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After examining one of the world’s worst case scenarios, the book turns to the state of Arizona that has one of the world’s more progressive groundwater management programs. After years of debate, the federal government eventually agreed to finance the Central Arizona Project to bring Colorado River water to central Arizona, but with a catch—Arizona first had to get their groundwater pumping under control. This chapter presents the historical background and role of key individuals involved in achieving this goal, as well as lessons to be learned from these efforts.

This chapter examines the history of American river development through one of its major proponents, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. On September 11, 1936, Hoover Dam began generating electricity. Many “experts” had predicted that a dam of such monstrous dimensions could not be built; some thought it would collapse of its own immense weight. Thanks to American ingenuity, courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation, Hoover Dam became a reality. In regard to public policy, there was a strong move to use “watery science” to irrigate vast stretches of land in the American West. But the science was only part of the irrigation phenomenon in 1900. The other part was a vast scheme of social engineering that was both grandiose and far-reaching. The construction of Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, and other projects launched the Bureau into a period of major expansion and construction. Other major Bureau projects include the Central Utah Project and the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the Garrison Diversion in North Dakota, and two of the five “Aspinall” projects in Colorado.

The 1979-80 Sagebrush Rebellion made the American West into a conservative stronghold. Prior to this, the region had belonged to Democrats. Using federal largesse, liberals had developed Western infrastructure and exploited its natural resource wealth. The key to the Democratic hold over the American West, New Politics liberals embrace of the modern environmental movement and preservationism effectively handed the region to the GOP. As the leading Western politician who pushed a preservationist agenda, Morris Udall was a transitional figure. Simultaneously backing the Central Arizona Project and the 1980 Alaska Lands Act, Udall came of age when liberals helped develop the West but he led New Politics in pushing a preservationist agenda. Once liberals embraced perservationism, most famously symbolized by Udall's Alaska Lands Act, they spawned the Sagebrush Rebellion, which gave the region to conservatives.