Cadillac Desert (92 page)

Coincidentally or not, however, the filling of New Melones Lake brought the first Age of Dams to a close—at least in the American West. In California, virtually nothing has been built since. It has been the same everywhere else. The Narrows Dam in Colorado, Orme Dam in Arizona, the Garrison Project in North Dakota, O’Neill Dam in Nebraska, Auburn Dam, the North Coast dams—none of the projects whose construction seemed likely when I began writing this book exists. There has been no NAWAPA-scale apotheosis; it’s hardly mentioned anymore. The dam-building machine didn’t even coast down like a turbine going off-peak. It just suddenly fell apart.

So many factors have played a role that it’s hard to judge which mattered most. You have to give some credit to Mark Dubois: Like Rosa Parks climbing defiantly aboard her segregated bus, he started something that couldn’t be quelled. Millions of people who had never seen the Stanislaus River found themselves feeling upset, if not infuriated, over its loss. Among environmentalists, “Remember the Stanislaus” is what “Stay the Course” was to the Reagan faithful. Meanwhile, river recreation—rafting, kayaking, fishing, just watching the river go—boomed all through the Eighties, in a way that hauling a sinister, gas-guzzling fighter jet of a motorboat to the local mudflat did not. (Wallace Stegner estimates that about five thousand Americans who were alive in the 1930s had ever floated a whitewater river; by the early 1990s, thirty-five million had.) Rafting is fairly big business in states like Colorado, where whitewater companies advertise on billboards that once promoted agricultural chemicals, shale oil development, or Wayne Aspinall. Having a captive audience helps: A couple of days spent floating a beautiful, threatened river can turn whole families into environmental radicals where the fate of that river is concerned.

But the water lobby itself deserves most of the credit for its sudden drought of opportunities. Back in the days when most members of Congress cheerfully voted for each other’s dams, the best sites disappeared as fast as the rivers on which the dams were built. By the eighties, you were left with ludicrous projects like the Narrows Dam, where you had to build a subsurface dam twice as large as the one aboveground in order to stop the river from seeping out underneath. A full-size Lake Auburn, which could hold 2,400,000 acre-feet of water—but would deliver only two or three hundred thousand acre-feet a year, because most of the American River is already captured and appropriated; Auburn Dam would need awesome runoff in order to fill up and remain full—is projected to cost about two billion dollars, which means it will cost twice as much. Hoover Dam, which captures thirty million acre-feet of water (and routinely delivers nine or ten million acre-feet a year) was completed in 1936 for forty-eight million dollars—
million
—and change. If you are the Bureau of Reclamation, you are left trying to justify a dam that would yield 3 percent of Hoover’s water, and perhaps 8 percent of its power, and cost ten times more in uninflated dollars. You also have to explain why you are building a gigantic dam next door to a presumably active earthquake fault.

Finding the money to erect pyramids such as this was no problem for the pharaohs who ran Congress thirty or forty years ago, when the whole federal budget was smaller than the portion that pays interest every year on a $4 trillion national debt. But today, when a clutch of visionaries representing Utah water districts troops into the U.S. Capitol to lobby for some new taxpayer-financed dam, they get the same response the departing bunch from Texas just received: It’s conceivable—
conceivable
—that Congress might find a little money for the project, if the local sponsors agree to pay, let us say, one-half of the cost—up front. That is how water projects that are a matter of life or death become projects a region can live without.

But the thorniest desert in which today’s water lobby finds itself wandering is the ecological legacy of its predecessors. By erecting thirty thousand dams of significant size across the American West, they dewatered countless rivers, wiped out millions of acres of riparian habitat, shut off many thousands of river miles of salmon habitat, silted over spawning beds, poisoned return flows with agricultural chemicals, set the plague of livestock loose on the arid land—in a nutshell, they made it close to impossible for numerous native species to survive. So today, if you want to erect a dam on any tributary of the Colorado River, you have to worry about its effects on the squaw-fish, a federally listed endangered species. If you want to siphon more fresh water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, you have to ponder the effect on the spring- and winter-run chinook salmon, on the nearly vanished striped bass (an introduced species, but one with a big and tough sport fishing lobby), on the Delta smelt (a serious candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act), and on two dozen, three dozen, who knows how many land-based species whose precarious hold on existence might be lost through the conversion of remnant deserts or marshes or grasslands to crops, or of fecund estuaries into sterile saltwater sumps.

