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KEYNOTE ADDRESS
<br />Marc Reisner
<br />Author
<br />21 Columbus Avenue
<br />San Francisco, CA 94111
<br />Usually, when I give a talk in a state like Wyoming, I
<br />always make sure that the death penalty exists because I
<br />assume I'm going to be shot and at least I won't exact
<br />posthumous revenge. But I think in this crowd, I don't have
<br />to worry about too many cattlemen.
<br />Well, the water issue reminds me a little bit now of the
<br />thunderheads that begin to stack up just before you get a
<br />hurricane. It's going on right now in the Gulf of Mexico. A
<br />whole bunch of thunderheads coming together and sooner
<br />or later, they can form a hurricane. We have, first of all, a
<br />very bad, horrible drought going on in California, also in
<br />Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana, to some degree.
<br />We've got cities like Los Angeles running desperately short
<br />of water, not just because of the drought, but because
<br />they've been "borrowing" water from other states for so
<br />long and now the courts are forcing them to give it back.
<br />We have endangered-species crises, it seems, everywhere
<br />you look. We've got whole ecosystems at risk: The Colum-
<br />bia River is Exhibit A, the Sacramento Delta is Exhibit B.
<br />We have ecosystems that don't even exist any more. The
<br />Colorado River Delta, I guess, would be Exhibit C.
<br />We have a groundwater overdraft in some places-in
<br />Eastern Oregon and the San Joaquin Valley of California,
<br />which is very severe. There's about 600 or 700 billion
<br />gallons of water a day being taken out of the ground in the
<br />San Joaquin valley in a normal year. It's more like 3 or 4
<br />trillion gallons per year, rather, being taken out beyond
<br />replenishment the last couple or three years of severe
<br />drought, which, of course, puts pressure on all the rivers
<br />that remain-that have any water left in them-because
<br />that water that's being overdrafted is supposed to be
<br />replaced by surface water.
<br />On the other hand, new dams, it seems, can't be built, no
<br />matter where. We just had the latest example when Auburn
<br />Dam went down to defeat. Now this was really interesting
<br />for some of you who may have followed it. Auburn was
<br />supposed to be a big flood-control dam-first an irrigation
<br />dam, then it metamorphosed into a flood-control dam. You
<br />know, whatever the latest crisis was, that's the crisis that the
<br />dam is suddenly supposed to alleviate, and Auburn
<br />metamorphosed into a flood-control dam after a big flood
<br />in 1986 above Sacramento.
<br />The dam was defeated by a combination of two types of
<br />people: Vic Fazio, who is a sort of a moderate, somewhat
<br />environmentally inclined congressman from Sacramento,
<br />wanted a dry dam built (which would have just contained
<br />floods but it would have held those floodwaters for a few
<br />weeks or a few days even and then released them, so it
<br />would not have been a conventional reservoir, and it would
<br />have cost only $700 million dollars or so, which is, you
<br />know, cheap these days for a dam). But he was defeated by
<br />a combination of environmentalists who wanted no dam
<br />and a whole bunch of Southern Californians who wanted a
<br />huge dam for water supply.
<br />Now, these guys were mostly Republicans and mostly the
<br />kinds of people who oppose all government in any form-
<br />except when it comes to building a dam for them. People
<br />like William Dannemeyer and Jon Doolittle. So, we have
<br />these weird alliances between the kind of little-old-lady-in-
<br />tennis-shoes types and the environmental types, and they
<br />are stopping dams from being built.
<br />So the obvious answer to no dams, then, is water
<br />transfers, where you take water from a supposedly ineffi-
<br />cient use and give it to a more efficient use. But the mecha-
<br />nisms for doing this have been really quite clumsy, painful
<br />in many cases. A lot of good farmland in Colorado has gone
<br />out of production.
<br />In one of my books, "Overtapped Oasis," my co-author
<br />and I came up with a whole series of ways to make water
<br />transfers less painful and more environmentally sound. Of
<br />course, nobody has taken our advice except for the state of
<br />Oregon, which is such a wet state, you hardly have water
<br />transfers.
<br />So, I guess what I'm saying is that we don't have a very
<br />good control of our destiny right now when it comes to
<br />water. Everything's in flux. Everywhere I go, I encounter a
<br />strong feeling that there ought to be more water in rivers.
<br />This is almost becoming a universal feeling now except for
<br />the cattlemen, the alfalfa fanners who always think there
<br />should be less water in rivers so they can irrigate more
<br />acreage. But generally speaking there is a growing feeling in
<br />the West that somehow we've got to figure out how to
<br />make our rivers at least semi-whole, and I guess that's the
<br />purpose of this whole conference here.
<br />Now, you know, I've been arguing this for probably half
<br />of my life, and it's a tough argument because essentially you
<br />are arguing on moral grounds, on aesthetic grounds, on
<br />environmental grounds. To the degree that you argue on
<br />economic grounds you say, well, you know if we only put a
<br />little more water in the river, then some rich trout fisher-
<br />man would come out and spend a lot of money locally and
<br />it would shore up the local economy.
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