Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

In his memorandum, Jensen merely hinted at an answer; it may have sounded so good he didn’t believe it himself. “The cost of such Colorado River supply,” he wrote, “is to be paid out of the first power revenues. The remaining power revenues would be available for assisting in the payment of the main program or project, and water revenues would pay part of the cost.” Apparently, Jensen was promised by Udall and Dominy that the power revenues generated by the dams that would be part of the import scheme were going to subsidize the price of water before they even began to pay back the cost of the facilities! Before the dams were paid for; before the aqueducts were paid for; before the tunnels were paid for; before the siphons and canals were paid for—before a penny went to all of that, the power revenues were going to go directly into the pockets of water consumers in southern and central California and Arizona, subsidizing the price of their water. How else could Udall be promising the Southwest water—water that probably wouldn’t be ava...

In an economic sense, what the backers of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan were proposing was unprecedented. It violated every principle of economics, even the fast and loose principles of Reclamation economics. If the lion’s share of the power revenues were going to subsidize not only irrigation but municipal water costs—municipal water whose revenues had usually subsidized irrigation in the past—the project could not possibly be paid back for hundreds of years, if ever. The cost, which had to be in the many billions, would simply be borne on the backs of the taxpayers. From a national perspective, it was a stunningly ill-conceived idea; but from a regional perspective, it was a wonderful idea—an offer none of the basin states could refuse. At a price guaranteed to be affordable—not only affordable but dirt cheap—the yield of the Colorado River would be increased by one-half. Oregon would get a slew of new irrigation projects, as would N...

By 1965, the war in Vietnam was consuming an ever-larger bite of the federal budget, and LBJ’s antipoverty programs also promised to cost a tremendous amount. No price had been put on the Columbia diversion, but the Trinity River version of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was expected to cost $3,126,000,000; going as far as the Columbia for much more water could easily cost three times that much. The federal budget in 1965 was only $118.4 billion; to persuade the Congress to authorize perhaps $10 billion for a single water project would take some doing.

But the biggest and most unyielding obstacle would not even be the enormous cost. It would be the man who, Udall foolishly felt, he could persuade to lead the bill through Congress—a pugnacious, five-foot-ten-inch, third-term Senator and fellow Democrat from Washington state named Henry Jackson. In June of 1965, with no discernible opposition, Senator Henry Jackson tacked an innocent-looking rider onto an innocuous-seeming bill that established standardized guidelines for the allocation of costs to fish and wildlife enhancement. What the rider did, in a couple of brief sentences, was prohibit the Bureau of Reclamation from undertaking feasibility studies that Congress did not approve in advance. The effect of the maneuver, which few recognized at first, was the same as if Jackson had strung a six-hundred-volt electrified fence along the entire south bank of the Columbia River. Without a feasibility study, the Bureau couldn’t approach Congress for authorization. Without a Congressional authorization, it couldn’t build. Explaining his amendment to a couple of reporters who were smart enough to see what it meant, Jackson made no mention of the Columbia River. He was annoyed, he said, by the Bureau’s habit of “working up local interest and enthusiasm for projects in the field before presenting its case to Congress.” Such tactics, he said, put Congress in a “take it or leave it position” when the Bureau came to authorization hearings with a gaggle of local politicians and noisy...

But Jackson’s rider had made illegal the feasibility study that Dominy had quietly ordered on the Columbia diversion. Jackson, who obviously had heard rumors of the secret plan, was out to kill it in its embryonic state. The Northwest had water to spare, but it no longer had power to spare, and nearly all of its electricity came from dams. To remove ten million acre-feet from the Columbia River meant a reduction of several billion kilowatt-hours in power output, unless one diverted the water below the dams. The Bureau would undoubtedly want to do that; but suppose the pumping cost of a diversion from low elevation would add tremendously to the project’s cost, and it made much more sense to divert above the dams? If the enormous momentum that could develop behind the diversion scheme really got rolling, the Northwest would look awfully selfish refusing to part with some of its superabundant water just because it insisted on paying one-fourth the average national price for electricity. “I told Jackson that we ought to let them study the idea,” recalled Daniel Dreyfus, who was then the Senator’s closest aide. “There was no way it was going to be economically feasible. Twenty years ...

Without a feasibility study—which Jackson, as chairman of the Senate Interior Committee, would never allow—the Columbia diversion was stillborn. What is more interesting is how quickly the Trinity Diversion died with it, even though Jackson had not publicly opposed it. One reason may have been that Los Angeles viewed it, as it had viewed the United Western Investigation, as a threat—an implied source of water that wasn’t the Colorado River (it didn’t mind the Columbia because that source was really big). But another and better reason was that it didn’t make any economic sense. The Trinity River offered too little water at too great an expense. No matter what the cost or oppos...

