Cadillac Desert (52 page)

Relatively late in life, Brower had discovered the sublime emptiness of the plateau and red canyon country of the Colorado River Basin. It was the same terrain that had enchanted John Wesley Powell eighty years before, and it was almost as unpeopled and unspoiled as it had been then. Brower loved everything about it: the bottomless dry wind-sculpted canyons, beginning suddenly and leading nowhere; the rainbow arches, overhangs, and huge stately monoliths (an expert rock climber, Brower had pioneered the route up the most impressive of them, Shiprock in New Mexico); the amphitheater basins ringed by great hanging rock walls; the chiaroscuro desert sky, with its promise of rain that rarely came. Above all, he loved the desert rivers. Brower’s favorite place in the Colorado Basin was Echo Park. Near the confluence of the Green and the Yampa rivers, Echo Park was a pure indulgence in the most austere of deserts. In autumn, its groves of cottonwood and yellowing willow gave it a New England air. In the spring, the swollen Green would flood the canyon bottom and leave lush meadows as it went. Echo Park was probably the most beautiful canyon flat in all of Utah, part of Dinosaur National Monument. It was also an ideal site for a dam.

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 with people, Brower had an amazing ability to marshal expertise—and his calculations were largely supported by General Ulysses S. Grant of the Corps of Engineers. (Sometime later, the Bureau’s regional director in Salt Lake City, Olie Larson, was presented with a rubber slide rule by a group of fellow engineers; it was his award for stretching the truth at Echo Park.)

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 Canyon, and numbers. He loved playing with figures, and above all he loved exposing figures as frauds. In particular, pyramid schemes fascinated him, and in the Bureau’s pay-back scheme for the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, he thought he had discovered the greatest pyramid scheme anyone ever saw.

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 revenues from Hoover, Parker, and Davis dams were added, all of that money would be consumed for a seemingly endless period paying for the new works and the CAP subsidy. It would be financing the
depletion
of the river; there would be no money for
augmentation
until long after the basin was predicted to run out of water. In fact, according to Ingram’s calculations, if you
didn’t
build the Grand Canyon dams, money would start flowing into the development fund sooner than if you
did.
Ultimately, the dams would generate a lot of money—perhaps enough to finance most of the cost of diverting a distant river, if one could be found. But by then it would be too late. The Colorado River would have long since run dry.

It was a formidable argument, and it forced the Bureau of Reclamation to redirect its creative energies toward convincing the Bureau of the Budget that it wasn’t really so. In the meantime, David Brower was free to do what he did best: publicity. 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 the end, none of it was to make much difference. The ads had been published; the public was outraged; the Grand Canyon dams were doomed to defeat. Everyone knew it except Floyd Dominy, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Colorado Basin states.

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.

In 1966, the National Reclamation Association held its annual meeting in Albuquerque, and Brower, to his considerable surprise, was invited to speak. To the NRA’s surprise, he showed up. So did Wayne Aspinall, the chairman of the House Interior Committee, and when a photographer spied them twenty feet apart he tried to arrange a picture. Aspinall glared at Brower and shouted, “No picture of mine is being taken with that liar!” When a reporter asked the Congressman how Brower had lied, he responded that the dams would in no way flood the national park. They would merely flood 120 miles of the Grand Canyon. As far as Aspinall was concerned, that was a distinction of the utmost significance.

As for Dominy, facing the prospect of a major defeat for the first time in his life, he not only believed that Brower was a liar—he was convinced he wasn’t worth worrying about. “If you even suggested to Dominy that Brower was winning,” says a former Bureau man, “he would have fired you on the spot.” Finally, when even his allies in the Southwest began to have misgivings about Bridge Canyon Dam, Dominy began to take his nemesis a little more seriously. He ordered employees to stalk Brower, showing up at his speaking engagements to report on what he said and get in a little heckling on the side. But Dominy’s men either were poor judges of audience response or were so afraid of their chief that they told him exactly what he wanted to hear. “Mr. Brower’s talk ... was highly emotional,” wrote a Bureau man in a blue-envelope report on a Brower address. “It was completely lacking in any kind of substantiating data, and he appeared a far less formidable opponent than anticipated. It is my opinion from this encounter that the Bureau should encourage face-to-face discussions with Mr. Brower before unbiased audiences because any reclamationist, armed with basic facts, could adequately defend the Bureau’s position against his pure emotionalism.”

In that particular speech, Brower had said that he wouldn’t mind dams in the Grand Canyon as long as the Bureau built a comparable canyon somewhere else. He received a standing ovation—in Denver.

The handwriting was on the wall by March of 1966, when the
Reader’s Digest
ran an article attacking Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon dams in a tone that could almost be described as enraged. “Right after the
Reader’s Digest
article,
Life
ran a big goddamned diatribe,” remembered Dan Dreyfus. “Then we got plastered by
My Weekly Reader.
You’re in deep shit when you catch it from them. Mailbags were coming in by the hundreds stuffed with letters from schoolkids. I kept trying to tell Dominy we were in trouble, but he didn’t seem to give a damn. It was kind of surprising, because Dominy could be very flexible when it came to the smaller projects. He made some big concessions here and there and wasn’t bothered by it. On this one he was an utter maniac. In a way you can’t fault the man, though, because even though Dominy was a good liar when he had to be, here he was a prisoner of his own intellectual honesty. A lot of people figured that no one was going to let the Southwest run out of water, and if the time came when it wanted more the country would just pay for it, whatever the cost. I mean, New York City was full of immigrants, criminals, minorities, so who gave a damn if it went bust? But Phoenix and irrigated farmland—that was America! So it may have been a correct assumption. But Dominy said, ‘No way—this project is going to include those dams.’ ”