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It is astounding to me, watching the divided society we live in, that an earlier
society situated on the same land could have come together to build Hoover, Glen
Canyon, Flaming Gorge and scores of other major dams. We today are like barbarians
left with something a higher order, or at least a more organized and cohesive society,
built. The society that built those machines agreed on what they were for, and put
them to work to produce food, fiber, and electricity and water for urban areas, with
flat-water recreation thrown in.
Now, decades later, we have 50 ideas about what they're for. Some of us want them
to be used exclusively for their original purposes. But others want them to be used
to create floods to build beaches, and to provide water for rafters, raptors, or
fish that are barely hanging onto their changed environments. And always, there
is the tug of war between rural uses of water and urban uses of water. That rural-urban
conflict does not include only the diversion of water away from irrigation and into
cities' water treatment plants, but also includes the environmental uses of water.
So, the dams and Reclamation Era, which opened with the last century and declined
well before the 20th century ended, is both a rebuke and a challenge to us: a rebuke
for being so quarrelsome, without even having the excuse of being liquored up; and
a challenge to come together and use these machines to serve our collective needs.
We are at the moment like the tribe in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy."
The tribe found a Coca Cola bottle, which they found endlessly useful -- so useful
that they fell to quarreling with each other over how to use it and who was to use
it. Should it be a container to carry water? To store grain? To pound stakes in
the ground?
We have found dozens of wonderful Coke bottles, left to us by a civilization that
has all but disappeared, and whose vision and drive have certainly disappeared.
We are fighting each other over those bottles. In case you didn't see the movie,
at its end, the tribe's leader took the bottle, traveled a long way to a city, and
returned this gift to whence it had come.
There are those who suggest that we, too, return the gift, which they see as a curse:
that we breach the dams and let the rivers run through them. The most organized,
cohesive and middle-of-the-road of these groups, the Glen Canyon Institute, has this
as a mission statement:
The Glen Canyon Institute's mission is to provide leadership toward restoration
of a free-flowing Colorado River through Glen Canyon and Grand Canyon.
So far as I can tell from its web site, the keeper of the traditional vision,
the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, has this for a mission statement:
Through leadership, use of technical expertise, efficient operations, responsive
customer services and the creativity of its employees, Reclamation continues to manage,
develop, and protect the water resources of the West for economic, social, and environmental
purposes. Over the past 95 years, the Reclamation program has emphasized development
of safe and dependable water supplies and hydropower to foster settlement and economic
growth in the West.
Reclamation will continue to increase productivity to carry out its mission more
efficiently. This requires Reclamation to provide the opportunity and means for
its employees to excel in their work, thereby ensuring that Reclamation can effectively
and efficiently carry out its mission and provide high quality customer services
at the lowest possible cost. Reclamation intends to achieve a diverse workforce
to promote excellence, innovation and responsiveness to the needs of our various
constituencies.
The Glen Canyon Institute may or may not succeed in implementing its audacious
vision, but there is no doubt what its vision is. By comparison, it is clear that
the US Bureau of Reclamation has no vision.
In a few places, dams have been dismantled, or steps toward such dismantling are
well underway, as in Olympic National Park on the Elwha River in the State of Washington.
I don't want to take sides on the question of wholesale dismantling of dams, because
I don't think that's the core issue. I don't think the West would become a wonderful
place if all of our dams disappeared tomorrow. Nor do I think our world would collapse.
What we're up against is how to change our Hatfield and McCoy approach to water
matters. Our challenge is how to achieve the unity of purpose that allowed the Reclamation
Era to be an era.
I don't like everything the Reclamation Era achieved. I think it overshot, but I
do admire its unity. I do admire the fact that the people of that time came together
with a purpose they believed in, and they did it democratically, for that time.
The Reclamation Era, I believe, was not a product of despotic forces. I think there
was as much democracy in Reclamation as we can reasonably expect in this world.
