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100 big dams were planned continued {rom previous page and _ so it appeared from down on the ground - held fOT development by corpora- tions like We'yBrhaclJscr, that could work on :m urban-industrial scale. With some exceptions, the Upper Basin slumbered from the compact signing in 1922 through the Great Depression. RoOsevelt's New Deal barely touched the Upper Basin, and even World War II bypassed it. Then in 1948, the four Upper Basin states finally met to divvy up their balf of the Colorado River. The Bureau of Reclamation was pushing them to get going on river development; inflated with hubristic momeD- tum after the conquest of the Lower Colorado and the Columbia, the Bureau had hit the ground running in 1946 with a Colorado River report. Subtitled ~A Natural Menace Becomes a National Resource," it proposed 134 water developments for the Colorado River _ 100 of them for the Upper River. A couple of things were different, howev- er. A treaty during World War 11 had ~ed 1.5 MAF a year of water to Mell:ico. More ominously, the river had been running less water than it was "committed to" by the com- pact. In 1934, it had dropped below 10 MAF, and tbe best light the Bu~u cotIld put on the four-decade average was somewhere between 15 and 16 MAF. Other estimates put the average at less than 14 MAP, and a four- century tree-ring study has sinee put the aVerage at around 13.9 MAY a year. . In tbe first major acknowledgment of reality, the Upper Basin states decided not to divide up the 7.5 MAY the compact "gave: them. After giving the northeastern corner of Arizona 50,000 AF, they allotted themselves the following percentages of whatever water precipitation the Lower Basin and Mexico made available: Colorado, 51.75 percent; New Mexico, 11.25 pen:enti Utah, 23 percent; Wyoming, 14 percent. Only n few months after the Upper Colorado River Compact was signed, the Bureau put the MColorado River Storage Project and Participating Projects" proposal on the table. CRSP was the Bureau's bid to outdo its Lower Basin Boulder Canyon Project: an integrated. set of dozens of large and small water projects lo develop every acre of irrigable land in the Upper River region, and to water all the growing cities in the Upper Basin states outside the natural basin. (The Upper Basin itself, as distinct from the Upper Basin states, lacks largecilies.l These projectJ'; were all to be paid for by power revenues from Meash register dams,~ built for both storage and power generation on the main tribu- taries of the Upper River: Flaming Gorge Dam on the Green River, Echo Park Dam below the junction of the Green and Vampa rivers, two CUrea'1nti Dams on the Gunnison (now the three dams of the Aspinall Unit), and the keystone of the whole project, Glen Canyon Damjust'above the Lee'!; Ferry division point _ the Upper River's equivalent of Hoover. . Dam. At that point in the evolution of the American West, the cultural environment in the Upper River basin was California dreaming. An Upper River water establishment was in place: A set of Los Angeles clones - Denver, Albuquerque-Santa Fe, i4 - High Country' News - Novell1be'r'lO: 100'7 ... THE BEST DAM BOOS1ER: Wayne Aspinall in .1980; when lake Powell topped Ollt, 17 years after the dam's completion. Top', the building of Glen C?<myon Dam (Bureau 01 Reclamation photos). Salt Lake City - had water boards ready to invest beavily in out-of-basin diversions, and every water. shed had its "water conservancy district~ dedicated to CfInserving water by getting it oui of local streams before someone lower down got it first. The Upper River water establishment wanted what the Lower River had; it had just needed more time to get there. The Upper Basin champion who emerged in the 1950s and 19605 to implement the Upper Basin's desires was Colorado Rep. Wayne Aspinall, a Grand Junction schoolteacher who learned the Washington system and worked his way - as honestly and tapa- bly al; is possible in that power center - into the chainnanship of the House Interior Commiuee, which oversaw all Department ofInterior activities. For two decades, Aspinall made sure that nobody got anything that didn't also involve something (or the Upper River - first, passage of a Colorado River Storage Project Act (1956), then the funding on the big dams and larger diversion projects and planning work on the vast array oflittJe Rube Goldberg-like water diven;ion projeets. But it was evident from the first introduction of a CRSP bill that the cultural environment was an the verge of a "climate chanif',~ at least at the national level. A coalition led by David Brower of the Sierra Club drew a hard line at the Echo Park Darn in the first CRSP bill, which was' to flood 63 miles of beautiful valley and eanyon country along the Green River and 44 miles on the Vamps. This coalition mounted the first effective national assault on the pieties orWestem development. The Bureau - accustomed. to trumping John Muir-type aesthetic appeals with statis. tiC<l1 cost-benefit analyses demonstrating "the greatest good for the greatest number~ - now found itself up against opponent.