Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [271]
The third man was the governor of Colorado, Richard Lamm. Young, humorless, thoughtful, intense, prematurely silver-haired, Lamm was a prototype of the New Age politician. As a state legislator he had made a name as an environmentalist, and a rather bold one—he was the leader of the successful effort to keep the lucrative Winter Olympics out of Denver. In 1978, the Almanac of American Politics described him as “far-out.” He flew periodically to Chicago or New York to hobnob with people like Garrett Hardin, the ecologist, and Hazel Henderson, the “futurist,” who served with him on the national board of the Council on Population and Environment. He staffed his administration with left-leaning people in their twenties and thirties—people like Harris Sherman, his resources secretary, who had served as counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund. Lamm was the sort of politician one could imagine drinking Red Zinger tea amid the whiskey-swillers in the smoke-filled rooms; he had backpacks and bicycles in his garage, and his wife, Dottie, was a well-known feminist. From every Chamber of Commerce in every mean little Colorado town there arose a collective groan. Dick Lamm—the governor?
But Lamm already had a reputation, in some circles, as a rather shameless opportunist. And even at the apogee of his alleged radicalism, he never was known as someone who didn’t like water projects.
In 1975, when Don Christenson and his Weldon Valley landowners’ group went shopping for a lawyer to represent them in what they were sure could culminate in a legal battle with the Bureau of Reclamation, they decided they had better choose well. “Everyone we talked to said, ‘You want the best, go hire Glenn Saunders,’ ” Christenson remembers. “I said, ‘Glenn Saunders, hell! Name one dam he’s ever opposed. He isn’t going to bother with a bunch of farmers like us.’ Well, we went to see him anyway. At first he looked like he couldn’t wait for us to go back out the door. But we served it up to him straight, and that man listened to us. You could watch his prejudices dissolve. I mean, he was a lawyer, first and foremost, and he knew we had a case.”
“Here was this bunch of farmers marching in here saying they wanted to stop Narrows Dam,” a raspy-voiced Saunders recounted. “I said to them, ‘Stop Narrows Dam! We don’t want that. We want to get everything we can built!’ But they kept throwing facts at me, and they finally had me convinced Narrows is a boondoggle. When I took a closer look it was an even bigger boondoggle than they said.”
“Old Saunders had sort of half agreed to represent us,” Christenson recalls. “But I think he still wanted to hear what the Bureau had to say. So he ups and says, ‘Get your coats! We’re going out to see the Bureau.’ Just like that! We drove out there to the Bureau’s big box of a headquarters, Mr. Saunders and Marvin Etchison, our president, and me. Saunders knew just the man to see. We walked into the bureaucrat’s office—I can’t remember who he was—and sat down like we owned it. I was tickled—mad as I was at the Bureau, I never would have done something like that. And Mr. Saunders and this Bureau guy got into an argument right away. I don’t even know about what, but the Bureau guy said, ‘Well, Mr. Saunders, you of all people should know that.’ ” Christenson is given to explosions of laughter, and the recollection makes him almost giddy. “ ‘You should know the answer to that!’ Saunders doesn’t say another word. He was mad! He gets up and kind of calmly says to Marvin and me, ‘Come on, Marvin and Don. We can accomplish nothing further here.’ And out we went, just like we came in. In the car, Saunders says, ‘I want you to go back to the Weldon Valley and start raising a kitty of a hundred thousand