BOARD02415

• Board Meeting Date: 3/20/2000
• Description: Directors' Reports
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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were built with government subsidies simply to add glarnour to real estate developments. It even _
happened in Yosemite where park officials added a dam at Mirror Lake to raise the water level, .,
thereby "enhancing" the reflection of Half Dome for visitors.

In this century, darn building was transformed from local project into national enterprise. Edison
and Steinmetz started it with electric lights and long distance transmission. Water power
transformed into electricity could be sent instantaneously to every community in the country.
Hydro darns becarne cash registers overflowing with money to finance ever larger projects. It
rernained only for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the WP A to build dams on the scale ofthe pharaohs
- first came Bonneyille Dam and Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia, then the Tennessee
Valley Authority, then Shasta Dam on the Sacramento. Dam building became an unstoppable,
runaway political juggernaut of spending, job creation and local pride.

As the juggernaut rolled on we paid a steadily accumulating price for these projects in the form
offish runs destroyed, downstream rivers altered by changes in temperature, wedges of sediment
piling up behind structures, downstream erosion and delta wetlands degraded by lack of fresh
water and saltwater intrusion. The great salmon runs of the Columbia River and the Snake drifted
toward extinction. The Colorado River ran dry, its great delta, celebrated in the writings of Aldo
Leopold, reduced to barren salt flats. The Platte River, once "a mile wide and an inch deep,"
shriveled, threatening the existence of the vast migratory flocks of sandhill cranes.

For decades darn building remained unstoppable. Even John Muir at the height of his powers was
unable to stop the City of San Francisco from invading Yosemite National Park to construct the
Hetch Hetchy Dam. Then in 1956 the dam builders selected a site within the National Park
System, Dinosaur National Monument on the Colorado River. This time the opponents mounted ...
a national carnpaign and won. But their victory came at a heavy price - as a tradeoff the dam was .,
relocated outside the park, on a little known stretch ofthe Colorado River called Glen Canyon.

In 1963, as the darn gates closed and the river backed up and inundated hundreds of miles of
river and canyon, we came to understand that the issue involved more than just keeping dams out
of national parks and lamenting the loss of nice scenery. At stake was the integrity and life of the
river system itself.

I began to reflect on these issues over the course of many days and nights spent in the Grand
Canyon over the last half century. I hiked and boated and carnped beside the Colorado River
before Glen Canyon was built in the 1960s. In those years the Colorado river was a wild,
unpredictable, red-brown, sediment-laden torrent, "too thick to drink, too thin to plow," flooding
in the spring, languishing in the summer, always reflecting the seasonal weather across its vast
Rocky Mountain watershed.

When the gates of Glen Canyon Dam, a few miles upstream from Grand Canyon, closed in 1963,
we started to notice the downstream changes. The warm silt laden waters turnedjello green and
cold. In the depths of the Grand Canyon the waters rose and fell on a daily cycle, in response to
the heating and air conditioning demands in Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Over time, as I floated down the river, I saw trees high on the talus slope wither and die for lack
of water from seasonal flooding. I saw sandbars, once covered with arrowweed, willow and
cottonwood, disappear as the silt free waters scoured the banks down to granite boulders. I saw
the once plentiful native fish - unlike those anywhere on earth - driven back into a few isolated
tributaries, threatened with extinction. e