Citizen's Guide to Colorado's Environmental Era

Home Browse Search

West has been minimal. A victory compa- rable to the defeat of dams proposed in the 1950s for Echo Park, in Dinosaur National Monument, and for the Grand Canyon in the 1960s hasn't left a ripple on the public face of environmentalism. Overall the movement's philosophy and strategy at Two Forks is proving, so far, to be the "one- off," the fluke. Why? Unlike most anti -dam campaigns, the fight against Two Forks came from the technocratic wing of the environmental movement. Led by a Ph.D. hydrologist and former Marine named Dan Luecke and a long -time veteran of environmental fights named Bob Golten, the Environmental Caucus —a coalition of national and Colorado environmental groups —built a case during the 1980s that the metro area could have all the growth it wanted by metering houses, building small reservoirs, and sharing water across governmental boundaries. The Caucus also revealed that Denver and its suburbs had more water supplies than they were admitting to, and that the growth projections were exaggerated. In the end, the people of the metro area, who turned out in huge numbers to testify against Two Forks, as well as Governor Roy Romer and the Bush Administration, accepted the idea that Denver could at least postpone Two Forks. And by doing so, the metro area could save $1 billion and spare miles of a beautiful canyon close to Denver, as well as eliminate a possible threat to the whooping cranes that use the Platte River in central Nebraska. The Environmental Caucus beat Two Forks by breaking two cardinal environ- mental rules. Instead of fighting growth as evil, it chose to meet growth's needs in least -cost, light- impact ways. And while it spoke of the beauty and ecological damage Two Forks would do, the bottom -line in this fight was on economic efficiency and least -cost alternatives that could spare the beauty and ecological values. There are all sorts of environmental struggles, of course, and all sorts of tactics. But the approach to high - profile issues such as Two Forks has been shaped by two fights that formed the West's modern envi- ronmental movement. In the early 1950s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposed construction of two dams within Dinosaur National Monument. Echo Park and Split Mountain were to dam beautiful canyons in remote northwestern Colorado, where the Yampa (still un- dammed) and Green rivers mingle. To the amazement of almost every- one during those conservative Eisenhower years, citizens buried Congress in let- ters and telegrams, demanding that this national park unit be spared. In response, Congress shifted the two dams to a single dam at Glen Canyon in Arizona, creating Lake Powell. A decade later, a proposal to put two dams into the Grand Canyon was also smote by public outrage. The dams were dropped, and a large coal -fired power plant, which still smudges the Southwest's air, was built to pump water out of the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson as part of the Central Arizona Project. The environmental coalitions that defeated these two sets of dams were led by David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club, and a brilliant advertising man and political tactician. It was he who created the ad about the Grand Canyon, asking if we should also flood the Sistine Chapel to get closer to Michelangelo's painting on its ceiling. But because environmentalists had trad- ed away Glen Canyon to save Dinosaur, and because Glen Canyon was later revealed as a place of great beauty, Brower vowed never again to compromise: "Polite conservation- ists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground." That philosophy was amplified by writ- ers such as Edward Abbey and activists such as Dave Foreman, a co- founder of Earth First! "Thou shalt not compromise nor collaborate" became the first com- mandment of the environmental move- ment in the West. The Environmental Caucus broke this Dan Luecke, a Ph.D. hydrologist and former Marine, successfully built the case that the metro area could have all the growth it wanted by metering houses, building small reservoirs, and sharing water across governmental boundaries. He and his partners in the Environmental Caucus were successful in a way the water developers may not have foreseen, by showing how metro Denver could have growth without a new dam. 7