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By Root 1705 0

to water what Russia is to land. Within its boundaries are, in whole or in part, the third-, the fourth-, the seventh-, the eighth-, and the nineteenth-largest rivers in North America. It is debatable how much of the world’s accessible and renewable fresh water the province holds, but the usual estimates are between 4 and 10 percent. The Fraser River alone gathers nearly twice the runoff of California; the Skeena’s flow approaches the runoff of Texas; both run to sea all but unused. The Talchako River, the main branch of the Bella Coola, which empties into the Pacific halfway between Vancouver and Prince Rupert, is fed by ice fields the size of eastern counties, and in the early summer the river runs like the Mistral, a riverine expressway in a Yosemite canyon that would make a dam-builder gasp. Among the larger rivers of British Columbia it barely rates a passing mention.

The relative proximity of so much water to so much arid land has been a source of compulsive longing in the American West for years. It wasn’t until the late 1950s, however, that anyone began thinking seriously about moving some of that water south. It is undoubtedly the grandest scheme ever concocted by man, and it was conceived, rightfully enough, in an engineering office in Los Angeles.

NAWAPA—like the mouth of the Amazon River or Itaipu Dam, it is a thing one has to see to comprehend, and since it hasn’t been built, even its architects may undervalue its brutal magnificence. Visualize, then, a series of towering dams in the deep river canyons of British Columbia—dams that are 800, 1,500, even 1,700 feet high. Visualize reservoirs backing up behind them for hundreds of miles—reservoirs among which Lake Mead would be merely regulation-size. Visualize the flow of the Susitna River, the Copper, the Tanana, and the upper Yukon running in reverse, pushed through the Saint Elias Mountains by million-horsepower pumps, then dumped into nature’s second-largest natural reservoir, the Rocky Mountain Trench. Humbled only by the Great Rift Valley of Africa, the trench would serve as the continent’s hydrologic switching yard, storing 400 million acre-feet of water in a reservoir 500 miles long. The upper Columbia and Fraser, which flow in opposite directions in the Rocky Mountain Trench, would disappear under it. Some of the water would travel east, down the Peace River—which would be remade and renamed the Canadian-Great Lakes Waterway—all the way to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. It would be enough to raise the level of all five lakes, double the power production at Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence (New York, after all, has a large Congressional delegation), and allow some spillover into the Illinois River and the Mississippi, permitting ocean freighters to reach St. Louis and providing a fresher drinking supply for the cities now withdrawing carcinogenic wastes from the river. The rest of the water would go south.

Imagine the Sawtooth Lifts, a battery of airplane-hangar siphons shooting 30,000 cubic feet per second through tunnels in the Sawtooth Range of Idaho and on to California, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico. Imagine Lake Nevada. Imagine the Columbia-Fraser Interchange, by which the West’s two largest rivers would be merged; a Pecos River Reservoir the size of Connecticut (the feckless Pecos having received a huge jolt of water from the north); another giant reservoir in Arizona which, through some probably unintended irony, would be called Lake Geneva. Imagine 19 million acre-feet of new irrigation water for Saskatchewan and Alberta. Imagine 2.3 million acre-feet for Idaho, 11.7 million acre-feet for the Texas high plains, 4.6 million for Montana, 13.9 million for California (under the NAWAPA plan, water would, as usual, flow uphill toward political power and money). Imagine the Mojave Desert green. Imagine, on the other end of the continent, a phalanx of hydroelectric dams across the bigger rivers pouring into James Bay, the lower appendage of Hudson’s Bay. Actually, those dams are the one part of the NAWAPA plan one needn’t imagine. Over the