Dam
Fools
Why federal water management is all wet--and
why environmentalists are right to question it.
REASON April 1998
By James V. DeLong
David
Brower has been the soul of the Sierra Club for almost
half a century. Now in his 80s, he senses the rush of
time and is anxious to correct an old error.
In
the late 1950s, Brower acquiesced in the construction
of Glen Canyon Dam, located 50 miles up the Colorado
River from the Grand Canyon. The dam is huge: 710 feet
high, 1,560 feet wide and storing 27 million acre-feet
of water in Lake Powell, which extends back up the river
for 186 miles. Completed in 1963, at the height of a
period when America was damming everything that flowed,
the dam destroyed beautiful, red-rock Glen Canyon and
altered the ecology of the Grand Canyon area permanently.
The trade-off Brower and the Sierra Club got in exchange
was to stop dams that would have flooded nearby Dinosaur
Canyon, and it is not clear that their choice was a
bad one. Nonetheless, Brower rues his decision.
His
basic position is simple: The dam was a mistake. At
the time, its effects were assumed to be necessary costs
for the benefits of controlling the Colorado. But Glen
Canyon Dam performs no functions that cannot be handled
by Hoover Dam, built in the 1930s and 250 miles downstream.
We need not blow it up: Just open the gates, drain Lake
Powell, let the ecology of the canyon recover, and leave
the dam standing as a monument to hubris and folly.
This
is not a one-man or one-dam crusade. The Sierra Club
board of directors has voted to back Brower's view on
Glen Canyon, and the environmental movement as a whole
is challenging many other dams. The Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission recently denied a license renewal to Edwards,
a privately owned hydropower dam on the Kennebec River
in Maine, and it may reach the same decision on others.
The dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Pacific
Northwest are under fierce assault because of their
effect on the salmon. Millions of dollars are already
being spent to undo some of what these dams have wrought,
and the enviros are suggesting that some of them should
be torn down.
Some
observers regard anti-dam activism as yet more environmental
craziness and assume that Brower's position--and by
extension the other dam-busting efforts--is so outlandish
as to require no serious answer. The fourth highest
dam in the nation, a mistake? Surely you jest.
But
the dam busters have a point. Many dams probably should
not have been built, not necessarily because of any
environmental harm--you do not even have to get to that--but
because they made no sense economically.
The
big dam era was a significant experiment in delegating
economic decision making to government bureaucracies
working closely with private interests, all under the
firm hand of Congress. The result was a disaster. "Water
socialism," as it has been called, was and is as
big a mess in the United States as were its counterparts
in Eastern Europe.
Understanding
the excesses of the era is important. The future of
the West remains inextricably tied to water, and many
people doubtless still think this means more dams, aqueducts,
and other big construction projects. The real need in
the West, however, is not for more brute-force water
projects but for institutional change. The West needs
to establish property rights in water and to foster
free markets that will let water flow freely among users.
It also needs to adopt the golden rule that he who gets
the benefits pays the costs. People need to understand
how far water policy departed from these principles,
and how high a price they've paid as a result.
The
Century of Dams
It
is impossible to stand on top of one of the great dams,
such as Hoover in Nevada, Dworshak in Idaho, or any
of a dozen others, without feeling awe at the power
of the natural forces held in check and profound respect
for those who accomplished it. Dams are an intrinsic
part of the epic of engineering achieved by Americans
since the beginning of their national history: Between
the first European settlement and 1900, they built 2,661
dams with a total storage capacity of 10 million acre-feet.
Before
1900, the technology and economics of damming were checked
by the necessity of moving massive quantities of earth
or stone, largely by hand. But in this century, the
rise of machinery for moving earth and pouring concrete,
together with improved scientific understanding of materials,
opened up new possibilities. By 1996, the inventory
maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers listed
75,187 dams with a combined storage capacity of almost
1 billion acre-feet, which is enough to cover the entire
state of Texas with six feet of water. About 5,500 of
these are over 50 feet high.
The
overwhelming majority of dams are privately built and
owned, with the federal government owning only about
5 percent of them. But the federal government owns the
biggest and most important dams, and its share of total
storage capacity is much higher. The Bureau of Reclamation
of the Department of the Interior has only 340 dams
in the 17 states west of the Mississippi, but these
include Hoover and Glen Canyon on the Colorado River
and Grand Coulee on the Columbia.