Echo Park Dam was to have been a part of the Colorado River Storage Project—one of the first of the giant cash register dams. David Brower loathed it as he had never loathed something before. Brower had no training as an engineer, but he was the son of an engineer, and he led the fight against Echo Park Dam in the late 1950s, going after the Bureau with its own favorite weapon—statistics. Brower liked to quote Disraeli about the three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. The Bureau had confidently proclaimed that Echo Park would conserve 165,000 acre-feet of water over any alternative site; Brower demonstrated convincingly that it would conserve nineteen thousand acre-feet at most. The Bureau said it would add to the basin’s water supply; Brower argued, with evaporation figures, that the basin might well lose water if Glen Canyon, the other big cash register dam, was also built. He demonstrated that a coal-fired powerplant would produce power for less money. It would be a great mistake, he told an incredulous Congressional subcommittee composed mainly of westerners, to rely on the Bureau’s figures “when they cannot add, subtract, multiply, and divide.” The Bureau reacted to such challenges with a mixture of bafflement and contempt, especially after Brower admitted that he had only made it through the ninth grade. But he had been secretly coached by Walter Huber, then the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers—for someone who had limited skill wit...

In the end, Brower and a handful of conservationists managed to bring about the biggest defeat the western water lobby had suffered until then: a denial of funds to build Echo Park Dam. To pull it off, though, they had had to compromise; for the sake of victory at Echo Park, they had agreed to leave Glen Canyon Dam alone. Later, when the dam was already under construction, Brower floated this then almost inaccessible reach of the Colorado River in a dory much like Major Powell’s. He was astonished by the beauty of the place, as were most of the handful of people (a few thousand perhaps) who managed to see Glen Canyon before it was drowned. When the reservoir filled, Brower’s friends actually wondered whether he might shoot himself. In the forward to a Sierra Club book called The Place No One Knew, he flagellated himself over the loss. “Glen Canyon died in 1963,” he wrote, “and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you. Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure.” Never again, Brower vowed, was he going to compromise over such a dam.

The battle over the Grand Canyon dams was the conservation movement’s coming of age. Only the upper basin had wanted Echo Park built; the lower-basin states had either remained neutral or opposed it. But now everyone knew the river was overallocated, and everyone wanted to see it replenished by water from somewhere else, so all the basin states were in favor of the Grand Canyon dams. Never before had conservationists challenged the collective will of seven states. Brower and the Sierra Club led the fight. As in the Echo Park battle, he managed to recruit heavyweight expertise. Luna Leopold, one of the country’s leading hydrologists and the son of Aldo Leopold, the famous ecologist, was willing to take a swipe at the Bureau’s flow calculations. Brower found some nuclear engineers from M.I.T. and Bechtel who were eager to demonstrate why nuclear reactors were a cheaper alternative. (Brower would later become one of the leading opponents of nuclear fission.) His most valuable discovery, however, was an utterly unknown thirty-year-old mathematician from New Mexico named Jeffrey Ingram. Ingram was a self-described fanatic about two things: the Grand Ca...

In order to finance the CAP and Bridge and Marble Gorge dams, Ingram discovered, the Bureau planned to capture the revenues from Hoover, Parker, and Davis dams, after their power sales had paid them off in the late 1980s, and reroute them into the new projects. For one thing, the Bureau, under Reclamation law, had no business doing this. All surplus power revenues were supposed to revert to the Treasury, in order to compensate the taxpayers for having forgiven interest obligations on the irrigation features of the projects. But that was not the half of it. The whole rationale for the Grand Canyon dams was that the river would have to be augmented someday, and power dams were the only means of raising the money for an importation project. The new dams, however, would be terrifically expensive compared to their predecessors. Hoover had been built for the incredibly low sum of $50 million; Bridge Canyon would likely cost close to $1 billion. Because of their enormous cost, the new dams would see their revenues tied up for years, for decades, repaying their own costs and subsidizing the CAP—a subsidy that was crucial if the Bureau was to find anyone to buy its water. Even if revenue...

With the help of two San Francisco advertising men, Jerry Mander and Howard Gossage, the Sierra Club took out full-page advertisements attacking the dams in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. One of the Bureau’s arguments for building the dams, an argument which it would later regret, was that tourists would better appreciate the beauties of the Grand Canyon from motorboats. “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel,” asked one advertisement, “so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” The response was thunderous. Dan Dreyfus was still with the Bureau of Reclamation then, in charge of planning projects like the CAP. “I never saw anything like it,” remembers Dreyfus. “Letters were arriving in dump trucks. Ninety-five percent of them said we’d better keep our mitts off the Grand Canyon and a lot of them quoted the Sierra Club ads.”

“Jerry Mander and Howard Gossage were both geniuses,” Brower would later reminisce. “We did a split run of one ad. I wrote one, which went, ‘Who Can Save Grand Canyon—An Open Letter to Stewart Udall.’ Jerry Mander’s said, ‘Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon from Being Flooded for Profit.’ We arranged to have a split run because I thought my ad was saying the right things and he thought his ad was. The upshot of it all was that Jerry Mander’s ad outpulled mine two to one. The Sistine Chapel line was suggested by a Sierra Club member from Princeton. I wasn’t sure about it. Jerry Mander jumped at it. He was right. That ad was dynamite. It was the ad the Internal Revenue Service cited when they revoked our tax-deductible status.”

