Cadillac Desert (88 page)

S
uppose, though, that it were possible to solve at one stroke all the West’s problems with water. Suppose you could import into the American West enough water to allow irrigation to continue, even to expand, for another three or four hundred years—to continue even after the great dams built during this century have largely silted up. Suppose you had enough surplus water to flush all the accumulated salts out to sea, thereby avoiding the hoary fate of almost every irrigated civilization. Suppose that, in the process of storing all this water behind great dams, you could create between 50,000 and 80,000 megawatts of surplus power—power that would be available for general consumption even after all of the irrigation water had been moved to where it was needed. (In 1985, the total installed electrical generating capacity of the United States was 600,000 megawatts, so if we take the higher figure we are talking about increasing the U.S. electrical output by nearly one-seventh.) This would be clean hydroelectric power—no pollution, no CO
₂
, no acid rain. The cost would be stupendous, but perhaps not much greater than the $300 billion the Pentagon has managed to dispose of annually since 1984.

Physically, such a solution appears within the realm of possibility. In a $6-trillion economy, it may even be affordable, disregarding the question of whether it makes economic sense. In the West, many of the irrigation farmers who are threatened by one catastrophe or another regard it as a matter of life or death, and it has long been an obsession to no small number of engineers and hardhat politicians. Its main drawbacks are that it would largely destroy what is left of the natural West and it might require taking Canada by force.

Larger than California and Oregon and Washington stitched together, flooded by up to two hundred inches of rain annually, bisected by big rivers whose names few people know, British Columbia is to water what Russia is to land. Within its boundaries are, in whole or in part, the third-, the fourth-, the seventh-, the eighth-, and the nineteenth-largest rivers in North America. It is debatable how much of the world’s accessible and renewable fresh water the province holds, but the usual estimates are between 4 and 10 percent. The Fraser River alone gathers nearly twice the runoff of California; the Skeena’s flow approaches the runoff of Texas; both run to sea all but unused. The Talchako River, the main branch of the Bella Coola, which empties into the Pacific halfway between Vancouver and Prince Rupert, is fed by ice fields the size of eastern counties, and in the early summer the river runs like the Mistral, a riverine expressway in a Yosemite canyon that would make a dam-builder gasp. Among the larger rivers of British Columbia it barely rates a passing mention.

The relative proximity of so much water to so much arid land has been a source of compulsive longing in the American West for years. It wasn’t until the late 1950s, however, that anyone began thinking seriously about moving some of that water south. It is undoubtedly the grandest scheme ever concocted by man, and it was conceived, rightfully enough, in an engineering office in Los Angeles.

NAWAPA—like the mouth of the Amazon River or Itaipu Dam, it is a thing one has to see to comprehend, and since it hasn’t been built, even its architects may undervalue its brutal magnificence. Visualize, then, a series of towering dams in the deep river canyons of British Columbia—dams that are 800, 1,500, even 1,700 feet high. Visualize reservoirs backing up behind them for hundreds of miles—reservoirs among which Lake Mead would be merely regulation-size. Visualize the flow of the Susitna River, the Copper, the Tanana, and the upper Yukon running in reverse, pushed through the Saint Elias Mountains by million-horsepower pumps, then dumped into nature’s second-largest natural reservoir, the Rocky Mountain Trench. Humbled only by the Great Rift Valley of Africa, the trench would serve as the continent’s hydrologic switching yard, storing 400 million acre-feet of water in a reservoir 500 miles long. The upper Columbia and Fraser, which flow in opposite directions in the Rocky Mountain Trench, would disappear under it. Some of the water would travel east, down the Peace River—which would be remade and renamed the Canadian-Great Lakes Waterway—all the way to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. It would be enough to raise the level of all five lakes, double the power production at Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence (New York, after all, has a large Congressional delegation), and allow some spillover into the Illinois River and the Mississippi, permitting ocean freighters to reach St. Louis and providing a fresher drinking supply for the cities now withdrawing carcinogenic wastes from the river. The rest of the water would go south.