Perhaps
surprisingly, the most common primary purpose for which
dams are built, according to the corps's inventory,
is recreation: 35 percent of existing dams fall into
this category. Nor is this a new phenomenon: 48 percent
of the dams built before 1900 had recreation as their
primary purpose. Other primary purposes are farm ponds
(18 percent), flood control (15 percent), water supply
(12 percent), irrigation (11 percent), hydroelectric
(2 percent), and navigation (less than 0.5 percent).
To
understand the dam building binge of the 20th century
requires an appreciation of how America's history merges
with its geography. When the line of western migration
reached the 100th meridian which bisects the nation
at about the middle of Nebraska, it ran into a wall.
Except for a belt along the Northwest coast, the rainfall
beyond that line averages less than 20 inches a year,
not enough for farming. The answer seemed obvious: irrigation.
Private groups started watering the West as soon as
the Mormons reached Utah in 1846, and by 1900 almost
7.5 million acres were under irrigation nationwide,
primarily in the West. For the most part, these works
consisted of rudimentary diversions of water from streams
into nearby fields.
Irrigation
is always up against the iron reality that water is
heavy, so moving it takes lots of energy. Try to move
it very far or very high, and the cost of the energy
used outstrips the value of whatever you can produce
with the water. Private citizens with their own money
on the line do not pump water over mountain ranges to
grow hay.
Federal
Physics
The
idea that the federal government is exempt from the
laws of both physics and economics is not a recent innovation,
and by the end of the 19th century both political parties
enthusiastically adopted the idea of a big reclamation
program for the West. The Newlands Act passed in 1902,
establishing the Bureau of Reclamation. In a fateful
portent, the law contained the first subsidy for users
of irrigation water. They were to repay construction
cost over 10 years without interest, and, when even
this schedule could not be met, Congress soon extended
the payment period to 20 years with a five-year grace
period.
Relatively
few dams are seriously controversial. Most were built
in the well-watered East or far Northwest by private
interests or as part of local construction of water
works. Many were indeed subsidized by the federal government
as part of the New Deal public-works efforts or as farm
ponds and are subject to all the usual concerns inherent
in federally subsidizing projects of local benefit.
But they do not seem to have aroused serious environmental
concerns, wasted undue amounts of money, or seriously
distorted other social decisions.
The
big controversies involve the federal dam-building efforts
conducted under four major public-agency umbrellas:
The Bureau of Reclamation in the Department of the Interior;
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; the great electric
power administrations, such as the Tennessee Valley
Authority; and the Federal Power Act of 1920.
These
agencies divided up the country according to geography
and function. The Bureau of Reclamation got most of
the 17 states west of the Mississippi. Its basic function
was to provide water for irrigation, with power generation
and municipal water supply tacked on because any dam
can be used for multiple purposes. The Corps of Engineers
had been charged by Congress in 1917 with flood control
and navigation, which meant it got the Mississippi and
the East.
A
few areas were left open. Both the bureau and the corps
operated in the water-rich Northwest, damming the Columbia
and the Snake rivers. They struggled over the Missouri
River, with the bureau pushing the Sloan Plan, which
would have put a series of high dams in the upper basin
to generate electric power that could be sold to pay
for irrigation projects. The corps wanted the Pick Plan,
which called for low dams downriver for flood control
and navigation. They compromised on the Pick-Sloan Plan,
which built all the dams wanted by either agency--112
of them.
TVA
was set up in the 1930s as an economic development agency,
designed to provide cheap power to the Tennessee Valley
and, incidentally, to control floods. The fourth program,
the Federal Power Act of 1920, provided for the licensing
of privately built dams to provide electric power. At
the time, it was thought that hydropower would become
the biggest source of electricity, and as of 1935 it
supplied one-third of the electricity in the United
States. Thereafter, declining fossil fuel prices shifted
the balance, and today hydropower accounts for less
than 9 percent of electricity generation, but the United
States has 2,300 hydroelectric power plants.
Red
Ink Reservoirs
The
federal dam-building program depended not only on a
revolution in the technology of building dams but on
a revolution in man's ability to fudge a cost-benefit
analysis: A key component of the boom was the dam builders'
ability to cut themselves loose from economic constraints.