Who persuaded the IRS to revoke the Sierra Club’s tax-deductible status is a question still debated today. Brower is convinced that Congressman Morris Udall, Stewart’s brother, was behind it. He insists Udall even confessed to him once in an unguarded moment. Others suspect Stewart. Everyone wanted to lay the blame with Dominy, but private memoranda from Dominy’s files suggest that he was as perplexed as everyone else; he wanted to locate the culprit so he could congratulate him. It was, obviously, a purely political strike. Other tax-deductible groups were at least as active in trying to influence legislation as the Sierra Club, and nothing happened to them. Whoever was responsible, the Sierra Club suddenly found itself tilling fund-raising soil as dry as the West’s, and had a close brush with bankruptcy. Brower, for his part, would soon find himself without a job, fired by the club’s board of directors for fiduciary irresponsibility. But, in...

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 car...

In early 1980, Phoenix experienced a series of damaging winter floods. The Salt River goes through the center of town and is usually an utterly dry bed of pebbles and rocks; therefore, city streets are laid right across the river, as if it had long since gone extinct. In 1980, however, it rolled cars like boulders—cars whose owners were so used to driving through the riverbed that, despite repeated warnings on the radio, they didn’t bother to detour and cross on a bridge as the waters began to rise. Even if they had, it wouldn’t have done them much good. Only two of Phoenix’s bridges were designed to withstand a flood flow greater than twenty-five thousand cubic feet per second. In February of 1980, the Salt River peaked at 180,000 cubic feet per second.

Phoenix owes its existence to this ephemeral desert river, but even so it doesn’t seem to hold the Salt in high esteem. On both banks, the floodplain is encroached on by industrial parks, trailer parks, RV parks, but no real parks. The flood channel itself has been developed to a degree, playing host to establishments which are, by nature, transient: topless-bottomless joints, chop shops, cock-fighting emporia. Paris built its great cathedral by its river, Florence its palaces of art; Phoenix seems to have decided that its river is the proper place to relegate its sin. When the Bureau of Reclamation performed a cost-benefit analysis for Orme Dam, once a central feature of the Central Arizona Project, it included as a benefit the flood protection the dam would offer to the cock-fighting and striptease establishments downstream.

What was most striking about the debate, however, was that practically no one seemed to be asking the more fundamental question about Orme Dam. As a $400 million flood-control structure, it made little economic sense; it would be much cheaper to move the relatively few threatened structures and reinforce the bridges. Only if it received and stored a substantial amount of Colorado River water—which implied not only a decent flow in the river but a demand for the water, and an ability to pay for it—did Orme Dam make any sense. Would the water arrive, and arrive predictably and often enough, and be economical enough, so that anyone would want to buy it? In 1980, one of the few people in the state who seemed to be asking this question was William Martin, an economist at the University of Arizona at Tucson. For having done so, and answering negatively, Martin had been accused in local newspapers of being a paid agent of California, where he was born. The dean of his department denied him merit raises for eight years, and even led a campaign to discredit his academic qualifications, though he wouldn’t go quite so far as to try to have him fired outright.

Large and bearded, inclined toward jeans, cowboy boots, and western shirts, Martin looks as if he would feel more at home in the cockpit of a Peterbilt than at a professor’s desk, even if his writings are nationally known. His first notoriety came in 1973, when he and a colleague, Robert Young—who was so wounded by the hounding he got that he opted to leave the state—published a book called Water Supplies and Economic Growth in an Arid Environment, an innocuous-sounding little tract which, in Arizona, was almost as revolutionary as Das Kapital. They first asked, as a matter of speculation, what might happen if the Central Arizona Project was not built. The underground aquifers, Young and Martin reckoned, would undoubtedly be depleted as the farmers continued to pump them out (in the 1960s, the rate of overdraft—use over replenishment—climbed as high as four million acre-feet per year). As pumping costs rose due to the dropping water table, some farmers would begin to go out of business. But there was still enough water so that the decline would be very slow. Arizona’s farm income, by Young and Martin’s calculations, would be reduced by about one-fifth of 1 percent per year. The reason the decline in income would be so modest was self-evident: as pumped water got more expensive, the farmers would conserve it better and switch to higher-value crops, and they would do more with less. The way to see if the Central Arizona Project Was worth building, then, was to see if each ac...

Twice since then, Martin has repeated the analysis, and his results confirm his earlier conclusions—only far more emphatically. By 1977, the projected canalside price of CAP water had reached $16.67 per acre-foot. Add the cost of a distribution network, and farmers growing any kind of low-value crops—alfalfa, small grains, perhaps even the state’s main crop, cotton—could not afford it. In 1980, he and another colleague from the University of Arizona, Helen Ingram, did a detailed study, region by region, of the likely cost of distribution systems, and were amazed by what they found out. In one irrigation district, Maricopa-Stansfield, the price of the distribution system—hundreds of miles of canals and laterals, headgates, and people to operate them—would likely come to $160 million, leaving each farmer a bill of $100 per acre-foot of water per year just for distribution. The Bureau’s canalside estimate for CAP water had, by then, risen to around $30 per acre-foot, per year. The price of pumped groundwater was nearly $100 less per acre-foot at Maricopa-Stansfield—around $39. It was an extreme case, but Ingram and Martin couldn’t find a single irrigation district where CAP water p...

