Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: What We Talk about When We Talk about Dams
The only laser light show commissioned by the United States Bureau of Reclamation enjoyed quite a run. Though it did not feature Pink Floyd blasted at decibels sufficient to feel the bass notes rattle your skull, nor any acclaimed innovation in the world of psychedelic art, it was projected with sober intent onto the massive face of Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington most every summer evening from 1989 until 2013. The premise of the show, evolved from a peculiar genre of American cold-war era advertising and Soviet-style propaganda that might be called Bad Disney, is that the Columbia River could suddenly speak.
I’d heard about this summer spectacle for years. Friends had described the Orwellian flavor of the scene, where spurious claims made over giant outdoor loudspeakers and a movie screen 500 feet tall and a mile long were met with docile acceptance by nightly audiences. I made the long drive a decade ago to witness one of the final screenings. I’d heard that The Bureau of Reclamation, (BuRec) one of a slate of select federal agencies that builds, manages and distributes water and power from American dams, had belatedly come to the conclusion the ideas projected onto the face of their flagship project were outdated. The show could not go on.
This movie featured the absurdity of a cartoon salmon leaping in mock celebration over the dam that in real life is threatening to drive millions of them to extinction. Then, god-like, a menacing voice from behind the half-mile wide monolith of concrete issued forth:
“Electricity! Hydroelectricity! Nonpolluting, inexpensive production of electric power from water. It may sound like a difficult concept for a river, but I understand all that involves me [... ] You have done what I could not accomplish alone. Through your engineering skills you have diverted part of my course, and spread my waters over the land. You have created the missing link in the cycle of life: the rainfall nature could not provide. You have irrigated the land. You have made the desert bloom! I was once a raging torrent of raw energy and thundering rapids crashing headlong to the ocean, my potential energy spent carving the land in my blind race to the sea. Now my power is harnessed, and I am part of an efficient system that serves the people and the land!”
The agitprop ended with a smattering of applause; a hasty herding of children, chairs, and blankets; and a retreat to nearby RV parks where motor homes were plugged in at one of those neatly trimmed green-lawn sites with picnic table and fire pit cast in concrete. Where, presumably, parents comforted frightened children by pointing out salmon aren’t cartoon monsters, and rivers don’t speak, at least not in English.
Beyond the kitsch was the notion that the pre-dam wild river was a kind of sick, liquid Neanderthal, an angry irrational beast not yet fully evolved, a patient in need of a cure. The old river was a profligate energy waster, a reckless teenager; it took curves at high speeds, slashed at the soil, crashed into the ocean. It took an army of government engineers insisting on a Nature contained in straight lines to make it calm, sane, predictable, profitable, productive, and amenable to the demands of civilization. To fully realize its potential, to provide a vital element missing in nature, the river had to quit being a river. Only in its transformation to a moving part in an efficient machine that as its highest calling serves human want and need could water evolve into a sentient being. But that’s not what happened.
During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century’s big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. The Federal government plugged the nation’s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into a revenue stream. Federal western water control projects’ main legacy will be remembered as one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices.
The more than 90,000 dams on the American landscape can’t reasonably be blamed for destroying the nation’s entire biological inheritance. But they play, even for such gargantuan structures, an outsized role in that destruction. The pages that follow are a kind of speed date with the history of the past century of western American water control, it’s dams, diversions and canals, and just as importantly, the politics that evolved from them, with a couple prevalent themes to hold in mind.
First, when it was finally acknowledged that no combination of private capital, pioneer gumption, and military protection would tame the arid Western United States, the federal government intervened with a water delivery program it promised would deliver, figuratively speaking, a rising tide that would lift all boats. Dams would deliver water to families who wanted their own farms. Acreage limits, initially, 160, topping out at 960 before being abandoned altogether (more on that later) were written into the law christening the era of big dams. In doing so, it attempted to defy, through engineering, technology, and a massive capital investment, the cold analysis that arid western landscapes were limited in potential for civilization-building. That analysis has proven correct. It appears, as I’ll get to here in the pages to come, that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in arid country—growing increasingly arid under the ravages of climate chaos—is well beyond the benefits furnished.
Next, despite law and policy that made it clear the federal investment in water storage and delivery should benefit working families on small farms, the intent of the law was systematically subverted, bent to serve those already with plenty rather than those in need. The pipes that deliver water are also bent, figuratively speaking, so that water runs “uphill toward money.”