The
initial Reclamation Act of 1902 was the template. By
relieving beneficiaries of any need to pay interest
on heavy capital investments, Congress ensured that
uneconomic projects would become common. It also ensured
that they would become political footballs. One of the
early projects approved was in the Strawberry Valley
of Utah in 1905. It drove a 600-foot tunnel through
a mountain to benefit a local group that was unwilling
or unable to finance the project itself. Setting a pattern
that has continued for a century, the final cost was
triple the estimate, the portion of the cost to be paid
back by the beneficiaries was set far too low, and even
this amount was not repaid for 75 years.
Rep.
William Hepburn of Iowa deserves canonization as a patron
saint of the public choice school of political analysis
for his 1902 comment on the Reclamation Act: "[T]his
bill is the most insolent and impudent attempt at larceny
that I have ever seen embodied in a legislative proposition.
These gentlemen...ask us...to give away an empire in
order that their private property may be made valuable....[T]his
is a thinly disguised attempt to make the Government...pay
for this great work--great in extent, great in expenditure,
but not great in results."
The
devices for avoiding economic rationality were many,
but they relied heavily on the public's lack of interest
in cost accounting. Congressmen could say, with a straight
face, that the beneficiaries of irrigation would pay
the costs of a project when, in fact they: 1) paid only
the marginal costs of the irrigation facilities that
were added onto a dam built for power generation or
flood control, not the basic costs of the dam itself;
2) were relieved of any interest charges during construction;
3) got repeated forgiveness of the debt. The result,
as calculated in 1989 in The Market for Federal Water
by Robert Wahl, a former analyst with the Department
of the Interior, is that the average subsidy to users
of agricultural water is over 80 percent of the costs
of construction.
The
Bureau of Reclamation also invented such devices as
River Basin Accounting, under which all projects on
a river system are brought under one cost-benefit umbrella.
That means that a "cash register" dam can
be built to generate power, and the revenue from it
then can be used to support irrigation projects that
could not stand on their own. The bureau also chronically
overstated the value of crops to be grown with the water
supplied and counted as "benefits" huge sums
that represented transfers of money from other parts
of the country into the favored locality rather than
true increases in national wealth. And once a project
passed the cost-benefit tests, augmentations could be
adopted without triggering any new analysis.
The
Corps Problem
The
Army Corps of Engineers, the other great dam builder,
did not get into the business in a big way until the
Flood Control Acts of 1936 and 1944. At the time, dam
building was seen as a depression-fighting jobs program.
Some deference might be given the concept that benefits
should exceed costs, but the real idea was to put men,
and hard-pressed engineering firms, to work. From 1936
right up to the present time, the corps and its congressional
patrons have understood that none of them were in the
business of finding reasons not to build projects.
When
I asked a Corps of Engineers representative whether
anyone had ever done a cost-benefit analysis on all
the corps's activities, I was told that analysis was
performed in advance on each individual project and
that all of these could be found in the Library of Congress.
Economists who have studied the matter say that the
corps's estimates greatly overstate benefits and understate
costs. Since the primary corps mission concerns flood
control, there is a circular quality to the benefit
calculations. If no one builds on a flood plain, floods
cause no damage. Put up a dam to prevent the flooding,
and people will build. Thereafter, every time the river
rises, the total value of all this construction can
be counted as "flood damage prevented."
Thus
the corps can claim that its works prevented $17 billion
in flood damages during 1994. But it is also no accident
that the national bill for flood damage has increased
as expenditures on flood control have grown. People
get lured in, then wiped out when there is a large 100-year
flood. (Not to worry, though--they can get federally
subsidized flood insurance.) This provides justification
for further flood control expenditures.
The
corps now manages 383 major lakes and reservoirs, 18,281
square miles of land and water, and 4,329 recreation
sites. A key factor in the growth of this empire was
that national taxpayers provided local benefits. While
the locals pay something, it was usually less than a
quarter of the costs, and even this was often forgiven.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's budget office tightened
the rules, which caused local political support for
many projects to evaporate faster than water in a desert
reservoir.
Water
Futures
The
federal dam circus has continued in all three of its
rings--irrigation, flood control, and power generation--with
ever more astounding performances. An irony of the continuing
federal irrigation effort is that the irrigation water
generated may not even be crucially important to agriculture.
The 10 million western acres getting all or part of
their crop water from the Bureau of Reclamation represent
less than 3 percent of the nation's 340 million acres
of cropland. They also represent only one-third of the
total western acres under irrigation; the rest is irrigated
by deep ground water, made possible by the invention
of the turbine pump in the 1940s. California's Central
Valley, site of one of the most important Bureau of
Reclamation projects, is more dependent on ground water
than on the federal dams. The necessity of the irrigation
water can be questioned on another ground as well: Between
1929 and 1978, 60 percent of the increase in irrigated
acreage was devoted to growing subsidized crops, most
of which were in surplus.
