What is the author's tone in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner?

The tone of Cadillac Desert is set by the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem Ozymandias in the book's beginning, as well as with the chapter titles: "A Country of Illusion," "Rivals in Crime," "Those Who Refuse to Learn ..., " "Things Fall Apart," and "A Civilization, if You Can Keep It." Reisner sounds didactic throughout, and his rhetoric reveals a strong environmentalist agenda. In repeated evaluations of the American West development, he discusses some benefits of the development but always counterweights them with judgmental statements such as: "The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun."