A a Ditch in Time by Patricia Nelson Limerick & Jason L. Hanson

Author:Patricia Nelson Limerick & Jason L. Hanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2016-04-26T06:00:00+00:00

In the worldview of Denver Water’s leaders, all their foresighted anticipation of future needs should have elicited not condemnation, resistance, and opposition but gratitude, support, and applause. In the twenty-first century, it may seem that these leaders confronted an earthquake in public opinion and misread it as a few inconsequential tremors. In truth, the scale of this shift in attitudes toward growth was almost beyond comprehension. For the better part of two centuries, Americans had looked at the American West and found “manless land calling out for landless men.” Getting more people into the West—promoting the region, advertising its resources, recruiting settlers to occupy more homes—served as the operating definition of progress. In the middle of the twentieth century, the suggestion that the definition of progress was on the verge of reversing, recasting the formerly welcomed increase in population as a problem, was psychedelic (to use the valuable term that would soon emerge from the counterculture). But changing attitudes toward growth, along with the new powers given to federal agencies, brought into being novel alliances and oppositions that challenged the inherited definition of progress.

The extraordinary new environmental laws were the most important—and mystifying—manifestation of this changed world. Given the warm feelings that many members of Congress have for the spotlight, it is a temptation to think of the occasion of passing a law as the conclusion of the main story, with a less important epilogue trailing behind and trudging through the bureaucratic process of putting the law into practice. A more realistic understanding of innovative legislation emphasizes the implementation of the law and reduces the story of the law’s passage to a prelude. No one, in other words, knows exactly what a law is going to mean until it has been applied on the ground level, until earnest bureaucrats have tried to exercise the powers seemingly granted to them by the law, and until individuals and groups who disagree with the bureaucrats’ interpretation of their mandate and power have talked to reporters, rallied fellow citizens, hired lawyers, and awaited and accepted the decisions of judges. Denver Water’s efforts to build the Foothills Treatment Plant and the Two Forks Dam thus offer case studies of vital importance to Americans trying to figure out how the 1960s and 1970s environmental laws had transformed their nation.

As our first step into the labyrinth of implementation, we begin with the recognition that the phrase federal government is a term that struggles to hold together a multiplicity of agencies and bureaus that do not always take joy in each other’s existence. In order for Denver Water to get permission to build the Strontia Springs Dam and the Foothills Water Treatment Plant, five federal agencies had to say some version of yes. This meant that every one of those agencies had to reach agreement, not just with the Denver Water Board, but with each other.

The first two agencies were pulled into the controversy because the dam and the reservoir would occupy twenty-seven acres of land under the

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