~ who knew how to get the public's ear and ey.... and who had learned how to ex~ its bhJe.sk.y assumptions about costs and benefits. Brower's frontal assault on the Bureau's cob. bled figures for Echo Park, coupled with Wallace Stegner's beautiful Echo Park coffee- table book, the first great piece of environ- mental propaganda. sent the CRSP back to the drawing boards without Echo Park. Aspinall was eventually able to pass a CRSP bill, but it took seven years - and he had to do it in spite of the Bunau, which not even the big-man arrogancE' of its chief, Floyd Dominy, could restore to the confident impe- tus it had before being sliced and diced by Brower in the Echo P:uk he:uings. It is worth nOling that thC' WN;.tem water establishment split nver the eRSP. California liked using that million acre-feet of "surplus water" from the Upper River. and rather than gh'ing the Upper River support in the spirit of the Compact, "the Desert Empire~ jOined Brower and company in trying to elim- inate the CRSP. To get Echo Park Dam out of the CRSP bill, the preservationists had to gO along with the big dam in the little-known Glen Canyon. Brower - who is Dominy's equal in every- thing, inclUding ego - has always taken per- sonal responsibility for that "Ioss~ on himself; and since Brower is again a force in the Sierra Club, as a bO;lrd member, this history probably figures in the current proposal to drain Lake Powell. The great "cash register dams~ of the CRSP got built in the 1960s: Flaming Gorge on the upper Green. three dams in the Aspinall ullit on the Gunnison _ and Glen Canyon. A number of the "Participating Px-ojects~ also got built: the San Juan-chama out-of-basin diversion into Albuquerque, the Central Utah Project out of th~ Green Basin into the Wasatch Front, and some more mod- est in-basin jrrigation projects. e e The dam opponents mtWe in The construc:tion of those "big pieces" of the CRSP concluded an era. As the big lake behind Glen Canyon began to 611 in 1963, the Upper River region itself began filling up with an unusually concentrated and focused cast of counter-revolutionaries. The same old . developers were still there - miners looking . fOT the overlooked ore body, forest products . companies looking for the last old-growth, and land speculators feeding on the tourism boom and anticipating the vac&tion-home rush. But for this moment, there wpre more people arriving in flight from the empire than advancing its interests _ and they were coming with a "last stand" attitude. They were a breed that the indu~tri- al revGlutionaries and agrarian counter-revolutionar- ies alike would be calling "hippie environmentalists~ by 1970, although many o(them were serious mid. die-aged and elderly people, troubled by the course of the urban-industrial empire. At the same time, new laws and court decisions were putting their ideals on a more even footing with urban-industrial money. Congress pasescd the first endangered species legislation in 19()6, Inoo-li(ving and strengthening it in 1969 and 1973. This bas turned a number of scarcely noticed (because l'carce) fishes and birds into major obstadcs to traditional water developments. The National Environmental Policy Act followed in 1969, with the creation in 1970 ofthe Environmental Protection Agenc:y. The nation. al Clean Water Act came in 1972, and that same year Congress passed the Colorado River Salinity Act to all$wer Mexican complaints about the deterio- rating quality of water in the Basin. The change also came from within the Upper Basin states themselves. In 1973, the Colorado Legislature enlarged the concept of ~neficial use- in a powerful way, passing the first "Instream Flow Appropriations" law. This law, incredibly for a Western state. empowel'l!d tbe Colorado Water Conl;efVation Board (a state agency) lo "appropriate e