Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [109]
It was, of course, a love affair not limited to the Northwest or even the West. The whole country wanted more dams. In Appalachia, the Tennessee Valley Authority had an answer to poverty: dams. No river in the entire world has as much of its course under reservoirs as the Tennessee; by the late 1960s, it was hard to find a ten-mile free-flowing stretch between dams. The Missouri is a close second; about seven hundred miles in its middle reaches became a series of gigantic stairstep reservoirs. In Texas and Oklahoma, between 1940 and 1975, something like eight million acres of land were submerged by artificial lakes. Much of this land was in the eastern part of those states; it was exceptionally fertile (as were the bottomlands along the Tennessee) and visited by adequate rainfall, making it some of the best farmland in the nation. No one seemed bothered by the spectacle of a government creating expensive farmland out of deserts in the West while drowning millions of acres of perfect farmland in the East. If there was a stretch of free-flowing river anywhere in the country, our reflex action was to erect a dam in its path.
There were legitimate reasons, of course, to build a fair number of those thousands of dams. Hydropower obviously was one; the Columbia dams helped prevent the horror of Nazism from blackening the entire world. Some new irrigation projects made economic sense, as late as the 1940s and 1950s (though virtually none did after then). The Tennessee and Red rivers were prone to destructive floods, as was the Columbia—as were many rivers throughout the country. A better solution, in many cases, would have been to discourage development in floodplains, but the country—least of all the Congress—wasn’t interested in that. For a dam, whether or not it made particularly good sense, whether or not it decimated a salmon fishery or drowned a gorgeous stretch of wild river, was a bonanza to the constituents of the Congressman in whose district it was located—especially the engineering and construction firms that became largely dependent on the government for work. The whole business was like a pyramid scheme—the many (the taxpayers) were paying to enrich the few—but most members of Congress figured that if they voted for everyone else’s dams, someday they would get a dam, too.
And this, as much as the economic folly and the environmental damage, was the legacy of the go-go years: the corruption of national politics. Water projects came to epitomize the pork barrel; they were the oil can that lubricated the nation’s legislative machinery. Important legislation—an education bill, a foreign aid bill, a conservation bill—was imprisoned until the President agreed to let a powerful committee chairman tack on a rider authorizing his pet dam. Franklin Roosevelt had rammed a lot of his public-works programs through a Congress that was, if not resistant, then at least recumbent. A generation or two later, however, it was Congress that was writing omnibus public-works bills authorizing as much as $20 billion worth of water projects at a stroke and defying threats of presidential vetoes. Most members who voted for such bills had not the faintest idea what was in them; they didn’t care; they didn’t dare look. All that mattered was that there was something in it for them. What had begun as an emergency program to put the country back to work, to restore its sense of self-worth, to settle the refugees of the Dust Bowl, grew into a nature-wrecking, money-eating monster that our leaders lacked the courage or ability to stop.
CHAPTER SIX
Rivals in Crime
On the 16th of August, 1962, Major General William F. Cassidy, the director of civil works for the United States Army