I think the evidence of that democracy came in the 1960s and 1970s, when the building
of dams in places that the nation held sacred - like Dinosaur National Monument and
the Grand Canyon - was stopped. The nation's values changed, and dam building was
stopped even though the top levels of government and most organized economic interests
wanted to continue building dams.
The trouble is, we stopped Reclamation without replacing its vision with another.
We were against, but we weren't clearly for something. What was Reclamation's vision?
Initially, it was an agrarian, Jeffersonian vision: to make the desert bloom by
putting water and tens of thousands of small farmers on the land. In places like
these west-central valleys, that vision can still be seen in place today. It is
what makes our areas special, I believe.
But far more typical is a place like California's Imperial Valley, which uses something
like 3 million acre-feet of water a year to raise a huge percentage of the nation's
vegetables, as well as huge quantities of sudan grass, alfalfa and cotton. The Imperial
Valley is being squeezed today, like a sponge, as California tries to figure out
how to water its 33 million people while skinnying down to its 4.4 million acre-foot/year
quota out of the Colorado River.
Imperial Valley agriculture has created as close to a feudal society as you can find
in the United States today. The valley has a few large growers, tens of thousands
of workers, 25 percent of its population living under the poverty level, and many,
many workers migrating daily from the Mexican city of Mexicali to work in the fields.
This poverty, these immense land holdings, and the drying up of the Colorado River
Delta are all a result of the Reclamation vision gone awry. We built the Hoover
Dam and the All American Canal so that the people who produce our food can live as
if they were vassals of some knight in England or France. The desert is blooming
in the Imperial Valley, but the society is not.
Reclamation completely abandoned the vision of small farmers creating a Jeffersonian
society in the West after World War II. That vision was replaced by a vision of
growth, progress, and technological mastery. It is the vision that is at work in
Southern California as that region tries to meet its Colorado River Compact quota.
California and the entire seven-state basin are proceeding as if they face only
a technical problem of reallocating water. I think we face a deep social problem,
which is easiest to express by pointing out that we have never replaced the lost
visions of making the desert bloom, settling small farmers on the land, and, finally,
creating growth and progress.
What we have today, if we have anything, is the latter vision: a vision of a smoothly
running, ever-growing machine. I think people expect more from their society and
even from their government than simply efficiency. America is a wonderful place
because, periodically, we think and dream with large, impractical strokes. If we
did not do this, we could not have built the Hoover Dam in the midst of the Great
Depression. We could not have built Glen Canyon Dam, Flaming Gorge, or Blue Mesa.
The West had a vision for itself, and the nation bought into that vision.
But that vision has played itself out, and we are living among monuments whose technical
workings we understand, but whose spirit we do not understand. And so we divide
into different camps: those who still want to keep the deserts and mountain valleys
blooming; those who want to divert those waters to metropolitan areas to grow houses
and malls, and those who want to tear down the dams and make the rivers live again.
I would like to see us recapture the Reclamation Era not by building more dams -
where would we put them? and what would we put in them? - but by recapturing the
spirit of Reclamation: a vision that would unite us in pursuit of a more fulfilling
future. Much as I admire the simplicity of the mission statement of the Glen Canyon
Institute - to breach Glen Canyon Dam - I don't think it's a sufficient vision for
the society. We need and deserve more.
The future will require the merging of two large forces: environmentalism - which
I define as a desire for a more natural and less paved world, and sprawl - which
accepts as inevitable a paved world, but which demands a bit of fenced and private
green space within that paved world. Both are intent on natural space, but they
are after that space in different sizes.
The immediate tragedy - and you can see it here in the Gunnison area - is that caught
between these two pincers are people who depend on large expanses of cheap land:
ranchers, loggers, farmers, oil and gas drillers, and miners. They are people who
depend on nature for their livings; people who experience nature in a much different
way than environmentalists or suburbanites.
I should say here that if we Americans had a lick of sense we'd be perfectly happy
with our material state, happy with our politics, and that we'd thank the Lord each
day that we live here and not elsewhere. We'd bless our dams and dammed rivers,
and we'd bless our undammed rivers, and we'd kiss our children and relax and cut
our work weeks to 10 hours or so.
