The current Book Club selection is “The Emerald Mile” by Kevin Fedarko. Ostensibly dealing with an attempt to set a record for the fastest trip through the Grand Canyon in a small boat, it turns out to be an overview of the Colorado River and man’s attempts to harness it.
One chapter in the book sings the praises of the Civil Engineers who designed and constructed Boulder Dam and then Glen Canyon. These are indeed two massive structures that tested the audacity and technology of the engineering and construction industry in the middle of the twentieth century.
Another chapter focuses on the efforts of super-conservationists David Brower and Martin Litton to preserve wilderness by opposing the construction of high dams and flooding magnificent canyons. The author presents their case objectively without emphasizing the inherent conflict between civilization and conservation.
This conflict has been eloquently explored by John McPhee in his masterpiece “Encounters with the Archdruid”, which the club read nearly twenty years ago. In it the author arranged three encounters in which Brower was paired with a major opponent in a threatened environment.
Most powerful was a raft trip through the Canyon with Floyd Dominy, commissioner of the United States Bureau of Reclamation and a passionate advocate of exploiting the potential of all our rivers. He and Brower spent the trip arguing the merits of building the Glen Canyon dam. McPhee reported their debates objectively, providing his readers with enough information to understand the dilemma posed by destruction of wilderness in the name of progress.
Civil Engineers are committed to serve society by designing and building necessary public projects, with a minimum negative impact on the environment. Nowhere is this more difficult than in the management of our nation’s rivers. We have accomplished great advances in navigation, flood control, hydro-electric power, water harvesting, and recreation, but always with a negative impact of some magnitude.
Pittsburghers are keenly aware that our beloved three rivers were navigable only part of the year prior to the introduction of the locks and dams that converted them into a series of inter-connected pools with constant depth. Beginning in 1885 with a dam and lock at Davis Island (Avalon), the entire Ohio River was eventually converted into a year-around transportation artery providing a low cost, high volume capability for moving bulk cargoes. The impact on the environment have been minimal.
Flood control is a different matter. Old-timers remember the 1936 St. Patrick’s Day Flood when the rivers crested twenty-one feet above flood level in downtown Pittsburgh causing massive damage throughout the region. We think the construction of flood control dams in the Allegheny and Monongahela watersheds has successfully reduced the flood control problem in this area to an acceptable minimum, but it has been at a cost to the natural environment.
The best example of this is the Kinzua Dam. Constructed in 1965, it has the capability of storing 1,300,000 acre-feet of water in a massive reservoir that flooded the Kinzua Valley. Acquiring the land necessary for the reservoir required the breaking of the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty, which granted the Seneca Nation rights to the land in their reservation, “in perpetuity”. Six hundred Senecas and thousands of acres of valuable farmland were displaced.
I am ambivalent regarding the ethics of this project. It is essential for flood control. Our family enjoyed camping many times on the reservoir; from a recreational standpoint I think it was probably an improvement over the valley it replaced. Betraying the Senecas and forcing them out of their sacred home is a little bit harder for me to justify.
In the heyday of dam construction in the West, hydropower provided a significant portion of our energy needs. By the time we had exploited most of the potential sites for its production our rapidly expanding appetite for energy had dramatically reduced its significance.
In 1950 when our population was one hundred and fifty million persons, we consumed 335 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, thirty percent of which was produced by hydropower. Today, when our population is three hundred and thirty million, we are consuming over four trillion kilowatt-hours per year; the hydro segment has shrunk to about six percent. The justification of damming rivers for hydro-electric energy production has become less compelling.
And what about harvesting water? In the Great Basin region of our country there is insufficient annual rainfall to permit normal agriculture. We have resolved this by harvesting water from our rivers, the Colorado being the prime example. In terms of annual discharge the Colorado is not among the nation’s largest. Its annual average discharge of 22,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) ranks it thirty seventh in the United States.
Nonetheless the sixteen million acre feet of water carried by the Colorado in a typical year is a valuable asset in the portion of the country that it drains, so valuable that nearly every drop of it is removed and harvested for agricultural (and recreational) use before it reaches the Mexican border. Treaties with Mexico require us to reserve 2,000 cfs for them; all of it is promptly harvested for agriculture in the Mexicali region, leaving the stream bed dry when it reaches Baja California.
Obviously the dams on the Colorado have made this process possible, facilitating the maintenance of a population of twenty million persons in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, as well as the productive farming of millions of acres of non-arable land. As the world’s population continues to sky-rocket, along with the associated need for energy, food, and water, the pressure to develop rivers will also grow, despite its impact on the environment.
Where does this leave us in our exploration of the rights and wrongs in river development? Unfortunately, we again reach the conclusion that there are too many of us and we are too greedy. Unless society commits itself to reversing both those trends, the desire to retain our natural wonders is doomed.