Imagine the Sawtooth Lifts, a battery of airplane-hangar siphons shooting 30,000 cubic feet per second through tunnels in the Sawtooth Range of Idaho and on to California, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico. Imagine Lake Nevada. Imagine the Columbia-Fraser Interchange, by which the West’s two largest rivers would be merged; a Pecos River Reservoir the size of Connecticut (the feckless Pecos having received a huge jolt of water from the north); another giant reservoir in Arizona which, through some probably unintended irony, would be called Lake Geneva. Imagine 19 million acre-feet of new irrigation water for Saskatchewan and Alberta. Imagine 2.3 million acre-feet for Idaho, 11.7 million acre-feet for the Texas high plains, 4.6 million for Montana, 13.9 million for California (under the NAWAPA plan, water would, as usual, flow uphill toward political power and money). Imagine the Mojave Desert green. Imagine, on the other end of the continent, a phalanx of hydroelectric dams across the bigger rivers pouring into James Bay, the lower appendage of Hudson’s Bay. Actually, those dams are the one part of the NAWAPA plan one needn’t imagine. Over the past fifteen years, at a cost of $16 billion, Canada has gone ahead and built the James Bay Project itself.

NAWAPA—the North American Water and Power Alliance—was conceived in the early 1950s by Donald McCord Baker, a planning engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Baker took the idea to Ralph M. Parsons, the head of the Pasadena-based firm bearing his name, who instantly fell in love with it, as, he would later insist, “everyone who has worked on it has fallen in love with it.” Before his death, Parsons created the NAWAPA Foundation, a tax-exempt receptacle for surplus profits from his company—which had fed on dams and aqueducts until it became the third- or fourth-largest engineering firm in the world—and dedicated it to enlightening the ignorant and converting the unappreciative about the project that was to become the obsession of his twilight years. In the 1960s, when anything big and brutish got at least a passing nod of attention, the NAWAPA scheme excited a considerable spasm of interest. Stewart Udall was able to declare, as Interior Secretary, “I’m for this kind of thinking.” Some exploratory discussions were apparently held between Canada and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Groups of dignitaries began making excursions into Canada under the auspices of the NAWAPA Foundation and the Wenatchee, Washington, Daily World, whose publisher, Wilfred Woods, was as enchanted by NAWAPA as Parsons.

In the 1970s, however, as the environmental movement and Canadian nationalism waxed, NAWAPA’s fortunes waned. Udall, having become a conservationist in office, began ridiculing the idea. Even the Bureau of Reclamation, which had been secretly assisting the NAWAPA lobby along with the Corps of Engineers, began to hold it at arm’s length. (In April of 1965, Commissioner Floyd Dominy went so far as to deliver a mild reprimand to an overenthusiastic Bureau engineer who had spoken too loudly and fondly of NAWAPA. “While I agree that ... potential interregional water transportation ... is a subject in which the Bureau is intensely interested and with which, I hope, the future will find us closely identified,” Dominy wrote his subordinate, whose name was Lewis Smith, “I do not believe the time is ripe for us ... we should, however, be prepared to move quickly should we have the opportunity.”) But the idea was kept alive by diehard believers: former Utah Democratic Senator Frank Moss (who in 1985 was still being kept on retainer by the Parsons company as a NAWAPA lobbyist), Hawaii Senator Hiram Fong, the late Governor Tom McCall of Oregon (proving that one could be a conservationist and a NAWAPA booster, too). “This is a plan that will not roll over and die,” Moss lectured anyone who would listen. “It may be fifty years or it may be a hundred years, but something like it will be built.”

By the late 1970s, Frank Moss was beginning to feel vindicated. People were gunning each other down in gas lines. California had just come through the worst drought in its history by a gnat’s eyelash. Nuclear power seemed on the verge of collapse. The Islamic revolution was the latest threat to America’s imported oil. Thousands of lakes and whole forests were dying from acid rain, a consequence of sulfur and nitrogen emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. Suddenly, the monster project that had been all but given up for dead began to twitch again. In October of 1980, at a California conference on “A High-Technology Policy for U.S. Reindustrialization” sponsored by the Fusion Energy Foundation—an offshoot of the U.S. Labor Party, which despises the Soviet Union but envies its inveterate commitment to gargantuan public works—Dr. Nathan W. Snyder of the Parsons Company reintroduced NAWAPA to a large and enthusiastic audience. “Ultimately, the decision to build NAWAPA—or a project similar to it—will determine, in some part, the future economic well-being in North America,” said Snyder. “Water is the most basic of all resources. Civilizations grew or withered depending on its availability.”