All
the economic legerdemain would be bad enough if it represented
a simple raid on the public fisc, if there were a straight
transfer of money from taxpayers to farmers. But that
is not the case; many projects combine large subsidies
with even more pure waste. The Central Utah Project
sells water to farmers for $3.00 per acre-foot. The
farmers use each acre-foot to produce crops worth $30.
But the cost to the government of delivering each acre-foot
is $350, so the dead-weight loss to the national economy
is $320.
A
fitting climax to this history is now being contested
in Colorado, where the proposed $700 million Animas-LaPlata
Dam would pump irrigation water up 900 feet over a ridge
and would cost over $7,500 per acre irrigated. This
is a stunning figure because, as Marc Reisner points
out in Cadillac
Desert, his classic 1986 book on the big dam era,
the most fertile farmland in the world sells for only
about $700 per acre. Projects such as Animas, Central
Utah, Central Arizona, and others spend thousands of
dollars per acre to bring water to land which will thereafter
sell for only a few hundred dollars an acre. According
to Interior's own analyses, Animas would produce benefits
equal to only 40 percent of its cost. But the project
just keeps rolling along.
In
California, the battle is over the Auburn Dam, a $948
million flood-control project that would be 75 percent
funded by federal taxpayers. Proponents say it would
simply protect Sacramento to the same degree that the
Corps of Engineers has protected other communities.
Opponents claim that the dam would destroy 40 miles
of river canyon visited by half a million people a year,
that the existing city can be protected through cheaper
alternatives, and that the purpose of the dam is to
let real estate developers build fearlessly on a large
flood plain.
The
moral and intellectual bankruptcy of cost-benefit analyses
of water projects is summed up in the story of the Tellico
Dam in Tennessee. In the 1970s, the TVA proposed a dam
that would destroy a beautiful valley and a splendid
trout and canoeing stream to gain a trivial increase
in power generation at a nearby dam. The project passed
all the applicable cost-benefit filters and got under
way. Construction was stopped by the discovery of the
endangered snail darter, a tiny and hitherto obscure
fish, and the Supreme Court ruled that the Endangered
Species Act required that the dam be left unfinished
to protect the fish.
Congress
responded by passing a law giving a special cabinet
level committee, nicknamed the God Squad, power to exempt
any specific project from the Endangered Species Act
when the benefits of doing so clearly outweigh the costs.
Tellico was 95 percent completed, and it was a foregone
conclusion that an exemption would be given. The committee,
chaired by Charles Schultze, a distinguished economist,
said no. Under honest cost-benefit analysis, all the
benefits from the completed dam would not equal the
5 percent of the costs that remained to be paid. Leaving
aside any environmental concerns, economic rationality
dictated that the dam should be left unfinished and
the sunk costs written off. Congress reacted by passing
a special law exempting Tellico from the Endangered
Species Act and ordering completion of the dam. To round
out the comedy, a few years later the snail darter was
found to flourish in several other nearby streams, so
allowing Tellico did not finish it off after all.
Fluid
Costs
From
1902 to 1994 the Bureau of Reclamation spent $22 billion
on construction, of which $7 billion was specifically
allocated to irrigation. The Corps of Engineers spent
$34.7 billion on flood control from 1928 to 1994. The
monetary expense may have been acceptable, but the nation
paid a high price in other coin.
The
dam building era ignored environmental values. It did
not count as a cost the submersion of beautiful canyons
or the destruction of the salmon runs of the Northwest
that resulted from turning the Columbia into a series
of lakes. It was not concerned with saltwater intrusions,
or the residues of irrigation, or a host of other effects.
People
can debate endlessly over assessment of the costs and
benefits of these actions. Flooding Glen Canyon produced
Lake Powell, which has 1,960 miles of shoreline, covers
266 square miles, and was recently described by one
newspaper as "one of the West's premier watersports
playgrounds." Is sacrificing a canyon to produce
a water playground in a desert good or bad? It is not
a question that produces unanimity of response. But
at least the environmental impact should be thought
about somewhere in the decision process, and it wasn't.
Another
cost of the dam building era was distortion of the nation's
economic and political decision making. Sometimes it
makes sense to irrigate cropland, such as low-lying
California valleys with long growing seasons that can
supply high-value winter fruits and vegetables. Sometimes
it does not, as when the land is on the high plains
where the growing season is four months and the only
viable crops are hay and alfalfa.