Did Arizona’s farmers realize any of this? One of William Martin and Helen Ingram’s graduate students, Nancy Laney, traveled around the state to find out. To her astonishment, most of the farmers didn’t. One of the farms Laney visited was the Farmers’ Investment Corporation, a huge pecan-growing operation south of Tucson that is about as far from the diversion point on the Colorado River as one can be. (Why pecans, which are native to the Mississippi Delta, should be grown on subsidized water in a desert state is another matter entirely.) If it arrives, CAP water will have surmounted a lift of well over a thousand feet and traveled more than three hundred miles to get there. Meanwhile, there is still plenty of water immediately under the farm, less than two hundred feet down. Despite the huge subsidies written into the CAP—as with any Reclamation project, the farmers are excused from paying interest costs—the groundwater is certain to be much cheaper, at least until the aquifer drops several hundred more feet. (The worst areawide decline in Arizona’s water table has been around two hundred feet, and that took decades to happen.) But the farm manager at Farmers’ Investment expressed to Laney his unalterable belief that “CAP water will be cheaper than pumping.” “Water is essential,” he said with religious conviction, adding that he “would back any plan where more water would be available.” He had no idea what CAP water would cost him, but planned to sign contracts to buy it ...

“Contracts are made to be broken.” There, in a simple phrase, was perhaps the worst legacy of the Bureau of Reclamation’s eighty years as the indulgent godfather of the arid West. The irrigation farmers not only had come to expect heavily subsidized water as a kind of right, allowing them to pretend that the region’s preeminent natural fact—a drastic scarcity of that substance—was an illusion. They now believed that if it turned out they couldn’t afford the water, the Bureau (which is to say, the nation’s taxpayers) would practically give it away. These farmers were about the most conservative faction in what may be the most politically conservative of all the fifty states. They regularly sent to Congress politicians eager to demolish the social edifice built by the New Deal—to abolish welfare, school lunch programs, aid to the handicapped, funding for the arts, even to sell off some of the national parks and public lands. But their constituents had become the ultimate example of what they decried, so coddled by the government that they lived in the cocoonlike world of a child. They remained oblivious to what their CAP water would cost them but were certain it would be offered to them at a price they could afford. The farmers had become the very embodiment of the costly, irrational welfare state they loathed—and they had absolutely no idea.

At the restaurant in the Dillard Motor Hotel in Clayton, Georgia, a little town in a mountainous northern corner of that state, a yellowed old newspaper clipping has been posted by the telephone for years. The story includes a photo showing two men in an open canoe going through Bull Sluice, a Class V rapids on the Chattooga, one of the South’s preeminent whitewater streams. According to the official classification system of the American Whitewater Affiliation, a Class V rapids consists of “extremely difficult, long, and very violent rapids with highly congested routes which nearly always must be scouted from shore. Rescue conditions are difficult and there is significant hazard to life in event of a mishap.” In the photo, the man in the stern of the canoe looks scared to death, but the man in the bow has a look of grim, Annapolis determination on his face—as if he were smoking out a nest of wasps. According to the story, which is dated sometime in 1972, this was the first run of Bull Sluice in an open canoe, ever. Others have their doubts about that—which is, of course, to be expected on a river with this sort of reputation—but most everyone acknowledges that even if they were not the very first, they were among the first. The man in the stern is Claude Terry, an expert local river runner. The man in the bow is the governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.

The lore of the South could not survive without rivers any better than the human body could survive without blood. Rivers wind through Twain’s and Faulkner’s and James Dickey’s prose; they flow out of Stephen Foster’s lyrics. Yet it is the South, more than any region except California, that has become a landscape of reservoirs, and southerners, more than anyone else, are still at the grand old work of destroying their rivers. With one hand they dam them; with the other they channelize them; the two actions cancel each other out—the channelized streams promote the floods the dams were built to prevent—and the whole spectacle is viewed by some as a perpetual employment machine invented by engineers.

The reasons behind the South’s infatuation with dams were somewhat elusive. Precipitation in the South is uniformly ample, the rivers run well and often flood, and good damsites are, or were, quite common. But the same applies to New England, and there the landscape contains relatively few dams. There are water-supply reservoirs and small power dams, but only a handful of mammoth structures backing up twenty-mile artificial lakes, which are encountered everywhere in the South. Whatever the reasons, it is an article of faith in the South that you send a politician to Washington to bring home a dam. The first southern politician of national stature who went on record opposing one may have been Jimmy Carter.