The Canadians, for their part, have viewed all of this with a mixture of horror, amusement, and avarice. Few seem to believe that NAWAPA will ever be built, but anyone important who mentions it on either side of the border usually rates several column-inches in the Vancouver Sun. A number of times in the past several years, Canadian television crews have trooped into the United States to film the sputtering irrigation pumps in West Texas, the salt-encrusted lands in the San Joaquin Valley, and the ghostly abandoned orchards in central Arizona. In western Canada, at least, paranoia about NAWAPA seems to be the reigning state of mind. A few years ago, a British Columbia television journalist named Richard Bocking wrote a blistering book entitled Canada’s
Water
—
For
Sale? which attacked not only NAWAPA but the huge and, as far as Bocking is concerned, pointless dams and reservoirs being built and planned by the provincial utility, B.C. Hydro—reservoirs that, as Bocking pointedly noted, could serve someday as off-the-shelf storage basins for a water-exportation scheme. The more conspiratorially minded in Canada’s environmental community are convinced that an intimate confederacy exists among water developers—a kind of freemasonry of engineers—which makes them willing, even eager, to aid one another’s grandoise ambitions at the expense of their own nation’s interests. It happens to be true that in Canada most of those favorably disposed toward NAWAPA belong to the water-development fraternity. A Canadian professor of hydrologic engineering, Roy Tinney, has even proposed a somewhat less stupefying version of the plan, nicknamed CeNAWP, that would divert the Peace and Athabasca rivers and some of the water in Great Slave Lake to southern Alberta and the American high plains. Every now and then a British Columbia politician has dropped a coy hint that his province (which is, politically speaking, far more independent of Ottawa than an American state is of Washington) might be open to some mutually profitable continental water scheme—someday. Moira Farrow, a reporter for the Vancouver
Sun
who has covered water policy for years, says that some of the province’s leading political figures are privately awed by the NAWAPA plan—as if they wished they had thought of it themselves.

There is, in fact, a great deal in the plan for Canada, as there is for Mexico, which has a surplus of oil but a chronic, and grim, and worsening shortage of food. Canada would get more hydroelectric power than the United States—some 38 million kilowatts under one version of the plan; Mexico would get 20 million acre-feet of water, enough to triple its irrigated acreage. Canada would also get a great deal of irrigation water, and, if the contemplated navigation canals are built, a shipping route between its mineral-rich northland and the Mississippi and Great Lakes.

It is Canada, however, that would have to suffer the worst of the environmental consequences, and they would be phenomenal. Luna Leopold, a professor of hydrology at the University of California at Berkeley, says of NAWAPA, “The environmental damage that would be caused by that damned thing can’t even be described. It could cause as much harm as all of the dam-building we have done in a hundred years.”

Every significant river between Anchorage and Vancouver would be dammed for power or water, or both—the Tanana, the Yukon, the Copper, the Taku, the Skeena, the Stikine, the Liard, the Bella Coola, the Dean, the Chilcotin, and the Fraser. All of these have prolific salmon fisheries, which would be largely, if not wholly, destroyed. (Since the extirpation of around 90 percent of the Columbia’s salmon run, the Fraser, the Stikine, and the Skeena have become the most important salmon rivers on earth.) In the western United States, the plan would drown or dry up just about any section of wild river still left: the Flathead, the Big Hole, the Selway, the Salmon; the Middle Fork of the Salmon, the Yellowstone, the Madison, the Lochsa, and the Clearwater would largely disappear. In Canada and the U.S. alike, not just rivers but an astounding amount of wilderness and wildlife habitat would be put under water, tens of millions of acres of it. Surface aqueducts and siphons—not to say hundred-mile reservoirs—would cut off migratory routes. Hundreds of thousands of people would have to be relocated; Prince George, B.C., population 150,000, would vanish from the face of the earth. In general, though, the project’s proponents display a peculiar blindness to the horrifying dislocation and natural destruction it would cause. They are far more comfortable talking about how NAWAPA is our only hope of averting worldwide famine.