Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

At the same time that Lyndon Johnson was telling himself and anyone who would listen that the opponents of his war in Vietnam were a handful of draft-dodgers, the proponents of the Grand Canyon dams were telling themselves that their opposition was limited to the Sierra Club. The real problem, Wayne Aspinall, Carl Hayden, and Floyd Dominy would fume, was Dave Brower’s “lies.” Once people understood that Bridge Canyon Dam would only flood Grand Canyon National Monument, and not the park itself, they would come around and support the dams. They believed, in other words, that the fate of the dams hinged on a technicality. They couldn’t fathom that a sea change in public feeling toward the natural world was taking place, one of those epochal shifts that guarantee that things will never be the same. But it was, and people didn’t care whether the dams flooded the monument or the park, or whether they drowned a mile or a hundred miles of the canyon, or whether they submerged the bottom fifty feet or the entire chasm. They wanted no dams—period.