and schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover to protect themselves from atomic blasts. Scientific facts about the environment—water flow, radioactive half-lives, principles of containment, et cetera—were jiggled until they could be used to justify the dumping of nuclear waste near the atomic test site.
Junk science might be too generous a label for the way conclusions have been reached about the water of the Colorado River—how much there is and how much and how securely it can change the arid landscape around it. The water has transformed that landscape. Without it, Arizona and southern Nevada would still be barely populated, and a lot of the agriculture in the Southwest wouldn’t exist. But the supply was always precarious and overcommitted, and it is already running out. Water limitations werenoticed from the beginning, when Major John Wesley Powell and his crew became the first white men to float down the Colorado. Powell’s 1875 Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons , an expansion of his magazine reports, is still in print. It is a gorgeous book about adventure, geology, anthropology, and hydrology, with illustrations carrying captions like “The Great Unconformity at the Head of the Grand Canyon” and chapters such as “From Flaming Gorge to the Gate of Lodore.” But it was the sobering A Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah of 1878 that makes Powell matter even today. A Civil War veteran and government explorer, he saw that there wasn’t enough water to irrigate people’s visions of a big agricultural society and that the limits on water would ultimately be the limit on everything else. Ignoring Powell has been the basis of almost everything that has come since, except the literature on the river, which Powell presides over as a kind of god.
James Lawrence Powell’s Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West tells the story of the Colorado well and moves it forward to speculate on what the era of climate change will bring. He isn’t optimistic—in his account, climate change is just one more factor that the engineers and hydrologists who are responsible for plotting the river’s fate refuse to face. He begins with two crises at Glen Canyon Dam—one of a sudden abundance of water that nearly destroyed the dam in the 1980s, and another in 2005, when the water level fell lower than the official scientists had calculated it would ever go. (A disaster for water managers, it was a miracle for explorers, who got to see canyons and cliff faces that were thought to have been lost forever.) Dead Pool then doubles back to begin the story at the beginning, with Major Powell and his warnings on the finitude of the Southwest’s water:
To a man of Powell’s principles and background, that his nation encouraged thousands of poor farmers to move to lands so dry that the settlers were bound to fail was a tragedy. He would spend most of the rest of his career trying to save them from that fate. . . . By March 1888 one of Powell’s scientific facts was undeniable: the West had too little water to irrigate allthe land. To collect and best use what water did exist would require a system of dams and reservoirs.
Building those dams and reservoirs would, in theory, be a cooperative enterprise; in practice, it was a big-government project for the benefit of Westerners who for the most part considered themselves individualists and independents. This delusion of self-sufficiency, along with the fantasy that enough water could be found to supply the region, launched the eco-tragedy now unfolding.
Toward the end of his book, Powell points out that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has decided not to take climate change into account when planning water management and allocation for the twenty-first century. Instead, it has been basing its projections on what we now know was the unusually wet twentieth
Junk science might be too generous a label for the way conclusions have been reached about the water of the Colorado River—how much there is and how much and how securely it can change the arid landscape around it. The water has transformed that landscape. Without it, Arizona and southern Nevada would still be barely populated, and a lot of the agriculture in the Southwest wouldn’t exist. But the supply was always precarious and overcommitted, and it is already running out. Water limitations werenoticed from the beginning, when Major John Wesley Powell and his crew became the first white men to float down the Colorado. Powell’s 1875 Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons , an expansion of his magazine reports, is still in print. It is a gorgeous book about adventure, geology, anthropology, and hydrology, with illustrations carrying captions like “The Great Unconformity at the Head of the Grand Canyon” and chapters such as “From Flaming Gorge to the Gate of Lodore.” But it was the sobering A Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah of 1878 that makes Powell matter even today. A Civil War veteran and government explorer, he saw that there wasn’t enough water to irrigate people’s visions of a big agricultural society and that the limits on water would ultimately be the limit on everything else. Ignoring Powell has been the basis of almost everything that has come since, except the literature on the river, which Powell presides over as a kind of god.
James Lawrence Powell’s Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West tells the story of the Colorado well and moves it forward to speculate on what the era of climate change will bring. He isn’t optimistic—in his account, climate change is just one more factor that the engineers and hydrologists who are responsible for plotting the river’s fate refuse to face. He begins with two crises at Glen Canyon Dam—one of a sudden abundance of water that nearly destroyed the dam in the 1980s, and another in 2005, when the water level fell lower than the official scientists had calculated it would ever go. (A disaster for water managers, it was a miracle for explorers, who got to see canyons and cliff faces that were thought to have been lost forever.) Dead Pool then doubles back to begin the story at the beginning, with Major Powell and his warnings on the finitude of the Southwest’s water:
To a man of Powell’s principles and background, that his nation encouraged thousands of poor farmers to move to lands so dry that the settlers were bound to fail was a tragedy. He would spend most of the rest of his career trying to save them from that fate. . . . By March 1888 one of Powell’s scientific facts was undeniable: the West had too little water to irrigate allthe land. To collect and best use what water did exist would require a system of dams and reservoirs.
Building those dams and reservoirs would, in theory, be a cooperative enterprise; in practice, it was a big-government project for the benefit of Westerners who for the most part considered themselves individualists and independents. This delusion of self-sufficiency, along with the fantasy that enough water could be found to supply the region, launched the eco-tragedy now unfolding.
Toward the end of his book, Powell points out that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has decided not to take climate change into account when planning water management and allocation for the twenty-first century. Instead, it has been basing its projections on what we now know was the unusually wet twentieth
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