Letter From a Drowned Canyon

May 8, 2017 12:04 AM

Many conservationists argued for a dam in Glen Canyon as a trade-off, feeling they had to be cooperative and believing that if there was going to be a dam, then the little-known, unprotected, remote place was one they were willing to sacrifice. They were finding their way through new territory that required them to learn not only about dams and water and the landscapes of the Southwest, but about themselves — who they were and what they stood for and who they dared stand against. As the fate of Glen Canyon was sealed, members of the Sierra Club leadership went there and learned how magnificent the place was. They regretted their decision, but it was too late.

(slCaliforniaSundayMagazine) (Previously)
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? (5 comments total)

Edward Abbey wrote an essay about going down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon before it was dammed in his book, Desert Solitaire. It's an essay that still haunts me sometimes.

The following bit from that essay inspired me to spend 10 years of my life running Western rivers. It's funny reading it again now, because I can remember the difficulty I had imagining that landscape the first time I read it, but now I can picture it clear as day:

Down the river we drift in a kind of waking dream, gliding beneath the great curving cliffs with their tapestries of water stains, the golden alcoves, the hanging gardens, the seeps, the springs where no man will ever drink, the royal arches in high relief and the amphitheaters shaped like seashells...We pass sandbars where stands of white-plumed cane and the lacy blossoms of young tamarisk wave in the breeze among driftwood logs aged to a silver finish by the sun and wind and water. In the lateral canyons we sometimes see thickets of Gambel oak and occasional cottonwoods with gray elephantine trunks and bright clear-green leaves, delicately suspended, trembling in the air.
posted by colfax at 4:04 AM on May 8, 2017 [11 favorites]

Thanks - this was a great read. I didn't know there was a movement to 'consolidate' Powell and Mead.

I recently read a book on the backstory to the 1987 near-collapse of the Glen canyon dam, Kevin Fedarko's The Emerald Mile. The introduction is awful, but the rest of the book is great.
posted by Dashy at 5:48 AM on May 8, 2017

This article really bothers me in a way I'm having trouble defining. So, the dam probably was a mistake in light of climate change, but it was an honest one. No one was twirling their mustache and cackling as they drownded a canyon, but the author really wants to find a villian. There's the sneering at jetskis on the lake not being quiet hikers in a canyon, and the odd surprise that an engineer who built the dam would tell how to bypass it.

I'm a conservationist, an environmentalist, a sailor, and a hiker (and I personally loathe jetskis). Articles like this, though... You know how it seems sometimes like the rich want to bring back fuedalism because serfs can't agitate for higher wages? This attitude seems similar, like serfs can't run their jetskis through the precious canyon. The big dam building and infrastructure boom of the 50s was sincerely aimed at increasing the standard of living (through hydroelectric power) and recreation (through the creation of lakes) of the common American. There was certainly a "build first, worry about consequences later" which we would do well to learn from. In this time of ever increasing income disparity, this article feels to me like one more attack on the middle class by our "betters".

Or, maybe I'm reading too much into it.
posted by BeeDo at 9:57 AM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]

I feel the same way BeeDo. The fact that it seems to introduce the hubris of large scale public works projects as a target for ire greatly annoys me because at some point this attitude becomes toxic to both positive change the same as potential negative changes. Sure, nuclear energy will always have a complicated legacy that we will never be able to fully understand but is that always automatically and unquestionably worse than just letting the world remain hydrocarbon powered? Is lesson we really want to draw from post war infrastructure projects really going to be "don't let it change anything wild?" because that's really going to make it harder to build large scale solar farms or make green updates to existing transportation networks.
posted by midmarch snowman at 3:43 PM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think the context matters a lot. A lot of us in the American West are worried about water in ways that can be hard to get your head around if you live in a wetter part of the country. We have built entire cities in the West that are dependent on groundwater for their existence, and that is a finite, non-renewable resource, which means that some of us are wondering what the West is going to look like in 25 years. Additionally, much of the West is basically in the middle of a 17 year-old drought that has had some brief moments of respite. I have read some fairly convincing arguments that this might just be the new normal rather than something we're going to get out of with the help of a wet year or two.

Basically, the American West is looking very fragile right now, and a big part of that fragility can be traced back to a long line of bad decisions made by politicians who made many decisions about West based on ideas about what the West should be like, rather than dealing with the actual arid landscape in front of them. It may be true that they were just doing the best they can, but they were also willfully blind about a lot of things and ignored a lot of people who were trying to tell them. So, personally, I think it's reasonable to be pissed off at them.

And in this wider context, it is just really deeply weird and off-putting to have a reservoir in the middle of the desert like Lake Powell that loses 860,000 acre-feet of water a year (approximately 6% of the Colorado River's average annual flow, when every single drop of that river is fought over) when one of its main justifications for existing is recreation. Water is such a precious resource that it feels like trading diamonds for coal.
posted by colfax at 6:29 AM on May 9, 2017 [1 favorite]