The fiercest environmental battles of the 1990s are likely to be fought in the American West, and many of them—most of them—may, to one degree or another, involve the Endangered Species Act. But some would be fought even if that act were written out of law. The battles over salmon in California will probably seem as nothing compared to those in the Northwest, because there salmon are a
real
industry; the Columbia River’s commercial and sport fishery is valued in the many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Columbia was once the greatest salmon river in the world: Fifteen million fish returned every year to spawn; today there are fewer than two million, and half of the watershed’s salmon runs (dozens in all) are in fairly imminent danger of going extinct.

What it all boils down to is undoing the wrongs caused by earlier generations doing what they thought was right. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers knew that their dams would ruin the Columbia River fishery, or most of it, as the years and decades went by. But they convinced themselves, and the Congress—and, for that matter, most people living in the Pacific Northwest—that all the new power and water was worth the price. It was simply how everyone thought—then. In 1967, in order to be ready for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was coming out to dedicate John Day Dam and who wanted to feel the thrum of its turbines, the Corps closed the dam gates before the fish ladders were operational, condemning a migration of hundreds of thousands of salmon and steelhead to death. The vice president’s schedule couldn’t be changed. The Corps, a perfect representative of its era, never bothered to ask whether the same might be true of the fish.

By the seventies, however, America’s values were utterly different, because everyone’s experiences had changed. People who came through the Depression didn’t just eat salmon, they survived on it, and they were sick of it; it was known as poverty steak, because it sold for ten cents a pound. Those who were born later could only listen to stories of rivers you could cross on the backs of salmon, of creeks where they crowded themselves out of the water and flopped into the woods. Suddenly there was plenty of cotton and fruit grown on irrigation water; there was plenty of cheap steak, because subsidized water was raising millions of cattle on irrigated alfalfa and grass. There was plenty of cheap hydroelectricity, just two or three generations after the Depression, when many rural towns in the West had no electricity at all. All things man-made had become plentiful, but a great menu of things once abundant in nature had become scarce.

And now people were demanding some of it back.

It didn’t seem possible when I began writing this book, but by now it is beginning to seem plausible after all. After damming the canyons and dewatering the rivers in order to spill wealth on the land, we are going to take some of the water back, and put it where, one could argue—as more and more Westerners now do—it really belongs. Law has been the ignition, but a great, almost epochal shift in values has worked as the engine of change. In the mid-eighties, after being hammered by a landmark public trust decision, the city of Los Angeles reduced its diversions from the streams feeding Mono Lake by 60,000 acre-feet a year. The level of the lake, a vast salty haven for migratory waterfowl, began to stabilize after dropping dramatically over forty years. A few years later, the city actually returned some water to the Owens River, which began to flow again for the first time in almost half a century. It didn’t flow as it once did, but at least you could call it a river again. It flowed out of new history. William Mulholland was dead. The board of his Department of Water and Power had been all but taken over by environmentalists. The mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, said with genuine contrition that he wanted to repair some of the damage his city had done.

It was the same everywhere. In 1992, the newly appointed Commissioner of Reclamation, Dennis Underwood, hailed not from Bountiful, Utah, or Orchard City, Colorado, but from Santa Monica. His new regional director in California, Roger Patterson, had just decided to dedicate outflows from Folsom Lake to the California Delta instead of cotton farmers and was holding hundreds of thousands of acre-feet in Shasta Lake for the sake of fish instead of alfalfa. Patterson said he looked forward to implementing the just-passed Central Valley Project Reform Act—legislation that might have prompted Floyd Dominy to resign in disgust. After all, he had acquired a much more important constituency—a public that was beginning to wonder why such an agency even exists—and a loaded gun called the Endangered Species Act was aimed at his head.

