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By Root 1592 0

far more apocalyptic drought of 1976 and 1977: groundwater. Idaho may have more groundwater in storage than any other state except Alaska. The Snake River Aquifer, lying directly beneath the Teton River, is still prodigious. During the 1960s, when the drought occurred, thousands of pumps were already operating, supplementing the diversion ditches. Pumping, of course, can be expensive, especially if one’s crops require nine or ten feet of water a year. The answer then might be to grow something that requires less water, or to install more efficient irrigation systems. But the farmers of Fremont and Madison counties, good upstanding Mormon conservatives, wanted things their way—and they wanted the descendants of the people who had chased them out of Ohio and Illinois and Iowa to pay 90 percent of the cost. “Mormons get burned up when they read about someone buying a bottle of mouthwash with food stamps,” says Russell Brown, one of the dam’s most persistent critics. “But they love big water projects. They only object to nickel-and-dime welfare. They love it in great big gobs.”

With the entire Congressional delegation from Idaho behind the dam, authorization was a snap, and in the later years the appropriations came fast and furious. However, the project had a little trouble getting going; it received only $3 million during the first six years following authorization, probably as a result of the Vietnam War. During that same period, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and the Bureau was forced for the first time to make a public assessment of the environmental effects of its new dams. Before it learned to flood its critics with a tide of ink, the Bureau merely went through the motions of writing an environmental-impact statement; in the case of Teton, it ran to fourteen pages and didn’t say much of anything. The exercise, however, drew some attention to the project; both the Idaho Statesman, the state’s preeminent newspaper, and the Idaho Environmental Council began to take a closer look at it, and liked little that they saw. Published in Boise, on the other side of the state, the Statesman could afford to be objective, but even had the project been next door, the paper’s maverick young editor, Ken Robison, was not the sort who parrots the views of the local Chamber of Commerce. The Environmental Council, which included a number of scientists from the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Testing Station at Idaho Falls, was unusually sophisticated for a tiny organization, and fed Robison a steady diet of statistics worked out on a federal computer.

The statistics, on their face, were quite damaging. The project benefits had been calculated by the Bureau on the basis of the worst drought on record, outrageously stacking the deck in the project’s favor. The figures it used to calculate the annual value of flood prevention were about 200 percent higher than historical losses to floods. Of the thirty-seven thousand “new” acres to be opened to irrigation, twenty thousand acres were already being irrigated by groundwater pumping; the project would simply substitute surface water for sprinklers, which is a lot different from bringing new land into production.

No statistic, however, was as startling as one freely provided by the Bureau itself. According to its own report, on the 111,000 already cultivated acres that were to receive supplemental water from the Teton project, the average annual irrigation amounted to 132 inches; the project would simply give the farmers, on the average, another five. One hundred and thirty-two inches is five times the annual rainfall of farmland in Iowa; it is ten times what prudent farmers in the Ogallala region of arid West Texas put on their crops. It is the precipitation of tropical forests. In fact, according to the Bureau, a common method of irrigating on the Rexford benchlands is subirrigation, which means literally what it implies: water is dumped on the ground in such prodigious quantities that the water table rises up into the root zones of the crops. In one of the driest