Sometimes
it makes sense to pump water over mountain ranges at
high cost, as when it is going to urban users who will
pay well for it; sometimes it does not, as when the
market is farmers who will take it only if they can
pay just a fraction of its cost, or who devote it to
purposes such as growing subsidized crops.
Sometimes
environmental values can legitimately be sacrificed
to produce hydropower, and sometimes the sacrifice is
pointless. Sometimes improving a river for barge traffic
has an economic payoff, and sometimes it is plain pork.
Sometimes protecting a flood plain against a 250-year
flood makes sense, and sometimes it does not.
These
decisions can be made in two ways. The best is the market.
Make users pay the full costs of the enterprise, and
good and bad projects get sorted out very quickly. Second
best, but still a lot better than nothing, is cost-benefit
analysis, which, when honestly done, at least avoids
the worst outcomes.
In
their thirst to escape accountability, the dam builders
wrecked both these mechanisms, and the consequences
of this are with us yet. On average, water costs residents
of the parched West about half of what is costs denizens
of the well-watered East. Furthermore, Western rights
to water are allocated by political rather than market
processes. The result is that water costing the federal
government upwards of $300 per acre-foot is pumped through
open, unlined irrigation ditches, where much of it evaporates
or seeps out because it is too cheap--to the farmer--to
be worth the cost of protection. The Central Arizona
project, partly the proud product of the efforts of
Bruce Babbitt, then Arizona's governor and now the secretary
of the interior, furnishes water to grow cotton, a crop
requiring the equivalent of 30 inches of rain per year,
in the desert. Cotton has also been in chronic surplus,
so the growers have collected federal price support
payments.
This
distortion of incentives applies across the board. Navigation
improvements are free to the users, for example, so
demand is unconstrained. Environmentalist Robert S.
Devine wrote in The Atlantic Monthly of standing beside
the Columbia watching as 43 million gallons of water
and $700 worth of electricity were used to lift a single
14-foot pleasure boat through one lock of the river.
A
recent decision to de-license Edwards Dam in Maine is
based on a 1986 law requiring that environmental factors
be taken into account in the licensing process. Economic
rationality, were it allowed to operate, would produce
the same result. Edwards's electric power sells for
three times the going rate on the spot market, and it
has been profitable only because federal regulations
force utilities to buy it.
Most
water rights are not transferable, and urban and industrial
users are not allowed to bid water away from low-value
agricultural users. Instead, even more expensive projects
are advocated. At the present time, there is plenty
of water in the West to meet all economically feasible
needs, including in-stream uses and environmental protection.
Ninety percent of the water goes for agriculture, and
minor shifts in pricing would be adequate to induce
diversion to higher-value uses. Almost all current problems
are due to defects in the institutional structure, not
to the scarcities imposed by nature, and these defects
are primarily the progeny of the great dam-building
era.
Another
serious price was exacted by the excesses of the dam-building
era. As a by-product of the erosion of the decision-making
processes and the indiscriminate adoption of all projects,
whether good, bad, or indifferent, the institutions
involved, ranging from the Congress to the agencies
to the private players, destroyed their own credibility
and legitimacy. (Marc Reisner describes a Bureau of
Reclamation party where an engineer was given a rubber
slide rule by his colleagues in ironic tribute to his
skill at cooking the numbers.)
Institutionalized
irrationality spread to the environmental movement as
well. As Tellico illustrates so well, those who opposed
the dams found that rational analysis was not a winning
strategy. Logically enough, environmental advocacy stopped
using it, and moved steadily away from conservationist
tradition, which stresses that using nature and respecting
it are perfectly compatible, and toward a generalized
pantheism. In particular, environmental argument has
come to rely on the Endangered Species Act as an all-purpose
weapon. The ESA starts from dubious scientific and philosophical
premises and progresses to muddy definitions that can
be twisted to support any results, with the result that
the ESA analysis has turned into the environmentalist
equivalent of a rubber slide rule.
A
Canyon Filled With Water
Which
brings us back to Glen Canyon. The Colorado River wends
for 1,450 miles from the high Rockies of Colorado to
the Pacific Coast in Mexico, second in length only to
the Mississippi among the rivers of North America. It
carries the snowmelt of the Rocky Mountains through
a vast, dry land, and the Colorado and its tributaries
are the principal source of surface water for seven
states, including Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico
(the Upper Basin states), and Arizona, Nevada, and California
(the Lower Basin states).
