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, Colorado Central Magazine November 1999 Page 13 <br />to the fulfilling of material human needs and desires? <br />Page 6 of 10 <br />The Aspinall Unit on the Upper Gunnison best represents that utilitarianism. It's what the post-war <br />Bureau of Reclamation would like to have done throughout the canyon regions of the whole Colorado <br />River Basin: dams in a kind of stair-step series, each dam backing water up to the base of the next higher <br />dam. Plans were drawn up to do that, down the Green River and its Yampa and White River tributaries, <br />down the Upper Colorado, and all the way down the mainstem through the Grand Canyon. <br />But in the two decades from the time the Aspinall Unit dams were started until they were done, the <br />nation began to undergo some basic changes in those less tangible cultural structures that underlie the <br />physical structures we build. The dawning of an environmental consciousness was part of the change. <br />Across the nation, but especially in and around the urban centers, the deterioration of natural systems <br />could no longer be ignored by the mid-1960s. When urban rivers became so polluted that one actually <br />caught fire, when Lake Erie went dead, when urban air began to be life-threatening, when the national <br />bird (along with a lot of other birds and animals) went into precipitous chemically-caused decline, when <br />salts began to destroy the productivity of the irrigated fields the nation depended on -- when these and <br />many other things began to happen, it became evident that we would have to actively take steps to <br />maintain a livable environment. <br />This gave rise to a lot of new "legal structure," in the form of national environmental legislation through <br />the 1960s and 1970s, including the Endangered Species Act (1966, strengthened in 1969 and 1973), the <br />National Environmental Protection Act (1969), the Clean Water Act (1972), and others. More strands <br />woven into the Knot. <br />BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL AWAKENING was just part of another, more general cultural change <br />that was having a big impact on places like the Upper Gunnison basin, during the decades the Aspinall <br />Unit was under construction. From the Civil War through World War II, despite programs like the <br />Homestead Act and a general idealization of small-town and farm life, the direction of movement had <br />been consistently from farm and town to the burgeoning cities. At the same time, improving <br />transportation systems -- first the train, then the automobile -- and increasing general prosperity and <br />leisure had resulted in the growth of tourism and outdoor recreation. <br />The basic cultural relationship of humans to the natural world changed over a couple of generations, <br />from a relationship based on work, to a relationship based on play and the enjoyment of nature as an <br />alternative to work, especially industrialized work. <br />By the 1960s Americans were going camping -- "roughing it" -- with more equipment and luxury than <br />their own grandparents had ever experienced in their daily living. <br />Then, in the late 1960s, demographers began to notice episodes of "population turnaround." There were <br />years when the net country-to-city migration was reversing nationwide; more people were leaving the <br />"statistical metropolitan areas" (cities and their suburban regions) than were moving there. And the <br />remaining "pre-urban natives" in places like the Upper Gunnison valley knew exactly where those city <br />people were moving, and what they were doing. Some were "going back to the land" in a romantic <br />agrarian way, but most of them, sooner or later, were moving to places like the Upper Gunnison valley <br />and participating in new economies growing up around tourism, destination resorts, and outdoor <br />recreation. <br />Not very many were jumping into the traditional extractive industries -- mining, logging and industrial <br />agriculture -- but that was not necessarily an indication of environmental virtue. The old utilitarianism, <br />http://www.cozine.com/archive/ccl999/00690133.htm 7/9/2003