This Green and Growing Land by Kevin C. Armitage

Author:Kevin C. Armitage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-10-03T21:23:54+00:00

Figure 6.2 David Brower fought to preserve the open landscapes of the American West—including the Grand Canyon. “If we can’t save the Grand Canyon” grumbled Brower, “what the hell can we save”?

That passion was needed, for new plans threatened other desert cathedrals. In 1963, just before the floodgates of Glen Canyon Dam closed, the Bureau of Reclamation proposed the billion-dollar Pacific Southwest Water Plan. Its ambitious agenda called for transporting water from northern California and the Columbia River Basin in Washington State to the southwest. And to ensure that it could pump Arizona’s share of Colorado River water to rapidly growing cities such as Phoenix, it proposed hydroelectric dams at Marble and Bridge canyons, both within Grand Canyon National Park. Marble and Bridge bookended the park, so their damming would turn the canyon into a reservoir. “If we can’t save the Grand Canyon,” asked a flabbergasted David Brower, “what the hell can we save?”

It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Dam proponents included President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, as well as the usual retinue of politicians and business interests eager to capitalize on development funded with federal dollars. The outspoken leader of the dam proponents was Floyd Dominy, the two-fisted, hard-charging, hard-drinking bundle of passion who was commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. He was quick-witted, salacious, and a gambler, the kind of man whose cigar remained lit when he rafted through a waterfall. Dominy described the dams as “cash registers,” a way to raise funds for the Central Arizona Project that would pump water to Phoenix and Tucson. Dominy badly wanted the dams at Marble and Bridge. Dan Dreyfus of the bureau remembered Dominy as refusing compromise and pursuing the dams like “an utter maniac.” Brower and Dominy were classic foils, two forces of nature that seemed to leap from the pages of a Hollywood script. The smart thing to do was to put them together on a raft on the Colorado River. That’s what writer John McPhee did, in the final chapter of his 1971 portrait of Brower, Encounters with the Archdruid.

Led by Brower, the Sierra Club responded to the Central Arizona Project with a media blitz. Brower blamed the loss of Glen Canyon on the fact that it was so little known; he had learned well the lessons of Echo Park. Advertisements appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. The ads were written by Brower and by an advertising agency he hired that featured the work of Jerry Mander, an important intellectual who would go on to pen widely read books on the relationship between consumer-technological society and the natural world, including Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977). Brower and Mander would team up again on campaigns to establish Redwood National Park and to fight U.S. Supersonic Transport. The first round of publicity emphasized the grandeur of the canyon. “This time,” the ads declared, “it’s the Grand Canyon they want to flood, the Grand Canyon.

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