What is the main conflict in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner?

Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert is such a revisionist history. His focus on the creation of infrastructure to support Western settlement exposes a history, not of rugged individualism and romantic cowboys, but of the construction of a heavily subsidized and tremendously expensive "hydraulic society," founded on and maintained by the greed and competitiveness that is behind the American Dream. Reisner examines the West's ecologically dangerous, and ultimately harmful, dependence on dams and aqueducts, as Americans pursue the ideal of taming the Great American Desert.