To a degree that is impossible for most people to fathom, water projects are the grease gun that lubricates the nation’s legislative machinery. Congress without water projects would be like an engine without oil; it would simply seize up. If an influential southern member of Congress didn’t much like a program designed to aid a certain part of the Northeast, then it would not be unheard-of for the Congressional delegation from that region to help him get a dam built in his state. If a Senator threatened to launch a filibuster against a particular program, perhaps the program’s advocates could muster support for the Senator’s favorite water project.

In the Congress, water projects are a kind of currency, like wampum, and water development itself is a kind of religion. Senators who voted for drastic cuts in the school lunch program in 1981 had no compunction about voting for $20 billion worth of new Corps of Engineers projects in 1984, the largest such authorization ever. A jobs program in a grimly depressed city in the Middle West, where unemployment among minority youth is more than 50 percent, is an example of the discredited old welfare mentality; a $300 million irrigation project in Nebraska giving supplemental water to a few hundred farmers is an intelligent, farsighted investment in the nation’s future.

Among members of Congress, the intricate business of trading favors is commonly referred to as the “courtesy” system, or, more quaintly, the “buddy” system. Among its critics—a category that extends to include anyone who has not yet benefited from it—it is called log-rolling, back-scratching, or, most often, the pork barrel. (The phrase “pork barrel” derives from a fondness on the part of some southern plantation owners for rolling out a big barrel of salted pork for their half-starved slaves on special occasions. The near riots that ensued as the slaves tried to make off with the choicest morsels of pork were, apparently, a source of substantial amusement in the genteel old South. Sometime in the 1870s or 1880s, a wag decided that the habitual efforts by members of Congress to carry large loads from the federal treasury back to their home districts resembled the feeding frenzies of the slaves. The usage was quite common by the late 1880s; and in 1890 it showed up in a headline in the New York Times, assuring its immortality.) Members of Congress who believe in the system—there are many who fervently do, and probably an equal number who dislike it but go along—argue that it bene...

Ideology is the first casualty of water development. Senator Alan Cranston of California, who is well out on the left of the Democratic Party, spearheaded the successful effort to sextuple the maximum acreage one could legally own in order to receive subsidized Reclamation water. Having accomplished that, Cranston, heavily financed by big California water users, launched his presidential campaign, railing against “special interests.” Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who built a reputation as one of the most ardent conservationists in Congress, also campaigned mightily for Rampart Dam, which, if built, would have destroyed more wildlife habitat than any single project ever built in North America. In 1980, Steve Symms of Idaho, a right-wing small busi...

“New Age” politicians who strive to disassociate themselves from the old Left or the old Right seem to fall into the same old habits where the pork barrel is concerned. In 1984, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado ran for president as a neoliberal and a self-proclaimed expert on how to trim the federal budget; he also supported, consistently, a couple of billion dollars’ worth of unbuilt Colorado reclamation and salinity-control projects, most of them sporting costs far greater than benefits. Former Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., of California flew to London at his own expense to attend the funeral of his hero E. F. Schumacher, who wrote Small Is ...

Politicians beach themselves in such ideological shallows for various reasons: the power of money, the selfishness of their constituents, or their own venality. The system thrives as it does, however, largely because of the power and nature of the committee system in Congress. The leadership of the appropriations and public-works committees that approve and fund water projects traditionally comes from the South and West, where water projects are sacrosanct. In 1980, for example, Congressman Jamie Whitten of Mississippi was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee; Congressman Tom Bevill of Alabama was chairman of its Subcommittee on Public Works; Congressman Ray Roberts of Texas was chairman of the House Public Works Committee; Jennings Randolph of West Virginia was chairman of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee; Mike Gravel of Alaska was chairman of its Subcommittee on Water Resources; Mark Hatfield of Oregon was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. In that same year, 1980, 288 individual projects were included for funding in the omnibus Public Works Appropriations bill. Only eight got more than $25 million. All but one of the eight were locat...

Together, the House and Senate committees and the water-development agencies run a remarkably efficient operation. They work in concert, rewarding those who vote for water projects and punishing those who do not, sometimes to the point of stopping virtually any federal money from going into their districts. They would, of course, much rather use the carrot than the stick. In 1978, before he had even set foot in Washington, Senator-elect Alan Simpson of Wyoming was paid a special visit by three high-ranking officers in the Corps of Engineers asking if there was anything they could “do” for him. Once in Washington, Simpson was approached again, this time by the leaders of the appropriate committees, who made him the same offer. Every freshman Senator and Congressman got the same treatment, even Bob Edgar. “The old-boy network comes to you,” says Edgar, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1974, at the age of thirty-one. “They say, ‘You’ve got a water project in your district? You want one? Let us take care of it for you.’ Then they come around a few months later and get their pound of flesh. You actually risk very little by going along. You get a lot of money thrown ...

