Friday, September 6, 2019

Why No Dams? Lets Count the Reasons.

No Grand Canyon Dams? Why Not?
(revised 8 Sep 2019)

1. The Bureau of Reclamation insisted that the dam(s) were, and needed to be, tied to a reclamation project, in this case bringing water from the Colorado River to central Arizona.

1a. The Federal Power Commission, ready to issue a license for a state-built Marble dam, was blocked from doing so by Reclamation, Interior, Hayden and Arizona Democrats.

1b. After Hayden's Bridge Canyon Project (CAP) was blocked in the House of Representatives in 1952 in order to settle water claims, the Bridge Canyon/Hualapai dam could have been considered by itself; the proposal was broached. The effect on Hoover might well have caused California to oppose this move. In any case, Reclamation and the Western water establishment in general saw the dams as federal reclamation property, and so the dams were tied, like concrete boots to the gangland squealer, to the CAP. Only when those weighted legs were cut off, did the CAP float free.


2. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall tried for the grand, Western, solution: His Pacific Southwest Water Plan sought water from outside the Colorado River Basin (CRB) to make the River whole and remove the threat of water shortages in the 21st century. The discussions in 1963-5 led to Hayden shelving his idea of a limited CAP-centered authorization. Thus the debate shifted from the CRB to the entire West, invoking the unyielding enmity of Northwesterners.

3. Interior Chairman Aspinall of the House saw the predicted water shortages as likely penalizing his state. He stuck on the need for a "whole river", and took the Reclamation analysis as correct that revenues from the dams were going to be needed to justify continent-spanning waterworks to meet that need. The dams were now tied to the CAP and to water import from the Northwest. 

4. The connection of dam revenues for future projects became so tied, in Aspinall's mind and also the minds of most other CRB watermen, that they could not stop talking about their needs, and worse for their cause, how obvious it was that the Columbia River Basin was the definitive source. 

5. The times, they were a-changing. For instance: the labor to produce the 1964 Wilderness Act deeply involved a key CRB water legislator, New Mexico Senator Clinton Anderson. Washington Senator Henry Jackson was key in the legislation to protect the North Cascades (including a Park), and then led the way to legislation for NEPA. 

5a. The changing included interest in scenic beauty expressed by the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. She worked closely with Secretary Udall on such matters. Udall himself had been involved in conservation-oriented activities--establishing Canyonlands National Park and Indiana Dunes Lakeshore, in which his brother the Congressman was involved. This did not imply that the Udalls were the environmentalists of today, but their devotion to water resource development in the West was not the same as that of the entrenched old-timers, Chairman Aspinall as the chief exemplar. 

What does have to be implied about the Udalls is that they were pre-eminently politicians, in the very real, deep sense of people who assessed the desires and needs of people and their interests, and sought for ways to satisfy them within the well-established framework of American politics, including compromising in the grinding process of legislative sausage-making. And yes, this does mean that they shifted ground, changed positions, and could often be accused of betraying principle. However often the betrayal charge was made on behalf of other people's principles; for politicians like the Udalls, this was not betrayal, not just who was the last to whisper in their ears, but part of a process that baffled and even infuriated more rigid, or principled if you wish, players. And yes, this was done at cost. The Udall brothers were not only some of the most effective Arizona public figures, they were also the most unpopular among much of the (more conservative) electorate. 
  
All of this is to say that with less skilled tuned-in politicos or with those more oriented toward old-time water politics, and less aware and open to the newer demands of changing twentieth-century Americans, the fight against the dams would almost certainly have been carried into 1967-8, no matter how well-placed Senator Jackson was. 

5b1. We must consider the unknowns. The relations between Sec. Udall and his immediate staff such as the newly appointed Under-Secretary Charles Luce, and Reclamation Commissioner Dominy and his close allies such as Aspinall and even Senator Hayden, are imponderable. The story I got at the time is that when Udall and Luce looked at the legislative mess created by the kitchen-sink bill that was sunk in August 1966, and considered what could be done to rescue the CAP from its concrete boots, they knew they had to neutralize Dominy. They chose a time when he was otherwise occupied (out of the country), and ordered Reclamation to search for ways of providing pumping power and pay-back subsidies for the Central Arizona Project that did not require dams in the Grand Canyon.

