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rush and foam and rage, in order to push through. There is, as you know, a place like that not far from our largest city and there are plans to pour in a solid concrete slab the width, depth, and height of a fifty-story office building. Then, ever so slowly, the water would back up and push out the animals -- and the spirits, if they exist -- not just out of the narrows but out of the canyon as well. How do we resolve these things? One method we would call procedural. That would be simply to bring all of the people up to the canyon and the dam site. If they went there, most of them would oppose the dam, some because it is wrong to destroy such a place, some because it is too expensive to destroy such a place, a few because of the spirits. A second thing is what we would call substantive. We need water laws that cause us to weigh in geologic time, that cause us consciously and deliberately to focus on the millions of years, all of the misty deep past, that it took to craft a Black Canyon of the Gunnison or a Glen Canyon or a South Platte Canyon and to weigh that expanse of time against the needs of those who want a dam now. Animals, canyons, beauty and geologic time are not too abstract for legal protection. We know how to protect abstrac- tions -- there are a multitude of examples, among them free speech, due process, and beneficial use. And we ought to dare to do another thing. We ought to try to think like a canyon, as Aldo Leopold and John Muir charged us to do. It is hard, and it runs counter to the human arrogance -17-