About Marc Reisner

Marc Reisner (September 14, 1948 – July 21, 2000) was an American environmentalist and writer best known for his book Cadillac Desert, a history of water management in the American West.

He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of a lawyer and a scriptwriter, and graduated from Earlham College in 1970.

In 1979 he received an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship, which enabled him to conduct research and write Cadillac Desert, which was first published in 1986.[3] According to The Guardian, Cadillac Desert illuminated the importance of water conservation in the American West with "the remarkable ability to explain entertainingly the complex, and often numbing, deals and disputes in the 'water wars' that have plagued the west."[2] The book was a finalist for both the National Book Critics' Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award (BABRA) that same year. In 1999, a Modern Library panel of authors and critics ranked it 61st on a list of the 100 most notable English-language works of nonfiction of the 20th century. It was later made into a documentary film series that premiered nationwide on PBS nationwide in 1997 and won a Columbia University/Peabody Award.[4]

He went on to write additional books and helped develop a 1997 PBS documentary on water management that emphasized human endeavor in the building of dams. He was featured as an interviewee in Stephen Ives's 1996 PBS documentary series The West, which was produced by Ken Burns.

In 1997 he published a discussion paper for the American Farmland Trust on water policy and farmland protection.