These
states, plus Mexico, have fought over the river for
many years, and the Colorado is subject to a body of
regulation called the Law of the River--a thick layer
of court decisions, interstate compacts, and federal
law--that determines who gets to use how much of it.
The fundamental document is the Colorado River Compact
of 1922, dictating that the Upper and Lower Basins each
get to use 7.5 million acre-feet per year, with Mexico
getting 1.5 million acre-feet.
Hoover
Dam is the cornerstone of the effort to harness the
Colorado. Its basic purpose was and is to provide water
to Southern California, including half the water used
by Los Angeles and San Diego. The flow of the Colorado
varies greatly, and only a huge dam with huge storage
capacity can smooth out the variations and make the
supply reliable. As with every other water source in
the West, though, upwards of 80 percent of the Colorado's
water goes for agriculture, not for the cities or for
industry.
But
while the purpose of Hoover was well-defined, Glen Canyon's
purpose is considerably more difficult to discern. It
is defended as necessary to deliver water to the Lower
Basin states at the formal transfer point of Lee Ferry,
Arizona, as required by the Colorado River Compact.
But this is not how it is actually operated. A National
Academy of Sciences panel that studied the dam in 1986
found that water delivery requirements might be relevant
in theory but had no practical effect on operations.
It called Glen Canyon a "cash register dam,"
which means it was designed to produce revenue from
hydropower to defray the costs of uneconomical upstream
irrigation projects in the high plains and thus enable
the whole package to pass the cost-benefit tests used
under the tenets of River Basin Accounting.
Another
defense is that Glen Canyon supplies water to irrigate
cropland in the Upper Basin. Unfortunately, this is
high plains cropland that no owner would have irrigated
if forced to pay his own dollars. Information on how
much land is involved, how much crop value the water
produces, and how much it would cost to buy up the land
and resell it without water rights is hard to come by.
It is not clear that the recipients of the water pay
even enough to support the operations and maintenance
costs of supplying it. Some of this water also is used
for the infamous desert cotton. So let us say, charitably,
that this defense remains undemonstrated.
Thus,
from the standpoint of cold costs and benefits, leaving
aside environmental impact, David Brower's contention
that the construction of Glen Canyon was a mistake is
not at all outlandish. It looks true. At the least,
given the history of the era, it seems fair to demand
that the dam's proponents justify the original decision
more convincingly than they have done so far.
A
third defense of Glen Canyon is that it generates power
that would have to be replaced. This is a valid point,
and one of the costs of Brower's proposal would be the
cost of replacing Glen Canyon's 1 million kilowatts
of electricity.
But
the principal defense of the dam may be the most important:
recreation. People love Lake Powell. The lake has 2.5
million visitors a year, pumps $400 million into the
local economy, serves as permanent home to 2,000 private
boats, and draws 400,000 visiting boaters. The desert
state of Arizona has more registered boats per capita
than any other state in the union. The federal government
could always buy out those who have invested in facilities
on Lake Powell, but there is no way it could compensate
a couple of million angry recreationists.
Other
arguments can get complicated. In an interesting inversion,
defenders of the dam say that the destruction of the
canyon is irrevocable. Even if the lake were drained,
water has leached out the colorful oxides in the rock,
and it would take millennia for them to come back.
Defenders
also make several environmental arguments: The existence
of Lake Powell has changed the ecological balance and
created homes for animal species that would become endangered
if the lake disappeared. They also argue that the dam
enhances appreciation of nature by enabling people to
boat to natural wonders that would otherwise remain
inaccessible to all but the most hardened hikers.
People
quarrel over other such issues as evaporation and seepage.
Big uncertainties surround silt. The Colorado is a silty
river, and the dam traps it. What effect would releasing
it have on the Grand Canyon, and on Hoover Dam down
the river? How long will it be before Lake Powell silts
up? What is the expected life of the reservoir, the
dam, and the power plant, and should we invest in keeping
them going?
No
clear answer on Glen Canyon emerges from the current
conflict. No answer emerges even on how to approach
making the decision. But if you think like a lawyer,
you have to say that the enviros have made enough of
an initial showing so that the inquiry should go further,
and, given the history of obfuscation of the big dam
era, that is all they should have to do at this point.
So
take the proposal seriously, and let the debate begin.
|