The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit Page B

figures were squirrelly; the estimates for how much water the river collects annually were off. In his book, James Lawrence Powell concludes that the dam and Lake Powell exist because a powerful Colorado representative wanted them and because the Bureau of Reclamation “needed new dams to burnish its reputation and justify its funding and staff levels.”
    The battle over the damming of Glen Canyon is one of the great epics of twentieth-century America, and out of it came two classics. One was Eliot Porter’s elegiac photographic book, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado , a book that helped create the genre of color nature photography. The other was by John McPhee, the New Yorker ’s science writer. Encounters with the Archdruid recounts what transpired when McPhee managed to get the dam’s chief advocate, Floyd Dominy, and its bitterest opponent, Porter’s publisher and the Sierra Club’s executive director, David Brower, to float together down the Grand Canyon below the dam, arguing all the way. Neither of them imagined the fate the dam now faces. But others hoped. Two classics, or maybe three. In his 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, the insurrectionary environmental writer Edward Abbey coined the verb “monkey-wrenching” for a certain kind of ecological sabotage: its four central characters plot to float a houseboat full of explosives to the dam. The book helped prompt the formation of the radical environmental group Earth First!, which announced its arrival on the scene in 1981, when some of its founders unfurled a vast line of black plastic resembling a crack down the 700-foot-high face of Glen Canyon Dam. “Surely no man-made structure in modern American history has been so hated for so long by so many with such good reason,” said Abbey, speaking to a crowd in a parking lot with a good view of the dam and the prank. It was Earth First! that came up with the optimistic bumper sticker about all this: “Nature Bats Last.” But Bechtel keeps the profits.
    The docks and ramps at both reservoirs have had to be relocated and rebuilt in pursuit of the fleeing waterline, and one dock simply closed. One ramp at Lake Powell grew to 1,300 feet long, another to more than 1,500 feet, new additions to the collection of landscape follies across the American West. Phoenix and Vegas seem fated, the book argues, to become dusty ruins, for the water to sustain them is already vanishing (thoughVegas has a murderous scheme to drain much of the rest of Nevada for its golf courses and casino fountains, to the detriment of rural communities and wildlife). If the lack of water doesn’t get them, climate change might: the author predicts that summer temperatures in the 120s (above 48°C) will be routine in Phoenix. Aridity, he proposes, could well kill off much of the agriculture and two of the biggest cities of the Southwest by the middle of this century. (In California, my local paper reports that a severe drought, now into its third year, is forcing state and federal water agencies to cut water deliveries to farmers in the Central Valley, perhaps the world’s single richest agricultural region, by “85 to 100 percent.” A 100 percent cut would be a death sentence in this Mediterranean climate without rain between May and October.)
    “When all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the streams are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in all this arid region, there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all this arid region,” Major Powell told an audience gathered in support of large-scale irrigation in Los Angeles in 1893. Booed and shouted down, the major retorted: “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to