5b2. And yet. Before the fight heated up, Dominy expressed in private his gloom over the chances of authorizing Bridge Canyon dam. 

5c. We must consider the, I believe warm and tight, relations between Senators Jackson, Hayden, and Anderson, each of whom wielded power and had non-negotiable demands. We must factor in the presence, formidable and "friendly", of President Johnson, and how this was all part of a Democratic governing majority then over three decades in power. Yes, Aspinall, too, was part of that majority, but compared with the relationships among the Senators (& Johnson), his committee control and allegiances (with such as Representative Udall) partook more of the stern taskmaster. 

An imponderable exception is his working with Republican ranking Committee member John Saylor, the principal opponent of the dams in the House. Given what in fact did happen, I shudder to think of an outcome where we Canyon advocates had to rely on Saylor to lead the way toward a damless bill in the House. Nevertheless, Saylor made noises and usually the right ones; he was often portrayed as having a strategy that could undercut the Aspinall-Udall coalition on the House floor. It remained, thankfully, a strategy never tested.

6. Must we consider the Californians? I think not. They were considered greedy, over-fed, and spoilers. In the Senate they had almost no power. In the House, they played a negative role only, embarrassed Aspinall, and once the Jackson-Udall-Hayden-Anderson alliance had changed the parameters of the debate in 1967, the big state became irrelevant as Aspinall became the principal and almost sole target of pressure to act.

7. The calculations the players made about the costs of their positions and decisions were also shifting unknowns, imponderable from this vantage. As these strategizers and tacticians thought about what they needed to do and what the results might be and how their actions would be weighed and judged, they offer us a wide range for speculation. And it is in that range that we must insert the campaign against the dams. That campaign was, unlike other aspects of this issue, national in scope. Such indicators as the Readers Digest publicity, the full-page, targeted ads in newspapers of opinion (New York Times, Washington Post), the Internal Revenue Service's scandalous offensive on the Sierra Club, the newspaper editorials and the letters to Congress & First Lady Johnson -- (has anybody ever quantified them; was it their numbers or their unusualness?) --, the presence in various parts of the country of conservation anti-dam groups: To step wrong on this issue:--how did that affect the thinking of real or would-be national politicians (Johnson, Jackson, Udall(s), for instance)? You might get re-elected in western Colorado by backing dams (though Aspinall was finally defeated in the 1972 Democratic primary on environmental grounds) and maybe it would secure Washington state votes just to say "no" to Columbia River being stolen by Los Angeles, but if you had or dreamt of higher office, what is going to enhance your gaining greater & positive national prominence? Would there be any choice but to be a friend of that national treasure, the Grand Canyon? Local and regional issues are, of course, the meat and potatoes of American politics. But if you are thinking of the full-course dinner, the banquet spread in the White House, are you going to display a shrunken set of priorities when you can lay on the full feast of being a friend of the Canyon?

8. And so, within the above political context, we come back around to the dams, the Grand Canyon, and the Sierra Club, personified in its Executive Director (1952-69), David Brower. 
As I have demonstrated elsewhere, (this blog, 1 Sep 2019), without these elements, it is more than likely the issues around the CAP and CRB would have been settled within the old, if expanded, regional context and one, or more likely all, of the Grand Canyon dams built. With these elements, the dams, in my continuing metaphor, were the concrete boots that had to be cut off for the legislation to succeed.

The story begins in the early 1950's effort to protect Dinosaur National Monument from another big-dam scheme. Actually, the story goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when two big concepts burgeoned in the American political landscape: the development of electricity and the National Park System (NPS). It was immediately clear that building dams, large and small, and sending their stored water through generators would help answer the growing call for electric power. Contemporaneously, it was clear that there were fine canyon landscapes that, while they might be used for power generation, were of, arguably, higher value when left undammed to be enjoyed for their scenic majesty and recreational uses. The 1920's saw markers set on both sides: the awe-inspiring Hoover Dam built by the Bureau of Reclamation, the protection of National Parks & Monuments as elements of the NPS. 