While there’s nothing new in parsing yet another instantiation of the unscrupulously wealthy stealing the commons from an unsuspecting public, dams performed this service so well that soon enough every congressional district near a river in the western United States contained a critical mass of vocal boosters who wanted one.
When, in 1902, the Bureau of Reclamation was invented, a new cabal of powers turned their collective attention to dams. Making the desert bloom, it was uncritically assumed, was a giant leap for humankind, a project only a technologically advanced, eternally optimistic, and fabulously wealthy, powerful nation such as the United States could undertake. But the assumption that total control over water over a far-flung geography was a bold leap for civilization was short-sighted.
Throughout human history, irrigation schemes and the formation of systems of government have had a symbiotic relationship. Any regime in any country that could harness water, especially where it was scarce, wielded an especially potent form of power—first over its environment, and later, over its people. The more complex the water system, the more centralized and concentrated seats of political and economic power tended to be. The regimes of antiquity tended to demonstrate, often in cruel and oppressive ways, the efficacy of centralized control, what might be identified in modern times as a combination of government authority, expertise, financing, and administration. So whether you were conscripted into labor in late nineteenth-century Egypt, a fellahin toiling alongside 300,000 others in the African sun on the Mahmudiyah Canal, a slave hauling rock for the construction of the Roman aqueduct, or a Chinese peasant in the Han Dynasty digging dikes and diversions to tame the Huang He River, the ultimate power and authority of the system under which you labored was as ugly, hard, and as obvious as the callouses on your hands and feet. In pre-industrial times, water grew the glory of nations. Oligarchies ruled, and built water storage and delivery systems, and generally made sure the benefits were delivered to them. America, high on the promises of the Enlightenment, in legal terms at least, set out to be different in this regard. But the road to even a well-watered hell is paved with good intentions.
Early laws on the east coast of the United States governing rivers and streams were based on English riparian legal concepts, which held to a more egalitarian tradition of access and use. In the America of the late nineteenth-century, Enlightenment-based intent was increasingly alienated from a starkly unenlightened reality.
As a massive, federalized water control effort was gaining steam, America had immersed itself in the extravagant excess of the Gilded Age. The term, coined by Mark Twain in 1873, refers to advances of the day in metallurgy that allowed a thin veneer of precious metal to wrap up a core of some considerably less valuable material. Twain thought it an apt metaphor for the state of his country. “What is the chief end of man?” queried Twain in 1871, riffing off a well-known religious line of inquiry from Protestant catechism. “To get rich. In what way? Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.” It was an age of corruption in legislative bodies from the White House to Tammany Hall. It was the era when the term “political machine” was coined. Rampant fraud, theft, and abuse accompanied the rush to fulfill the vision of a nation stretching from sea to shining sea.
In the 1860s, under the auspices of the Homestead Act, an estimated 8 million acres of public lands in California alone was turned over to private ownership. Like the Reclamation Act passed forty years later, the law was intended to put working farm families on land that could become theirs. In Rivers of Empire, historian Donald Worster describes what happened instead. “Most of the land came into the hands of a group of Sacramento and San Francisco ‘appropriators’ who lied, bribed, hired dummy entrymen, and manipulated laws to amass holdings of gargantuan size,” writes Worster. “The outcome was that, by 1871, over 2,000 individuals owned more than 500 acres apiece, and 122 of them held an average of 71,983 acres. ... In many cases, the land so amassed was merely held for speculation, the owner selling it for a good price later on, getting $2 to $10 or more for an acre that had cost him 60 cents or $1.25.” Regulatory enforcement was lax, and much of the wealth intended for the average rural settler wound up benefitting the “investors” in the coastal cities.
Another popular turn of phrase then was “robber baron.” These decades marked the rise of almost mythologically wealthy captains of industry—the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, Mellons, Vanderbilts, and Astors. They and families like theirs made their money in the rapid innovations of the day: the railroad, telephone, refrigeration, the lightbulb. They made fortunes in the raw material for manufacture of such goods—steel, timber, petroleum, copper, gold, silver, iron. The new economy catalyzed rapid emigration from farm to city. It was a time of brutally abject poverty. Eleven million of the 12 million families in the United States lived on less than $1200 a year, their per capita income was $380 annually.
