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100 big dams were planned ... continued (rom pre~ious page and _ so it appeared from down on the ground _ held for development by corpora- tions like Wcyerhacuser, that could work on on urban.industrial scale. With some cllceptions, 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 half of the Colorado River. The Bureau of Reclamation was pushing them to get going on river development; inflated with hubristic momen- tum after the conquest of the Lower Colorado and the Columbia, tho Bureau had hit the ground running in 1946 with a Colorado River report. Subtitled "A Natural Menace Becomea 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 ceded J.5 MAF a year of water to Mexico. 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 the best light the Bureau could put on the four-decade average was somewhere between 15 and 16 MAF. Other estimates put the average at less than 14 MAF, and a four. century tree-ring study has since put the average at around 13.9 MAF a year. In the first major acknowledgment of reality, the Upper Basin states de<ided not to divide up the 7.5 MAF the compact "gave~ them. After giving the northeastern corner of Arizona 50,000 AF, they allotted themselves the following percentages of whatever wawr predpitation the Lower Basin and Mexico made available: CoIDrado, 51.75 percent; New MexicD, 11.25 percent; Utah, 23 percent; Wyoming, 14 pereent. Only n few months aner the Upper Co]orado River Compact was signed, the Bureau put the "ColoradD River Storage Project and Participating Projects'" proposal on the table. CRSP was the Bureau's bid to outdo ita Lower Basin Boulder Canyon Project: an integrated set of dozens of large and small water projects to develop every [u::re of irrigable land in the Upper River region, and to water all the growing cities in the Upper Basin :;t.atcs outside the natural basin. (The Upper Basin itself, as distinct from the Upper Basin states, lacks large cities.) These projects were all to be paid for by power revenues from ~cash register dams," built for both storage and power generation on the main tribu- taries of the Upper River: F]aming Gorge Dam on the Green River, Echo Park Dam below the junction of the Grcen andYampa rivers, two Curecanti Dams on the Gunnisen (now the three dams of the Aspina1J UnitJ, and the keystone of the whole project, Glen Canyon Dam just 'above the Lee's 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, 14 _ HII~h Country'New~ - November' 10,' 199'7 THE BEST DAM BOOSTER: Wayne Aspinall in .1980,. when' lake Powell lOPped out, 17 years after the dam's completion. Top, the building of Glen ~anyon Dam (Bureau 01 Reclamation photos). Salt Lake City _ had water boards ready to invest heavily in out.of-basin diversions, and every water- shed had its "water conservancy district~ dedicated to conMrving water by getting it out 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 capa- b]y 3S is possible in that power center - into the chairmanship of the House Interior Committee, which oversaw all Department ofInterior activities. For two decades, Aspinall made sure that nobody got anything that didn't also involve something for 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 of little Rube Goldberg-like water diversion projects. But it was evident from the first introduction of a CRSP bill that the cultural environment was on the verge ofa ~elimate change,~ at least at the national level. A coalition led by David Brower of the Sierra Club drew a hard line at the Echo Park Dam in the first CRSP bill, which was to flood 63 miles of beautiful valley and canyon country along the Green River and 44 miles on the Yampa. This coalition mounted the first effective national assault on the pieties of Western development. The Bureau - accustomed to trumping John Muir-type aesthetic appeals with statis- tic.'1l cost-benefit analyses demonstrating ~the greatest good for the greatest number~- now founo itself up against opponent~ who knew how to get the public's ear and ey.... and who had learned how to expose its blue-sky 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 Bureau. which not even the big-man arrogance of its chief, Floyd Dominy, could resture to the confident impe. tus it had before being sliced and diced by BrQwer in the Echo Park hcnrings. It is worth noting that the Wl;>stem water establishment split over the CRSP. CalifQrnin liked using that million acre-feet of "surplus water" from the Upper River, and rather than giving the Upper River support in the spirit of the Compact, "the Desert Empirc" joined Brower aud 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 G]en Canyon. Brower - who is Dominy's equal in every- thing, including ego _ has always taken per. sonal responsibility for that ~]oss" on himself; and since Brower is again a force in the Sierra Club, as a bonrd member, this history probably figures in the current proposal to drain Lake Powe]1. The great "cash register dams" of the CRSP got built in the 1960s: Flaming Gorge on the upper Green. three dams in the Aspinall unit on the Gunnison - and G]en Canyon. A number of the ~Pafticipating P.rojet;ts" also got built: toe San Juan-Cha.ma out.of.basin diversion into Albuquerque, the Central Utah Project out of the Green Basin into the Wasatch Front, and some more mod- est in-basin irrigation projects. The dam opponents move in The construction ofthose "big pieces" of the CRSP concluded an era. As the big lake behind Glen Canyon began to fill 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 . for the overlooked ore body, forest products . companies looking for the last old.growth, and land speeulators feeding on the tourism boom and anticipating the vacation.home rush. But for this moment, there were 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 revolutionaries and agrarian counter-revolutionar- ies alike would be calling ~hippie environmentali~ts" by 1970, although many of 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 passed the first endangered species legislation in 19G6, mo,jifying and strengthening it in 1969 and 1973. This has turned a number Qf scarcely noticed {because ~carcel fishes and birds into majorobstflc1es to traditional water developments. The Nation[ll Environmental Policy Act followed in 1969, with the creation in 19iO of the Environmenta] Protection Agency. The nation- al Clean Water Act came in 1972, and that same year Congress passed the Colorado River Salinity Act to answer 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 "beneficial use~ in a powerful way, passing the first "Instream Flow Appropriations~ law. This law, incredibly for a Western state, empowered the Co]orado Water Conservation Board (a state agency) to "appropriate