After a while, it is difficult to remain principled in such an atmosphere, let alone be effective. “Congress as an institution is pretty sick,” says Bob Eckhardt, who was a liberal Congressman from Houston until his defeat in 1980. “It has two diseases: special interestitis and parochialism. My opponent made a big issue out of the fact that I was too generous to the Northeast. He said I voted to guarantee New York City’s loan when the money could have been spent in Texas. He boasted about not being a candidate with a national perspective. New Yorkers are just as parochial in their own way. Liz Holtzman of New York feels the question of the Concorde landing at Kennedy Airport is as important as the Equal Rights Amendment. People like Pat Moynihan [the Democratic Senator from New York] oppose western dams but want to waste even more money on a crazily expensive project like Westway. If New York City had gone bankrupt in 1975 it would have been a terribly serious blow to the bond markets of many other cities, including places like Boise, Idaho, and Jackson, Mississippi. I didn’t detect that many members recognized that fact, or cared about it if they did. They mainly didn’t want to be accused of spending their constituents’ money on a lousy place like New York.”

Whatever the case, the timing was miserable. It was 1977 and California was in the midst of its driest year on record—the year before had been the third-driest—and Auburn Dam was on the hit list. Though Auburn’s existence would hardly have helped the state a bit, no one was about to notice that during a drought. Colorado, whose mountains were so bereft of snow that many of the ski slopes were closed in February, had three projects on the list, the most of any state. None of them would have helped much, either, but reason is the first casualty in a drought. The Central Arizona Project was already half-built, but it, too, was on the hit list. The western governors, who saw, by Andrus’s own embarrassed and baffled reaction, the hopeless disarray of the Carter administration, milked the incident for all it was worth. Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado had to plumb the depths of his emotions to convey properly his deep and profound sense of outrage and shock. “We’re not going to be satisfied,” Lamm shouted at a huge crowd of scribbling reporters, “until we get our projects back.” Governor Raul Castro of Arizona was “stunned and angry.” The ever-opportunistic Jerry Brown of California, who had won over the state’s powerful environmental community by publicly opposing the only two federal dams then being built in California—Auburn and New Melones—made one of his deft about-faces and said, “We want to build more dams.”

The intensity of the reaction from Congress and the affected regions was so white-hot that Carter had to move much more quickly than he had reckoned toward conciliation. In a letter to Congress, he chastised its members for authorizing projects that made so little sense, but promised regional hearings on every project in question and invited the leadership to the White House for a talk. It was hardly the kind of talk he had in mind. “All they did was tell him what an idiot he was for doing this,” said Carter’s House lobbyist, Jim Free. “It was like a lynch mob. He was the sheriff throwing calm facts back at them, but they kept yelling at him to release the projects. One Congressman kept banging his fist on the table. They compared him to Nixon—the Imperial Presidency line. They were rude. They interrupted him. And most of them belonged to his own party.”

Despite its best efforts, Congress couldn’t budge Carter. He may have been naive, but he was adamant. Seeing this, Congress, as the New Republic remarked, began “breaking out the high-minded rhetoric that Congressmen reserve for their grubbiest and most cynical undertakings.” Majority leader Jim Wright of Texas, for example, wrote a letter to his colleagues urging them “to help defend the Constitutional prerogative of Congress. The White House,” Wright said, “in trying to dictate [budgetary] line items, is reaching for powers never granted any Administration by Congress.” (This was the same Jim Wright who was one of the key backers of the constitutionally dubious Gulf of Tonkin resolution; it was the same Jim Wright who, in defiance of his own constituents—who had decisively rejected a bond issue to help finance the proposed Trinity River Project—kept sticking money for it back into the public-works appropriations bills.) Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine picked up Wright’s Imperial Presidency line in the Senate—the same Edmund Muskie who was pushing the Corps’ $800 million Dickey-Lincoln Dam on the St. John River even as it was opposed by both the president and minority leader of the Maine senate, by Maine’s two U.S. Representatives, by most of the local newspapers, and, according to several opinion polls, by a majority of the people in the state. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said, “A project is not ‘pork barrel’ to someone who has to shovel black mud . . . or see hi...

Tellico was a dam the Tennessee Valley Authority had conceived as early as the 1930s and hadn’t gotten around to proposing seriously until the 1960s—which was mute testimony to the kind of project it was. The dam itself would produce no power—it would merely raise and divert the Little Tennessee River about a mile from its confluence with the main Tennessee so some extra water could be run through the turbines of nearby Fort Loudon Dam. The result would be twenty-three megawatts of new power, about 2 percent of the capacity of one of the nuclear and coal plants the TVA was simultaneously building. There were no flood-control benefits; there were hardly recreational benefits (the region had more reservoirs than it knew how to fill with boats); there were no fish and wildlife benefits. On the other hand, the Little Tennessee was about the last fast-flowing coldwater stream in the state. It was dammed only once upriver, while most tributaries of the Tennessee were dammed several times. It had a large and healthy population of trout. It was a splendid canoeing stream. It flowed through a beautiful valley, one of those happy places that contain both farms and bears. The Cherokee Indian Nation had had its pick of all the rivers of central Appalachia, and it chose the valley of the Little Tennessee as its home. There were hundreds of archaeological sites, some probably yet to be discovered. With its pretty white clapboard houses and its well-tended little farms, the valley was a ...

