Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Rampart Dam, however, was an ecological disaster probably without precedent in the world. It would drown the entire Yukon Flats, a sightless plain of marshes, bogs, and small shallow lakes that nurtures more ducks than all of the United States below the Canadian border. In its report on the project, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stated, “Nowhere in the history of water development in North America have the fish and wildlife losses anticipated to result from a single project been so overwhelming.” At least a million and a half ducks were contributed to the North American flyways by the Yukon Flats, besides 12,500 geese, thousands of swans, an estimated ten thousand little brown cranes, eagles, sandhill cranes, osprey, and moose—thousands and thousands of moose, to which such boggy habitat was pure paradise. The ducks, the moose, the geese, and the swans all required drowned lands, shallow wet habitat, and the Yukon Flats were the greatest continuous expanse of it in North America.