Even in the Northwest, where the sheer size of the dams, and the sheer value of hydroelectricity, make change terrifically difficult, it almost has to occur. You can perhaps imagine California salmon going extinct, but you can imagine no such thing in the Pacific Northwest, a region the salmon very nearly symbolizes. The great mainstem dams will never be torn down, but smaller dams may be. The federal government already has plans to purchase a high dam on the Elwha River, which drains the north side of the Olympic Range and hosts all five species of Pacific salmon, in order to tear it down. And the mainstem dams, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, will be re-engineered in order to block fewer adult salmon and pass more juveniles through. Holes may be punched through their immense, solid insides and then sealed with ponderous metal gates; when the fish are running downriver, the gates may be opened to let them pass without becoming chopped liver in the turbines. The river may be “managed” (for better or worse, it is in human hands) in a completely different way: the reservoirs rapidly drawn down to quicken the current, the gates opened for the fish, the whole process repeated, again and again, water tumbling down a ladder, until each successive run is safely at sea.

Forty years ago, only a handful of heretics, howling at wilderness, challenged the notion that the West needed hundreds of new dams. Today they are almost vindicated. There is more talk of deconstruction than of construction: of minor dams demolished, of big dams made “environmentally sound,” of marginal acreage retired and water returned to its source, of flows bypassing turbines to flush salmon and steelhead out to sea. How can this happen? The region’s population is growing and, in places, exploding. (California has added seven million people since New Melones Dam.) More people need more water and power and food. Asia sends its surplus population to California and the Northwest; the Mexican border is porous as a sieve.

It’s only recently—mainly in the years since this book first appeared—that Westerners have begun to ask where their water goes, what it costs, and what it earns. That inquiry may produce the most revolutionary results since the Reclamation Act.

In California, for example, enough water for greater Los Angeles was still being used, in 1986, to raise irrigated pasture for livestock. A roughly equal amount—enough for twenty million people at home, at play, and at work—was used that year to raise alfalfa, also for horses, sheep, and (mainly) cows.

The more one tries to make sense of this, the less success one has. Feeding irrigated grass to cows is as wasteful a use of water as you can conceive. Pasture is hydrologically inefficient in the extreme, and, metabolically speaking, so are cows: You need seven or eight feet of water in the hot deserts to keep grass alive, which means that you need almost
fifty thousand
pounds of water to raise
one
pound of cow. (Feeding alfalfa to cows requires even more water, but at least alfalfa fixes nitrogen in the soil.)

If the livestock industry earned California real money, and if cows (unlike avocadoes or artichokes) couldn’t be raised on rainfall in thirty-five other states, then giving more water to cows than to humans in the nation’s richest and most populous state—a semidesert state at the mercy of a precarious water supply—might make a grain or two of sense. In 1985, however, the pasture crop was worth about $100 million, while southern California’s economy was worth $300
billion,
but irrigated pasture used more water than Los Angeles and San Diego combined. When you added cotton (a price-supported crop worth about $900 million that year) to alfalfa and pasture, you had a livestock industry and a cotton industry consuming much more water than everyone in urban California—and producing as much wealth in a year as the urban economy rings up in three or four days. (Rice, another crop that needs lots of water, consumed more than the entire Bay Area, but the state’s rice acreage supports much of the Pacific Flyway on waste grain and an enormous winter production of invertebrate food, so I am leaving the rice acreage alone.)

It isn’t much different in any other western state. In Colorado, the alfalfa crop is worth a couple of hundred million dollars a year, while tourism is worth about five billion dollars a year. To raise alfalfa, you have to dam, dewater, and otherwise destroy the rivers that many of the tourists come to fish, to raft, or simply to see. The hydroelectricity that could be generated down river by water used to raise alfalfa is potentially worth more than the crop. In Idaho, the money crop is potatoes, but the crops that use most of the state’s water are alfalfa and grass. Each cow raised in the Columbia River watershed—where millions of cows are raised—indirectly consumes water for several salmon. Then the cow pollutes the rivers, overgrazes the hillsides, erodes the streambanks, and conspires, beyond the workings of its feeble brain, to ruin the fish and their habitat in other ways (for example, by sending forth acres of methane-rich flatulence that hasten the greenhouse effect).