The era marked a low ebb of human rights in America. Jim Crow law and policy relegated African Americans to another century of state-sanctioned racism. Native Americans in the west were relentlessly pursued and mercilessly slaughtered, the survivors relegated to islands of poor country on reservations. As the massive disparity of wealth polarized the country, America seemingly was becoming, simultaneously, more and less civilized. French prime minister Georges Clemenceau is said to have remarked by the Public Broadcasting Service after a brief tour of the United States that the nation had gone from a stage of barbarism to one of decadence—without achieving any civilization between the two.
The Emergence of the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation
The drive to dam every river emerged out of what Twain dubbed the Gilded Age, and the mercenary mindset that went with it. Engineers, planners, and politicians promoted, and plenty of people accepted, the concept that rivers had to be sacrificed. It was for the good of the country, the argument went. But that turned out not to be true.
The historical context out of which America’s dam building craze—rife with corruption, inequality, and racism—created a system whereby the benefits of water control, just as had been true throughout history, accrued to a few, while many paid the costs. Among the first to pay were migrant workers. Within fory years of its inception, federal dams created the need—or as most large-scale farmers will acknowledge, the necessity—for “guest” workers in the United States. Yet this contradicts what was supposed to be a foundational mission of the Bureau of Reclamation—offering struggling families a path toward economic stability by putting them on their own farms and delivering the water to make them viable. BuRec was created to offer working families a way to improve their economic lot in life.
Later, dams were celebrated as a key asset in victories in both World War II and the Cold War. But this claim doesn’t hold water either. Thoroughly damming the Columbia River appealed to America’s post-war sense of pride, and its saber rattling at the Soviet Union. But it did so with a Soviet-style system of infrastructure development, a government-sponsored capitalism with a communist-style, military-flavored central planning element that utterly transformed much of the western United States. The mythology around dams—that they were built for the greater good of the nation, that they helped secure and promote the American way of life—owe their existence to the era in American history out of which the lust for water control was realized. Under the guise of equality and freedom for all, water, like many other American resources, began flowing uphill toward money.
The metastasizing inequality of civilization—the masses plunging toward a poverty-driven barbarism and the wealthy forming the gold-plated backbone of a new Consumer’s Republic—prompted some critics, artists, and philosophers over the next century to consider with renewed scrutiny the freshly paved road which humankind was traveling in their new-fangled horseless carriages. This endeavor of social criticism persisted through the ensuing wars, genocides, economic roller-coasters, and an expanding funhouse of technological discovery. Insightful observers wrote about the mindset necessary to create an economy and society where wealth was concentrated at the top. They scrutinized oppression in its various forms. They wrote about the obliteration of Nature as a prerequisite to dominating other humans. Some of them applied these ideas to the rapid industrialization of the American landscape. An eco-crank, Edward Abbey, an erudite European dissident philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, and an early critic of technology, Lewis Mumford, had some ideas that shed light on the century’s wild ride. Collectively, what they wrote explains a great deal about the motivation behind America’s dam building craze.
The quick-scan, philosophical critique of the turbo-charged, twentieth-century, man-versus-machine trope might read like this: the trouble with modern civilization and the technology on which it relies has been its tendency to displace the rational, intelligent, orderly, elegant, and life-affirming work of humankind. Art, music, culture, craft, kinship, spirituality, good food, booze, and fun and games are subsumed into a massively-scaled, Earth-enveloping labyrinth of engineering, military, industrial, and technological works that sow the seeds of chaos and destruction, even as these forces foster the illusion of freedom in a regimented and increasingly restrictive modern life.
In One-Dimensional Man, French philosopher Herbert Marcuse described this problem: “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technological progress.” Marcuse was foremost among a group of Continental philosophers who emerged from the rubble of World War II with some questions about the direction civilization was heading, and foretold of a crippling alienation from all forms of Nature, including human nature, that would be a casualty of uncritical adoption of the latest forms of technology.
Earlier in the United States, in the 1960s, scholar of modern cityscapes Lewis Mumford argued against what he called “megamachines,” power-centric inventions that tended to accumulate capital in various forms, and foster a pursuit of growth and expansion for their own sake. He warned that this could eventually destroy all worthy human endeavors.
Later, in the 1960s, desert philosopher Edward Abbey described this megamachine mindset of growth for the sake of growth “is a cancerous madness.”
