Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [199]
The reasons behind the South’s infatuation with dams was somewhat elusive. Precipitation in the South is uniformly ample, the rivers run well and often flood, and good damsites are, or were, quite common. But the same applies to New England, and there the landscape contains relatively few dams. There are water-supply reservoirs and small power dams, but only a handful of mammoth structures backing up twenty-mile artificial lakes, which are encountered everywhere in the South. Whatever the reasons, it is an article of faith in the South that you send a politician to Washington to bring home a dam. The first southern politician of national stature who went on record opposing one may have been Jimmy Carter.
Carter’s misgivings about dams appear to have been rooted in metaphysics, flintiness, and a sense of military honor. As a businessman, a state legislator, and the chairman of the Middle Flint River Planning and Development Council, he was at first enthusiastic when the Army Corps of Engineers announced plans to erect Spewrell Bluffs Dam, a $133 million structure on the Flint, which is one of Georgia’s larger rivers. However, some of Carter’s personal friends belonged to the state’s environmental community, and at about the same time he was running for governor, they introduced him to canoeing and river rafting, a sport with which he immediately fell in love. Caught between political expediency—many of the state’s business and labor interests were equally in love with Spewrell Bluffs Dam—and the appeals of close friends and his own changing values, Carter decided to make up his mind purely on the facts. He got a copy of the Corps’ general plan and environmental statement, closeted himself in a room, and, displaying that passion for detail that was to contribute to his political undoing, read it from cover to cover. He cross-checked its assertions with a number of experts; he did his own math; he graded the Corps’ hydrology (Carter had graduated from Annapolis as an engineer). In the end, he wrote a blistering eighteen-page letter to the Corps accusing it of “computational manipulation” and of ignoring the environment; then, exercising his gubernatorial discretion, he vetoed the dam. According to friends, Carter was deeply incensed by the Corps’ reliance on deception to justify the dam; as an Annapolis graduate, he didn’t believe a military unit would do such a thing. And, perhaps because he did go to Annapolis instead of West Point, he took it personally. “The Corps of Engineers lied to me,” he told his friends. He said it as if a stranger had wandered into his house, eaten everything in the icebox, and then, on leaving, chopped down his favorite tree.
Carter also possessed something rare among American politicians—a sense of history—and, according to those close to him, he began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams we had built. What right did we have, in the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all the world’s rivers? What would happen when the dams silted up? Fixed, huge, and permanent, dams were also oddly vulnerable. What if the climate changed? What if there were floods which the dams, their capacity drastically reduced by silt, couldn’t hold? What if there were terrible droughts, and farms and desert cities that owed their existence to dams faced economic ruin? Besides, having already built fifty thousand of them, what were we getting for our investment now? By the time Carter became President, the cumulative federal debt was approaching a trillion dollars and inflation had already visited the double digits, but the federal water bureaucracies were still going through $5 billion every year. One of the first things he was going to chop out of the federal budget was dams.
To a degree that is impossible for most people to fathom, water projects are the grease gun that lubricates the nation’s legislative machinery. Congress without water projects would be like an engine without oil; it would simply seize up. If an influential southern member of Congress didn