Item Detail
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31000
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1
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8
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English
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From Cadillac to Chevy : Environmental Concern, Compromise, and the Central Utah Project Completion Act
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Utah in the Twentieth Century
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Logan, UT
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Utah State University Press
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343-366
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"In a region with scant precipitation, Utahns, like most residents of the American West, consume prodigious amounts of water to maintain lush lawns and productive farms. In 1986 journalist Marc Reisner completed his muckraking exposé of water usage and reclamation in the West, aptly entitled Cadillac Desert. Reisner argued that the immense cost of federally funded dams and canals designed to support the water-rich lifestyles of westerners defrauded American taxpayers. In 1987, one year after Reisner’s exposé appeared, leaders of the U.S. House and Senate, who likewise viewed western water projects as boondoggles, refused to approve increased expenditures for the “Cadillac” of Utah water projects : the Central Utah Project (CUP). In the following essay, Adam Eastman uses the reports and records of federal and local agencies, articles from newspapers, and interviews with key participants to describe the history of federal water projects in the Beehive State, culminating in the battle for passage of the Central Utah Project Completion Act. Eastman shows that in that battle, municipal water users, farmers, Native Americans, politicians, and environmentalists divided and coalesced in patterns that confound traditional binaries : urban versus rural, East versus West, or federal versus local. The end product was a less-ambitious water project that Utah Representative Wayne Owens named “a Chevy instead of a Cadillac.” Despite Owens’s metaphor, as Eastman indicates, the CUP delivers some of the West’s most expensive water to the Wasatch Front and Uinta Basin." [Author]
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'A Different Mode of Life' : Irrigation and Society in Nineteenth-Century Utah
Glen Canyon Dammed : Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country
History of Irrigation in Utah
Irrigating the Mormon Heartland : The Operation of the Irrigation Companies in Wasatch Oasis Communities, 1847-1880
The "First" Irrigation Reservoir in the United States : The Newton, Utah, Project
The Weber River Basin : Grass Roots Democracy and Water Development
Utah's Great Drought of 1934
Waters of Zion : The Politics of Water in Utah