Marcuse, Mumford, Abbey, and their philosophical kin knew that modern technology would never be neutral in its effect on contemporary life. A profound re-arrangement of family, social, professional, and personal life would be required to justify the size, cost, pace, and scale of building and maintaining this proverbial shining new city on a hill. Unquestioning adherence to technological and industrial boosterism would crash cultures and kill higher order critical thought. If no one bothered to slow down and contemplate implications, conveniences like electricity, mass media, automobiles, and suburbia would run the risk of making us dumb, lazy, self-absorbed, sexually frustrated, and greedy, all the while creating a more violent, polluted, and ecologically and socially fragmented world.
Dams certainly don’t bear all the blame for this increasingly desperate state of affairs. Yet western American water control was a key component in the development of uncritical acceptance of a technological fix for social ills, the marriage of private sector lobbying and government power, and the subsequent creation of public infrastructure with benefits that disproportionately flow to the well-connected. But initially, the only problem dam boosters could perceive was that the endeavor to dam all the West’s rivers kept running out of money.
Within a decade of its 1902 inception, BuRec had to be rescued with a $20 million loan from the Treasury Department. Insolvency came along with the inability of farmers to repay their share of project construction loans. By 1922, 60 percent of BuRec farmers were delinquent in their payments, and a measly 10 percent of the total costs had been paid off by 1922. The repayment schedule was doubled from ten to twenty years before World War I and then again after the war from twenty to forty years, but this didn’t help the agency’s budget. Plunging commodity prices had tanked the farm economy, and by the late twenties, farmers were getting out. Water had made their land worth a little more than when they bought it, and the buyers were mostly long-term speculators who already saw the possibilities for profit in any big federal subsidy. But as Marc Reisner points out in Cadillac Desert, something more insidious was causing BuRec to go broke. Engineers within the agency began to view public works as ends in themselves: “stopping a wild river was a straightforward job, subjugable to logic, and the result was concrete, heroic, real: a dam. Enforcing repayment obligations and worrying about speculators was a cumbersome, troublesome time-consuming nuisance. Was the Bureau to abandon the most spellbinding effort of modern times—transforming the desert into a garden—just because a few big landowners were taking advantage of the program, just because some farmers couldn’t pay back as much as Congress hoped?”
Conceived as a public service agency that would serve ordinary people, BuRec would rather quickly become strictly an engineering outfit, trapped in the hamster-wheel logic of building dams to build more dams. It abandoned the higher calling—economic opportunity for middle class rural Americans—of its original mission.
Initially, sticking strictly to engineering had its advantages. Hoover Dam was completed in five years for chump change: $49 million. Foreshadowing who would come to benefit most from future BuRec projects, at the time of Hoover’s completion, the money doled out to private contractors had created what was at the time the six largest construction companies in the country. (One of them, Bechtel, is today one of the largest construction firm in the United States and feasts on a steady diet of fat government contracts. The sole contractor for Hoover was an entity called Six Companies Inc.; two other spin-offs from that parent company are construction giants Morrison-Knudsen and Kaiser.)
Low interest and Depression-era wages at Hoover Dam guaranteed nothing of the sort would ever be built that easily again. Inflation was making it harder with every passing year for BuRec to get even a dishonest cost-benefit analysis for a proposed dam to pass Congress for funding. But with Hoover, and soon Grand Coulee generating scads of electricity, the federal dam-builders hit on a grand idea: why justify construction costs at all? New dams and irrigation projects would pay for themselves out of power revenues. These “cash register” dams became the rationale for a new generation of needless projects. The justification for each new dam was described by historian Don Worster as a kind of “rationalized irrationality,” a consideration only of means without regard to ends. “Electricity,” wrote Worster, “became the very elixir of the bureaucratic life.”
Engineers, politicians, and budding bureaucrats drank this punch. As Reisner put it, “For a dam, whether or not it made particularly good sense, whether or not it decimated a salmon fishery or drowned a gorgeous stretch of wild river, … was a Bonanza to the constituents of the Congressman in whose district it was located—especially the engineering and construction firms that became largely dependent on the government for work. The whole business was like a pyramid scheme—the many (the taxpayers) were paying to enrich the few—but most members of Congress figured that if they voted for everyone else’s dams, someday they would get a dam, too.”
Federal water management agencies began to exercise a kind of circular, internal logic: we need this dam to grow crops, to float barges, to harness power, to “become part of an efficient system that serves the people and the land,” as the laser light show at Grand Coulee told it. With a focus only on the most grandiose feats of engineering, they soon adopted the slogan “Total Use for Greater Wealth.” The phrase meant what it said. In the short time span of the ensuing generation, almost every western river was killed off as a conveyance of nature’s bounty, and reborn as a proclaimed money-maker. If BuRec had its way, not a single drop of water on the continent would make it to the sea without turning a turbine, floating a barge, or watering a field. But they didn’t get their way. Not because of reform, or any other sort of happy ending. They had competition.
