Even the Major would have found it ironic that Lake Powell bears his name. No tree-hugging conservationist—he saw western rivers as a huge plumbing system ready to help build the glorious American future, yet he still would have found Lake Powell a caricature of the ideas he had sown, a monstrosity defying his hard-learned assumptions of a sustainable West and localized control of water. The lake now known as Powell was created by the last of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation mega-dams, the 710-foot Glen Canyon Dam, which rose on the Colorado fifteen miles above Lees Ferry in 1963. The immense reservoir of Lake Powell that grew behind it became one of the world’s largest human-made lakes, stretching 186 miles upriver and flooding the quiet beautiful red rock chasms of Glen Canyon. Drowned now were the heady rush of rapids down Cataract Canyon, and the influx of that Dirty Devil River that Powell had been so determined to locate. Gone, too, were innumerable petroglyphs, grottoes, side canyons, and rock faces. It proved a devil’s bargain: The Glen Canyon Dam got passed after David Brower and fellow environmentalists had stopped another dam project on the Green River. The outrageous trade-off sparked the environmental movement and rang the death knell of the mega-dam.
Three hundred miles downriver from Lake Powell lies Hoover Dam. Thus bracketed, the Colorado through the Grand Canyon has become little more than a canal between these two mammoth hydroelectric centers. Glen Canyon engineers release cold water from the depths of Lake Powell into the Canyon for rafters and boaters, this icy water replacing the warm, muddy river down which Powell ventured. The Colorado has become America’s—and likely the world’s—most contested and controlled river, every single drop of it allocated to serve more than 36 million people in seven states—more than the nation’s population when Powell served at Shiloh—mostly gathered in massive, often desert cities of Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Denver, San Diego, and Mexicali, and to irrigate nearly six million acres of farmland. In 1922, Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, traveled to a Santa Fe lodge to allocate the Colorado’s water among the seven riverine states. The resulting Colorado River Compact did just that. (Mexico objected, a treaty two decades later yielded it 10 percent of the river’s flow.)
This heavy-handed, central settlement was exactly what Powell had for so long argued against. The Compact set off a binge of dam-building by the Bureau of Reclamation. The small-dam system that Powell had cautiously imagined on the tributaries of western rivers now looked to dam every major watercourse. Political expediency now had more weight than environmental or ultimately economic costs: While engineers put up 85 dams between 1902 and 1930, the number jumped to 203 during the following 40 years. Bureau staff soared from a few thousand employees in the 1920s to 20,000 in the 1940s. Every locality wanted a dam project, whether it made sense or not. Somewhere along the line the dams got even larger, and, as Powell would have predicted, things got truly out of hand. The states started canal projects to distribute that water, often lifting it across absurd distances and over mountains. The Central Arizona Project, completed in 1993 at a cost of $5 billion, diverts Colorado River water through a 336-mile canal system to Phoenix and Tucson. Southwestern cities grew faster than any other region in the United States, putting even greater strains on the water infrastructure.
Today, there is not enough river water for everyone to take their legal allotment. The Colorado has not much more to give, yet dependence on its waters keeps growing. Recent droughts have pushed farmers to tap deeper and deeper into the aquifers, some “water mining” now drills 3,000 feet to reach the precious commodity in the vanishing Ogalla Aquifer. The fossil water deep under the ground, which took millions of years to collect, is being withdrawn rapidly—and largely not being replaced.
In 1935, when one of humanity’s more remarkable engineering feats—Hoover Dam—was completed, a curious omen befell Washington, D.C. A dust cloud reaching 10,000 feet in the sky blew into town—remarkably consisting of the aerated soil from Nebraska and Oklahoma 1,000 miles to the west—just as the Senate debated the government’s responsibility in mitigating the great Dust Bowl. A severe drought across the West had created a new form of weather, the “black duster,” facilitated by the indiscriminate plowing of the prairies. The topsoil on more than a million acres simply blew away. Congress and the secretary of the interior were slowly moving to address the degradation with the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 and a bill establishing the Soil Conservation Service the next year, whose measures, such as planting windbreaks and seeding grasses, did much to head off future black dusters. On that early spring day, the nation’s capital became a city on the prairies, infiltrated by great filth that begrimed the windows of federal office buildings. It was the most tragic and most impressive lobbyist to visit those early discussions of climatic disaster.
More recently, a combination of droughts and overdemand has swallowed much of lakes Powell and Mead. A good snowpack one year revives the reservoirs somewhat, but then again Powell would have made clear that such variability is normal, and that one must certainly not hope to escape long droughts. Intensifying the mounting crisis in the West are rapid population growth and global climate change, the latter of which a recent National Climate Assessment report concludes will likely make devastating dryness an ongoing condition.
From the Arid Lands controversy of Powell’s day can be drawn important parallels—and a still unique perspective—for the current climate debates. The genius of John Wesley Powell—for which his times were not ready—was his sense that sustaining development in the arid lands rested on a broad-front integration of human and physical factors under a so-often-variable climate. It was not enough merely to acknowledge that the land was desperately dry or to seed it with irrigation works; it was also necessary to establish the legal frameworks to tie the water to the land, to design watershed communities, to inform Congress in a way that would keep its usual interventions modest, and to establish mechanisms for monitoring meteorological and ecological factors. At the heart of such large-scale assessments lay Powell’s far-reaching programs in topographic and geological mapping, the classification of land, the establishment of regular data monitoring with such instruments as permanent stream and rain gauges, and the ongoing assessments of the land’s resources. He could have written the playbook for today’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-authorized body set out to gather and integrate scientific and economic data on global climate change.
Powell’s 1869 river voyage had bestowed on him a geologist’s deep understanding of Earth’s history—that forces operating on the landscape were destined to shift radically in the face of climatic change. These lessons raised serious doubts about relying too heavily on the stability of climatic conditions. It was not a far step for him to sense the dynamism between earth, climate, and human activities. What Stewart, Herbert, and others missed was that Powell did not look to these efforts as either a bureaucratic power play or simply an obsessive collection for science, but as a serious human commitment to managing the future—an acknowledgment that no future would be entirely friendly to human interests. Indeed, the responses to Powell’s ideas in that debate sound much as they do today. C. D. Wilber, first secretary of the Illinois Natural History Society, whom Powell most certainly knew, accused him of producing scientific information that “is consistent only with the all too common practice of public fraud.”
Powell’s emphasis on watershed commonwealths and local responsibility for water use seems far from crazy after all. “Irrigation emerged as an individual and collective effort at the watershed level,” reads New Era for Irrigation, a National Academy of Sciences report, “and in many important respects its future will be determined in the watershed. The growth of locally driven watershed activities reflects a promising trend in water management.” Indeed, a Bureau of Reclamation report found that western-water stakeholders largely favored decisions made at the local level on issues of water policy.
As in Powell’s day, sociocultural beliefs about American enterprise and its golden future can still trample over the dawning realizations of what science is revealing. It took severe drought in his day for the irrigation debate to come onstage—and later for the Dust Bowl to savage great tracts of topsoil to force Congress into taking a more rational view of full-tilt exploitation of the land. It took a good many more years for Powell’s ideas to sink in and blossom. The debate over global climate change will also take time—filled as it had been in Powell’s day with vituperative national debates clouded by misinformation, the terrors of economic recessions, and unsettling climate fluctuations.
If Powell was here today, he would be at the forefront of climate change, working to inform the public about the relationship of a warming climate and flooding, drought, rising sea levels, and bad storms. The connection would be all too clear for him. But so, too, would his optimism that Americans and the rest of the world can adapt and work to mitigate these challenging conditions. He would—as he had always been—be there to serve his country.