After wrestling with its lack of a raison d’être for a while, the TVA decided that the only way it could justify the new dam was to change the whole character of the region in which it would be. The solution, it finally decided, was to create an entirely new town around the reservoir, a chrome-and-steel headquarters for a major branch of the Boeing Corporation which would go by the somewhat ironic name Timberlake. (Actually the TVA may have come up with the idea because the Bureau of Reclamation had thought of it first. In the 1960s, it was no secret that the Bureau, boxed out of much of its historical domain by the Corps of Engineers, was looking to expand its activities eastward, and Appalachia was the first place it planned to give things a try, building exactly the kind of sterile, reservoir-centered new towns of which Timberlake would be a first example.) It was like deciding to put a fifty-thousand-seat Superdome in the middle of Wyoming and then building a city of 150,000 people around it to justify its existence. And there was no real guarantee by Boeing that it would establish itself there; it had merely expressed interest in the idea. But that was enough to get the project moving. By 1969, Tellico Dam was well on the way to being built.

As it was going up, however, two entirely new hurdles were thrown in Tellico’s path. One was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which requires an environmental-impact statement and a discussion of alternatives before any major federal project can proceed. (The TVA claimed it was exempt from NEPA and had to be taken to court before it complied.) The oth...

In that same year, 1973, a professor of zoology from the University of Tennessee was snorkeling around in the Little Tennessee when a small fish, resembling a dace, darted out from under a rock in front of his face and gulped a snail. The zoologist, whose name was David Etnier, followed the fish until he could get a good look at it. He had never seen one like it before. After some taxonomic investigation, the fish was identified as a snail darter—a species that appeared to inhabit only a portion of the Little Tennessee, mainly the taking area of Tellico Dam. Its numbers estimated to be in the low thousands, its habitat apparently confined to one place, the darter seemed eligible for classification as an endangered species. Before the act, that would...

The TVA tried to get around the act by attempting, without much success, to transplant the darter to other nearby streams. Meanwhile, instead of suspending construction, it redoubled its efforts to complete the dam in a hurry, a time-honored strategy employed by the public-works bureaucracies—but one which, this time, resulted in its being hauled into court by the Environmental Defense Fund. The federal district court essentially found for the EDF, but ruled that the Endangered Species Act was never intended by its framers to stop a project whi...

The national media, which had covered the story with yawning lack of interest up to then, were suddenly tearing each other’s clothes trying to get onto the Tellico site. Half the newspapers in the country seemed to run the story on page one, under some variation of the same headline: “Hundred-Million-Dollar Dam Stopped by Three-Inch Fish.” In most cases, the coverage went little deeper than that. Some editorial writers couldn’t even see humor in the impasse; the Washington Star harrumphed that it was “the sort of thing that could give environmentalists a bad name.”

Had the editorialists and reporters taken a longer look, they might have seen that the big story was not the dam at all but the TVA itself, an agency that had evolved from a benevolent paternalism into the biggest power producer, biggest strip miner, and single biggest polluter in the United States. Unaccountable to the public, largely unaccountable to Congress, the TVA was an elephantine relic of the age of public works; it had undoubtedly done its region some good, but by the 1970s it had passed the uncharted point in an agency’s career—twenty years, thirty years, sometimes much less—when it confronts new challenges with barnacled precepts and, in a sense, turns on the constituency it was created to help. Had they looked around them, the reporters might have seen that Appalachia, the godchild of this benevolent agency for four decades, still looked socially depressed; physically, it looked horrifying. The single most important reason was the TVA’s purchase of immense quantities of strip-mined coal. It still clung to the discredited notion that the salvation of Appalachia lay in cheap power, and strip-mined coal was the cheapest fuel. But the strip-mining, besides eliminating thousands of jobs in deep-mined coal, was creating a scene of gruesome devastation. The denuded mountains seemed covered with a reddish-brown rash, and rivers that were once pristine were running with what looked like old blood. Meanwhile, the TVA’s older coal-fired power plants were creating polluti...

This same obsession with cheap electricity had, of course, resulted in the TVA’s having built thirty-odd major dams in the Tennessee Basin over the course of thirty-odd years. The dams, mostly built during the Depression and the war era with low-interest money and by workers earning a few dollars a day, were the cheapest source of power around, and TVA’s rates were as low as those in the Northwest. As in the Northwest, a complement of energy-intensive industries had moved in—aluminum, uranium enrichment, steel—and now the TV...

In June of 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the injunction against the dam on the basis of the Endangered Species Act, as written. Legally, the Court had little choice, even though, by then, the dam was more than 90 percent built. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who wrote the decision, was clearly offended by the whole situation, and all but invited Congress to amend the act. Congress required no such prompting. The legislative hopper began to spin with amendments to weaken or gut the act. Through the leadership of Senator John Culver of Iowa, however—and of Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, whose only real interest was completing the dam—a less drastic amendment was passed, by which an endangered species review committee would be created to resolve any case where a major project such as Tellico ran up against the act. It was to be a Cabinet-level committee, composed of the Secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, and the Army, in addition to the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and a representative from the affected state. According to the l...