But we don't have a lick of sense. I know I don't. We live as if saber tooth tigers
were still at our heels, and adrenaline still courses into our systems at the slightest
provocation. And individually and as a society we're addicted to adrenaline, so
we will keep on churning. We will keep busy. We will keep organizing. For whatever
reason, we can't stop. I accept that. The only question is: in what direction should
we try to direct our churning?
At my age, and at this point in my career, I feel like the Nez Perce Chief Joseph:
I am tired of fighting ... from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more.
What I want instead of fighting are colleagues and allies, especially if they look
at the world very differently. I am no longer a very good ideologue. I don't believe
in large, overarching ideas or in the charismatic characters who preach those ideas.
I don't believe in big technological fixes. I don't believe wind energy, or the
hydrogen economy, or the fuel cell, or even the dismantling of dams will save us.
I believe instead in pragmatism. I believe in working away at a knot in many different
ways, with many different hands and minds and approaches, until it finally unravels.
I want to be involved with people who have the patience and temperament to work
away at the many knots that confront the western United States: the cattle-and-public
land knot; the dam and rivers knot; the logging and old growth forest knot. Those
are my people. Those are my soul mates.
Chief Joseph came to his decision to fight no more out of honorable defeat. My war
was against rural, extractive uses of the Interior West. I run an environmental
newspaper, and for most of the 1980s, I ran that newspaper as if only the environmental
movement could save the West from ranching, mining, logging and dam building. I
consider that we, the green folks, have won that war. After all, we live in a state
and in a region where urban uses now trump rural uses everywhere, including the most
remote county.
But for me at least, the victory is proving hollow, for much of what I loved about
the West was in rural nature. This isn't a new conclusion. For much of the 1990s,
I tried to run as a vehicle of reform rather than of revolution. I became especially
attached to the idea that ranching, properly done, could lead the way to a New West,
and I've been appalled for years at the efforts some of my fellow environmentalists
make to drive ranchers off the public land.
Where did this war within the West come from? I can describe it in terms of a personal
evolution. We city people came here out of an alienation with how urban America
was being run. We idealized the rural West, and we ran head on into the people who
were living here, and who did not idealize the rural West. They understood it was
a great place to live. But they knew it was also a tough place to make a living,
and that it was a left-behind part of America, with everything stacked against it.
They knew the rural West was living off the crumbs of the American economy, producing
commodities at rock-bottom prices for relatively well-off city people.
Of course, they were enraged when the newcomers, and city people working through
national environmental groups, interfered with the production of those commodities,
and also interfered with the subsidies that larger economy chose to send to the rural
West. Led politically by the environmental movement, and squeezed economically by
free trade, by a reaction against subsidies and regulation, and by the increasing
price of land and labor in rural areas, natural-resource based economies have come
under increasing pressures.
What does this have to do with Reclamation? We should see Reclamation as a spirit
rather than as a set of dams. The West came together - it buried enough of its differences
to get a job done. Unless we can now adopt that spirit, we will be locked in endless
warfare. Nothing will work well, and those things we care about: the land, wildlife,
the economy and the things a healthy economy enables us to do will all deteriorate.
The following books are helpful in understanding the spirit, if not the purpose,
of the Reclamation Era:
High and Dry: The Texas-New Mexico Struggle for the Pecos River, by Emlen
Hall. A University of New Mexico law professor describes how Reclamation really works
in the Southwest.
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, and The Hedgehog
and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, by Isaiah Berlin. What does
a now dead Oxford philosopher have to tell us about the West? Plenty. Berlin is
the apostle of a society which uses seemingly clashing ideas to find a workable middle.
Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner. A wonderful, from-the-heart book about the
failures of reclamation. The wonderful thing about Reisner is that he went on to
work with rice farmers and others to enhance rural economies. His death was a tragedy,
for this was that rarity: a thinker and activist capable of growth.
Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul
of America, by J. Anthony Lukas. If you like your history to be well plotted,
this story of the murder of the former governor of Idaho, around 1900, is for you.
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