Summary
Federal dam-building program
Environmentalists are questioning the federal dam-building program conducted under four major public agencies. Critics claim that the dams, such as the Glen Canyon Dam, were built without taking into consideration their social, environmental and economic benefits.See the full content of this document
Extract
Dam fools.
How federal water management is all wet - and why environmentalists are right to question it.
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 m...See the full content of this document
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