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By Root 1633 0

the Corps was preoccupied with such mightily intrusive wonders as the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway and its county-size reservoirs in the South, it was proclaiming the 1970s the “Decade of the Environment,” publishing a four-color magazine devoted to wild rivers and fish and swamps, and holding regular palavers with its environmental adversaries to throw them off guard. General John Woodland Morris, who became chief of the Corps in 1970, is regarded by many conservationists as the most brilliant and effective adversary they ever met. Some of the same adjectives are used to describe Dominy—tough, brilliant, formidable—but it is odd how seldom anyone refers to him as “effective.”

Dominy’s problem stemmed from a fatal sin—pride—and a fatal misjudgment: that his despised adversary, David Brower, was the corporeity of the conservation movement—its unanimous voice, its unified soul. To Dominy, anyone who objected to any single thing the Bureau wanted to do was “a Dave Brower type.” He failed utterly to understand that Brower had always been a fringe figure in the conservation movement—respected, admired, but not necessarily followed or trusted or believed. Jack Morris of the Corps understood that, as a rule, conservationists enjoyed widespread public respect—that an endorsement from one conservation organization was worth the endorsements of a hundred Chambers of Commerce. He knew that when it came to a conflict between nature and civilization, millions of Americans automatically turned to the conservation groups for guidance. If such an organization endorsed a compromise proposal, general opposition could die like a puff of wind.

But the last thing Floyd Dominy was going to do was seek a compromise with conservation groups. If he went out of his way at all, it was to antagonize them. On February 13, 1966, he gave a speech in North Dakota lambasting the principle that certain rivers, or portions of rivers, ought to be set aside as “wild and scenic.” Calling the undammed Colorado River “useless to anyone,” Dominy harrumphed, “I’ve seen all the wild rivers I ever want to see.” The speech elicited a testy letter from the state’s fish and game commissioner (who was hardly a Dave Brower type) to Stewart Udall, suggesting that Dominy badly needed some edification about changing American values—not to mention the importance of rivers and wetlands to waterfowl. “Floyd, it seems to me that Commissioner Stuart has a point,” Udall wrote in a short memo with a copy of the letter attached. “My Secretary’s becoming a Dave Brower type,” Dominy sneered to his comrades in arms. A few months later, ignoring his advice, Congress passed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Under Dominy, the Bureau lost touch with reality so completely that it developed an uncanny knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. At the northern end of Lake Havasu, a few miles south of Needles, California, it had inadvertently created a large freshwater wetland known as Topock Marsh. Migrating ducks and geese that were evicted from the Central Valley soon discovered the marsh and descended on it by the tens of thousands during their winter sojourns. By the late 1940s, Topock Marsh had become one of the most important man-made attractions on the Pacific Flyway, and the Bureau, had it had any sense, would have graciously accepted its share of credit and basked in it. The grasses and duckweed, however, were phreatophytes, and consumed valuable water that could have been sold to Imperial Valley farmers for $3.50 an acre-foot. As a result, the Bureau began trying to dredge the marsh in 1948; when at first the dredging didn’t work, it spent millions of dollars and stepped up its efforts and pursued them so relentlessly that by the 1960s about 90 percent of the food grasses were gone. The marsh’s visiting waterfowl soon diminished from forty or fifty thousand a year to a few hundred or thousand at most.

Dominy’s Bureau regarded the operation as a “success,” failing utterly to recognize the public relations catastrophe into which it had happily stepped. Even Imperial Valley