Marc Reisner

American · 1948 to 2000

Born Marc Reisner on September 14, 1948, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of a lawyer and a scriptwriter, he graduated from Earlham College in 1970 and spent time on the staffs of Environmental Action and the Population Institute in Washington, D.C., before joining the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York in 1972, where he worked for seven years as a staff writer and director of communications. In 1979 he won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship, which funded the years of travel across the American West, touring dam sites, irrigation districts, and the offices of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, that became Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. Published in 1986 and revised in 1993, the book argued that a century of federally subsidized dam building had turned an arid, fragile landscape into an illusion of abundance that could not last, and it was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award the year it appeared; in 1999 a Modern Library panel ranked it 61st among the hundred best English-language works of nonfiction of the twentieth century. A 1997 PBS documentary series based on the book won a Peabody Award. Reisner went on to write Overtapped Oasis (1990) and Game Wars (1992), and taught for a time as a visiting professor at the University of California, Davis. In 1990 he co-founded the Ricelands Habitat Partnership with the Nature Conservancy, flooding California rice fields in winter to restore waterfowl habitat instead of burning the straw, and shortly before his death he won a Pew Charitable Trusts fellowship to support Pacific salmon habitat restoration through dam removal. He married the biochemist and environmentalist Lawrie Mott and had two daughters, Ruthie and Margot. Reisner died of colon cancer on July 21, 2000, at his home in San Anselmo, California, at fifty-one; his final book, A Dangerous Place, was published three years later.