The makeup of the interagency committee suggested a predisposition toward completing stalled projects, especially in the case of a dam. At best, Tellico’s opponents were hoping for a four-to-three split in favor of construction, which might seem like enough of a hung jury to let them try another tack. They were wondering what such a tack might be when the committee’s decision was announced. No one was prepared for the outcome: a unanimous decision that held for the snail darter and against the dam. In so doing, the committee skipped over metaphysics, transcendentalism, and evolutionary philosophy and ruled solely on the basis of economics. Tellico was a terrible investment—even worse, if the committee was to be believed, than the environmentalists had said. “Here is a project that is 95 percent complete,” said Charles Schultz, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, “and if one takes just the cost of finishing it against the benefits . . . it doesn’t pay.” Cecil Andrus ad...

June 18, 1979, was a dull day on the floor of the House, even duller than most. Little was going on, so hardly anyone was there. Bob Edgar was one of the many who were absent, and he still hates himself for it. He was one of the few Congressmen who might have been suspicious enough to stop what was about to take place. “Duncan walked in waving a piece of paper,” Edgar recalls. “He said, ‘Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker! I have an amendment to offer to the public-works appropriations bill.’ Tom Bevill and John Myers of the Appropriations Committee both happened to be there. I wonder why. Bevill says, ‘I’ve seen the amendment. It’s good.’ Myers says, ‘I’ve seen the amendment. It’s a good one.’ And that was that. It was approved by voice vote! No one even knew what they were voting for! They were voting to exempt Tellico Dam from all laws. All laws! They punched a loophole big enough to shove a $100 million dam through it, and then they scattered threats all through Congress so we couldn’t muster the votes to shove it back out. I tried—lots of people tried—but we couldn’t get that rider out of the bill. The speeches I heard on the floor were the angriest I’ve heard in elective office. For once, a lot of my colleagues were properly outraged. Senator Baker and Representative Duncan couldn’t have cared less. They got their dam.” A few days later, the House passed the appropriations bill with the Tellico rider still in it. The Senate followed suit, 48–44, despite two earlier votes again...

There was, of course, still the possibility of a presidential veto. If anything, it seemed inevitable. Here in the case of one dam, was everything that was rotten in Denmark: a bad project proposed by a dinosaurian bureaucracy; needless destruction of one of the last wild rivers in the East; usurpation of a quiet valley; and a cynical Congress sneaking around one of its own laws. Guy Martin and Cecil Andrus were both urging a veto in the strongest possible terms. Gus Speth, by then chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, was privately talking of resignation if Carter backed down. Few in Carter’s conservationist constituency even entertained the possibility that he wouldn’t veto the bill. Congress, however, had taken care of everything. Carter was in the midst of negotiating a treaty that would give the Panama Canal back to Panama, and he was meeting stubborn resistance in Congress. The votes were lined up closely enough to put the President in a position of wretched vulnerability. The threats were quite naked. If Carter vetoed the bill, there would be no treaty; his education bill might suffer the same fate. In both cases, his embarrassment would be extreme—worse, perhaps, than if he swallowed the Tellico exemption. The gulp was almost audible. On the night he signed the bill, the President telephoned Zygmunt Plater, the young law professor from the University of Tennessee who handled the case before the Supreme Court, and performed a mea culpa. Plater was taken ...

Everyone knows there is a desert somewhere in California, but many people believe it is off in some remote corner of the state—the Mojave Desert, Palm Springs, the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. But inhabited California, most of it, is, by strict definition, a semidesert. Los Angeles is drier than Beirut; Sacramento is as dry as the Sahel; San Francisco is just slightly rainier than Chihuahua. About 65 percent of the state receives under twenty inches of precipitation a year. California, which fools visitors into believing it is “lush,” is a beautiful fraud.

California is the only state in America with a truly seasonal rainfall pattern—stone-dry for a good part of the year, wet during the rest. Arizona is much drier overall, but has two distinct rainy seasons. Nevada is the driest state, but rain may come at any time of year. If you had to choose among three places to try to grow a tomato relying on rainfall alone, South Dakota, West Texas, or California, you would be wise to choose South Dakota or West Texas, because it rains in the summer there. California summers are mercilessly dry. In San Francisco, average rainfall in May is four-tenths of an inch. In June, a tenth of an inch. In July, none. In August, none. In September, a fifth of an inch. In October, an inch. Then it receives eighteen inches between November and March, and for half the year looks splendidly green. The reason for all this is the Pacific high, one of the most bewildering and yet persistent meteorological phenomena on earth—a huge immobile zone of high pressure that shoves virtually all precipitation toward the north, until it begins slipping southward to Mexico in October, only to move back up the coast in late March. More than any other thing, the Pacific high has written the social and economic history of California.

Actually, San Francisco looks green all year long, if one ignores the rain-starved hills that lie disturbingly behind its emerald-and-white summer splendor, but this is the second part of the fraud, the part perpetrated by man. There was hardly a single tree growing in San Francisco when the first Spanish arrived; it was too dry and wind-blown for trees to take hold. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. The same applies to Bel Air, to P...