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Show The Politics of the Glen Canyon Dam: Challenging the Status Quo of Water Policy in the West Brian D. Poulsen, Jr. upper Colorado River, provided that Echo Park and Dinosaur National Monument were left alone (Reisner 1986, 295). Thus, they forfeited the right to protest the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam-a decision that Sierra Club director David Brower would sorely regret. Once the dam was built, it was only a decade or two before its ecological impacts were being noticed. Because the dam blocked the natural flow and deposition of sediment, and because the water being released from the reservoir was significantly colder than the relatively shallow Colorado River, the ecology of the lower basin began to change. Ultimately interested in the protection and preservation of the Grand Canyon, environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Grand Canyon Trust, as well as various river rafting organizations, began hotly contesting the operation of the Glen Canyon Dam (Grand Canyon River Guides 1992). By the mid 1990s, only slightly more than thirty years after the dam's construction, yet convinced that the dam had outlived its purpose and wishing to see the canyon restored to its pristine natural state, Richard Ingebretsen founded the Glen Canyon Institute (GCI) to advocate decommissioning the dam and restoring Glen Canyon (Ingebretsen 2004). Among those immediately getting behind Ingebretsen were former director of the Sierra Club David Brower, former director of the Bureau of Reclamation Dan Beard, and former Bureau of Reclamation scientist Dave Wegner (Peterson 2004a). Each of these men was to become a key component of the GCI's legitimacy. Of course, efforts to influence policy are never one-sided. Criticisms of the operation and presence of the dam were quickly met with opposition by entities such as the nonprofit group Friends of Lake Powell (FLP). Based out of Page, Arizona, FLP claims to represent the more than three million people who visit Lake Powell each year. They cite the significant economic impact on Page resulting from such an attraction and assert that the economy would be decimated without the motorized water sport industry that the lake draws (FLP "Facts" 2004). Other actors include the Federal Department of Energy's Western Area Power Administration (the agency in charge of marketing and selling power generated by the dam), the Navajo Generating Station (a coal-fired power plant that draws water from the reservoir for its cooling towers), the city of Page, Arizona, and the motorized water recreation industry (Peterson 2004a). Each of these entities has something to lose should the dam be decommissioned. Decommissioning is also dramatically opposed by the state and federal legislative delegates of Utah and Arizona, who fear the loss of millions of visitors to the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area each year. Perhaps more than anything else, it is votes that these representatives stand to lose should they support decommissioning, since the vast majority of the conservative populace of the surrounding states view decommissioning as radical and are therefore in stark opposition to the proposal. Conditions The water rights law that the West was founded on, which formed the groundwork for the conditions that would later surround the Glen Canyon Dam, is called "Prior Appropriations." Its mantra is "first in time, first in right" (Cook 2004). Thus, to keep California from taking all the water in the Colorado before any of the other surrounding states had a chance to secure their shares, the Colorado River Compact (CRC) of 1922 was born. This became the cornerstone for what would later be called the "Law of the River." Essentially, this is a compendium of laws and judicial rulings, over the past century, that directly addresses the rights and allocation of Colorado River water. The CRC divided water allocation into upper and lower basins and provided that each basin be allocated 7.5 million acre feet (maf) of water annually (Colorado River Compact 1922, Article III). It also imposed a duty on the upper basin to deliver a rolling average of 75maf over ten years to the lower basin (Compact 1922, Article III). In other words, the CRC provided that in the event that the flow of the river could not deliver the 7.5maf to each basin in any given year, the upper basin would bear the loss (Compact 1922, Article III). In 1948 the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact was signed, which created the Upper Colorado River Commission and further apportioned the upper basin's annual allotment to its four member states (Bureau of Reclamation 2004). These acts paved the way for the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) of 1956, which provided a comprehensive upper basin water resource development plan authorizing the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and three others as "main stem" or "cash register" dams (Cook 2004). The term "cash register" is used because the CRSP outlines one of their primary purposes as generating power. According to Wayne Cook, former Commissioner of the Upper Colorado River Commission, the sale of the power generated is then used to fund a host of smaller developments for irrigation called "participating" projects, also commissioned by the CRSP (Cook 2004). Thus, without cash register dams, he argues, smaller projects such as the ones that provide water to Utah and Colorado farmers would be nearly impossible (Cook 2004). Therefore, because the Glen Canyon Dam is a cash register dam, one of the biggest challenges that its opponents have had to deal with is its power generation. In 1970, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) (Switzer 2001, 20). This act required the completion of an Environmental Impact Statement for all federal government projects. Because the dam had already been built, no such statement was ever required of it. In 1982, however, in response to a lawsuit by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Bureau of Reclamation ordered the completion of the Glen Canyon Environmental Studies (GCES), of which Dave Wegner (now a GCI board member) was lead scientist (Farmer 1999, 184). At first, the studies were simply an investigation into the impact of the 16 |