For the Grand Canyon, the 1930's-40's were a see-saw. Recognition of the scenic wonders throughout its full length; legislative progress toward authorizing a Bridge Canyon dam in the western Canyon. Stasis ensued when Congress ordered Arizona and California to settle their claims to Colorado River water, a situation that lasted into 1963. Attention turned to the Upper CRB, for which Reclamation had a multitude of projects planned, including large dams flooding Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge, and in Dinosaur N.M. The conflict that ensued centered around the idea of a dam that would invade NPS units, Dinosaur and Rainbow Bridge N.M. It became a nation-wide conflict, and was set aside when the NPS-invading structures were dropped or modified. 

As I pointed out in 5 above, the times were changing. The 1950's were, for those who were advocates of the American values embodied in the NPS, a learning time. They came to see that much of the wondrous landscape of the American West had not been, maybe could not be, included in the NPS. The resource development pressures, expressed politically, were too often too strong; knowledge of the NPS-worthiness too limited. A struggle over reservoir invasion of Rainbow Bridge N.M., and the publicizing of what would disappear under the waters of a reservoir behind Glen Canyon dam, roiled the NPS-friendly community. These years saw a booming of the numbers of people aware of how the struggle between hydro-electricity and NPS-worthiness had to be expanded to consider the quality of the land, whether it was part of the NPS or not. 

Although Congress was inactive on the matter, consideration of developing the hydro-electric potential of the Grand Canyon was active through the 1950's. Wild schemes (like the Kanab diversion), new participants (like Los Angeles and the Arizona Power Authority), were keeping the pot boiling, keeping friends of the Canyon nervous and alert. One result of all these elements, all this learning let us say, was a historic change at the Sierra Club. When the Bridge Canyon dam had been considered in the 1940's, the Club was mis-led into approving it. The lessons of the 1950's led to a reversal of course, and in 1963, the Sierra Club Board of Directors resolved that the entire Grand Canyon, whether part of the NPS or not, was of such worth in its natural state, that no dams whatsoever should be built in it. 

(Sidebar: Lest we forget: The 1930's brought Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, backing water 40 miles into the lower Grand Canyon. Fluctuations in water supply have, as of this writing, left vivid evidences of what that means to a river, its canyon, and the life in it. The 1960's brought Glen Canyon dam with the waters of Lake Powell coursing in a highly regulated, fluctuating, fashion through the Grand Canyon, leaving vivid evidences of what THAT means to a river, its canyon, and the life in it. Let us not forget.)

The 1963-8 effort to keep any Grand Canyon dams from being authorized did not succeed because it was a Sierra Club effort or because the charismatic figure of David Brower personified and publicized it. The success resulted because the Club and Brower and others who had learned the lessons of the 1950-60's rang the tocsins about what was being planned for the remote deserts of Arizona. Which were hardly, politically, remote. For the plans that took shape from 1963 (when the court fight was settled in Arizona's favor) were the plans of the federal, national, government -- the Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of the Interior, the pro-water resource development committees and individuals in Congress. 

Some in Arizona claimed the state could do the CAP and Bridge Canyon all by itself. But the powers-that-were in Washington said "no"; this was a federal, a national, resource. It had to be developed and authorized and paid for using the nation's framework for Western water development. So the stage on which, David Brower, the Sierra Club, and all the other defenders of the Canyon had to perform was, courtesy of the dam advocates, nation-wide; all of America. 

As of course, it should have been. The Grand Canyon is located in Arizona -- NO: the state of Arizona was set up with boundaries that the Grand Canyon happened to be within -- but Arizona did not, and does not, "own" the Grand Canyon. What the would-be dam builders did was go after a national treasure, legitimizing Canyon defenders in taking the stage for national decision-making on this most significant struggle over preservation for humanity of a world-class natural place versus a narrowly focused hydropower development.

David Brower strode that stage, powered of course by media attention and his opponents' desire for a villain. Inspired by the Canyon, he spoke for it and for all who treasured it. If today, he can be regarded as having -- again, with the Club and all the thousands of other Canyon advocates -- "saved the Grand Canyon", it is just because all the other participants -- from Carl Hayden (reluctantly, the sly old man) to Floyd Dominy to Stewart Udall to Wayne Aspinall to Henry Jackson et al. -- made the Canyon and its saving or damming a national matter, a question of America's future and what shape it was to have.

So yes;  David Brower did not "save the Grand Canyon". Henry Jackson did not "save the Grand Canyon". Nor did Stewart Udall, nor any of those others.

We, America, did. 




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