Cadillac desert
(DVD Video)

pt.1. Mulholland's dream (90 min.) This episode tells of the William Mulholland?s search for water for the people of Lost Angeles. Evoking the real-life visionaries, scoundrels, and dark intrigues behind the fiction of the motion picture Chinatown, the film weaves the past and present together to illustrate water?s role in the history of Los Angeles, as well as the city?s challenges for the future.

pt. 2. An American Nile (60 min.) This episode charts the dramatic transformation of the Colorado reviver from a wild desert waterway with a mind of its own into the most controlled, litigated, domesticated, regulated, and over-allocated river in the history of the world. From the heroic construction of the Hoover Dam during the Great Depression to the bitter political and environmental battles of the potential damming of the Grand Canyon this program illustrates how the Colorado became so impounded and diverted that by 1969 it no longer reached the ocean.

pt. 3. The mercy of nature (60 min.) This episode traces the fierce political and environmental battles that raged around the transformation of California?s Central Valley from semiarid desert into the most productive and environmentally altered agricultural region in global history.

pt. 4. Last oasis (60 min.) This episode opens with the story of how America?s large dams became examples for water projects abroad, particularly in developing countries. The film goes to India and China, where big dam building continues in full force, and to Mexico, the Middle East, and back to the American West to explore how, in the face of rising water needs, conservation may be humanity?s ?last oasis?.