By the 1930s, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the engineering wing of the US Army and who had been building dams since before the Bureau of Reclamation existed, wanted more of the dam racket. And in at least one way, they were in a better position to do it. Any project the Corps took on that could be justified as flood control would not have to be concerned with repayment to the Treasury.
Like the rest of the military’s annual appropriation, Congress would simply decide to give the Corps the money, no further questions asked. In addition to being fiscally less restrained, it eventually became more adept at partnering with influential, private interests who would benefit from Corps-built dam projects. An early coup for the Corps was at Pine Flat on the Kings River in the Sierra Foothills of California. In the 1880s, the Kings had been the battleground for a landmark water rights court case between two wealthy landowners. Noting that the same few families still controlled land in the area, the Corps out-schmoozed, out-leveraged, and out-hustled BuRec, gaining appropriations for construction of Pine Flat Dam in 1948.
The two agencies hated each other—until they fell in love on the Missouri. In 1940, the Corps finished Fort Peck Dam, creating a 140-mile-long swath of bass and walleye habitat. While the Corps was plugging up the upper-Missouri, BuRec had set its sights on a suite of utterly budget-sucking projects throughout the river basin. All of them were losing money, but the losses might be covered by power revenues—generated by new dams. W. Glenn Sloan, a Montana BuRec engineer, was putting the finishing touches on his agency’s plan, when Lewis Pick, the Corps regional director, had the misfortune of witnessing one of the Missouri’s signature rampages in spring of 1943. He took the flood as a personal insult and demanded retribution in the form of a report that would punish the river for its insubordination with five monstrous dams.
Not to be outdone, BuRec finished its wish list of ninety dams. Whereupon, the inter-agency pissing match began. The Corps lobbied and testified against BuRec’s plan. BuRec testified and lobbied against the Corps’ plan. President Roosevelt suggested in a letter to both parties that a regional third-party agency like the Tennessee Valley Authority be created, in part to deal with the impasse. Neither side wanted to suffer the humiliation of having their bureaucratic wings clipped, so they met in the fall of 1944 to sort the whole thing out. In the span of a single day, BuRec and the Corps consummated their relationship by screwing the American people out of a considerable chunk of their own land, water, and money.
BuRec and the Corps reconciled their differences by promoting the buggered idea that all of their proposed projects on the Missouri should be built, and then some, despite both agencies having earlier testified that the benefits of one agency’s plan would be cancelled out by the other. Price tag in 1944 dollars: a cool $2 billion.
The consequences were brutal: the best winter cattle range and some of the best waterfowl habitat in the country—along with a good measure of BuRec and the Corps‘ credibility—went out the window. The Corps took a singularly sadistic approach to making sure any reparations to Fort Berthold Native Americans went unmet with the construction of Garrison Dam, which, after completion in 1953, flooded ground the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people had lived on for thousands of years. The three tribes, seeing the handwriting on the wall at a time when Native American legal rights had bottomed out, asked only for land equal in acreage to what they would lose, plus grazing and timber rights. That was too much for the Corps. Instead, the tribes got thirty-three dollars an acre for the fertile river bottom land they lost (plus another 7.5 million dollars for immediate needs). It took fifty years—the three tribes fighting the United States every step of the way—but eventually, a settlement that at least began a move toward economic justice was made. The land, however, is still drowned.
There are no monetary reparations that could adequately compensate for the half-century of torment the three tribes suffered. In Coyote Warrior, writer Paul VaDevelder quotes Phyllis Cross, whose home in Elbow Woods, North Dakota, was buried beneath the slackwater behind Garrison Dam. She described the ensuing existential darkness that engulfed her community this way: “Our thinking failed us because suddenly our landmarks, our social and physical landmarks, the framework for everything we were, was gone. Our identity derived from our villages. Those were destroyed. … When everything was gone, there was no one waiting to help us put the world back in order. … How do you bury the past when your identity is trapped in its lasting effects? What do you call your life as a community, as a people, when despair is the only emotion you can trust?” A national program of dam building that was intended to help people victimized them instead. And some of the people that did benefit had begun to amass great wealth, partially by acting like credit criminals.
