I've heard Cadillac Desert recommended a few times. I haven't read it simply because it isn't on Audible and I can crush an Audible in a day or week while printed matter takes me months.

Not mentioned, unfortunately, is Chinatown - which despite being an oscar-winning noir is actually a brief and insightful history into William Mulholland and water rights in Southern California.

The why of overdevelopment isn't mentioned in this analysis, unfortunately. Why irrigate the desert to turn California into farmland? Why create a massive overabundance of hydroelectric power? The answer is "geopolitical strategy" - American food production has been used as a club since the end of WWI and our ability to refine more materials than any other nation makes our possession of resources irrelevant. We may not have the world's greatest strategic reserves of oil but we sure as fuck have the greatest refinery capacity, which means the world's oil flows through America. Likewise aluminum; as an undergrad I got to tour the Intalco Works, which is a place you've never heard of, which refines aluminum from all over the world, which uses more electricity than Los Angeles.

This is why the Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea in order to turn Uzbekistan into cropland: we never had to send bombers or troops, we could just turn off the flow of grain. Afghanistan was met with "hedgerow to hedgerow". All that copper the Chinese used up, driving up prices? They bought it from us.

Dams make more sense if you view them as a civil defense project. Our interstate highway system, after all, was created to facilitate the rapid mobilization of troops against Soviet invasion...