The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit Page A

century. No shortage, no problems to plan for. The author points out that climate change is not something that may happen to the American West or that is now happening only in the Arctic. It is here, now. And at the end of Dead Pool he describes what a post–climate change Southwest might look like—the book’s title, incidentally, is the term used to describe a reservoir when its water level drops too low to feed the intake valves for hydropower generators.
    “Mistakes were made” is the locution politicians like to use, and it could be used for a lot of the plans for the Southwest, which have left follies in their wake. The Salton Sea, for example, a little west of the tail end of the Colorado, became the biggest lake in California when it was accidentally created around the time the Tulare Lake was drained into nonexistence. It was the result of an attempt early in the last century to divert a little irrigation water. The whole river raged into the new canal, ripped it into a broad channel, and for two years emptied itself into the low point that in another climatological era had been a lake and now became one again, full of the salts of the desert. Only one force in the West was mighty enough to do battle with the river: the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP), the monster corporation that dominated California politics and land for decades. It took the SP two years to stuff enough rubbish into the gap to send the river back into its usual bed. The Salton Sea is recharged by farm runoffand other filthy waters; it has become a major bird sanctuary because their old wetland habitat, the delta where the Colorado runs into the sea, has largely dried up. Most of the attempts to develop resorts around the lake have turned into ruins; the most famous site there is Salvation Mountain, a folksy one-man religious complex made of concrete poured a few bags at a time and painted with discarded house paint.
    The Salton Sea is already a conundrum, a toxic bird sanctuary in a place where water doesn’t belong, and the reservoir-dam systems will go the same way. But not all the strange phenomena that have arisen from the long wrestling match with the Colorado are situated near it. Take the San Francisco–based, family-owned Bechtel Corporation, which is to the United States what the Bin Laden construction firm is to Saudi Arabia—a colossus itself and a maker of colossi. Bechtel emerged from the building of the Hoover Dam to become a major force in reshaping the West and then the world: it is responsible for nuclear power plants and infrastructure for mining in hitherto roadless jungle and for triggering Bolivia’s water war earlier this decade when its attempts to privatize Cochabamba’s water backfired. And it was one of the more visibly problematic contractors in Bush’s Iraq. (The bin Laden family was earlier this decade a “substantial investor,” with $10 million in a private equity fund owned by Bechtel, but that’s another story.)
    No one opposed the Hoover Dam, built at the height of the Depression and the height of hope in technology, but Glen Canyon Dam, built thirty years later, was controversial from the outset. Furious about the development, the Sierra Club transformed from a genteel regional mountaineering society into the most powerful environmental group in the country. The canyon that would be dammed was one of the most beautiful places in the Southwest. Although the Sierra Club knew this, it originally signed off on it as a replacement for a dam upstream. But then the club changed its course and began to fight—in vain, ultimately—to save the canyon and the river ecology downstream. Yet the struggle produced soul-searching and rabble-rousing, out of which came the modern environmental movement.
    The logic for the dam was hard to find, but the junk science was not: basic errors were made concerning the rate of evaporation (creating a biglake in a desert entails giving a lot of the water to the sky); cost