cultivating the earth. They plowed the virgin land and put in crops, and the great Interior Valley was transformed into a garden for the imagination, the Garden of the World. The vision of this vast and constantly growing agricultural society in the interior of the continent became one of the dominant symbols of nineteenth-century American society - a collective representation, a poetic idea (as [Alexis de] Tocqueville [1805-59] noted in the early 1830s) that defined the promise of American life. The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase and blissful labor in the earth, all centring about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow.”

FrontierFarmerAmerican WestPlowAlexis De Tocqueville
Book:Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
Create image

“...perhaps the Great American Desert's importance to the Western genre derives from the nineteenth-century view of the arid West as the natural refuge of Indians and, by extension, of all outlaws. The agrarian ideal, with its roots in Rousseau's thought, defined civilisation as arising from the agricultural life, so the migratory Indians - often compared in nineteent-century writings to Tartars and Bedouin - were, by reason of their socioeconomic organisation, outside the pale of civilised society and the area in which they moved was regarded as fit only for outlaws. It is as a milieu within which men outside civilised, agrarian society resolve their tensions, both personal and social, that the Western has used the myth of the Great American Desert, as in Riders of Death Valley (Forde Beebe and Ray Taylor, 1941), The Last Wagon (Delmer Daves, 1956), The Law and Jake Wade (John Sturges, 1958) and the Boetticher cycle.”

Civilized SocietyNative AmericansAmerican WestOutlawsRousseauWesternsThe Desert
Book:Cinema, A Quarterly Magazine, No. 4, October 1969
Create image