Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [318]
NAWAPA—the North American Water and Power Alliance—was conceived in the early 1950s by Donald McCord Baker, a planning engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Baker took the idea to Ralph M. Parsons, the head of the Pasadena-based firm bearing his name, who instantly fell in love with it, as, he would later insist, “everyone who has worked on it has fallen in love with it.” Before his death, Parsons created the NAWAPA Foundation, a tax-exempt receptacle for surplus profits from his company—which had fed on dams and aqueducts until it became the third- or fourth-largest engineering firm in the world—and dedicated it to enlightening the ignorant and converting the unappreciative about the project that was to become the obsession of his twilight years. In the 1960s, when anything big and brutish got at least a passing nod of attention, the NAWAPA scheme excited a considerable spasm of interest. Stewart Udall was able to declare, as Interior Secretary, “I’m for this kind of thinking.” Some exploratory discussions were apparently held between Canada and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Groups of dignitaries began making excursions into Canada under the auspices of the NAWAPA Foundation and the Wenatchee, Washington, Daily World, whose publisher, Wilfred Woods, was as enchanted by NAWAPA as Parsons.
In the 1970s, however, as the environmental movement and Canadian nationalism waxed, NAWAPA’s fortunes waned. Udall, having become a conservationist in office, began ridiculing the idea. Even the Bureau of Reclamation, which had been secretly assisting the NAWAPA lobby along with the Corps of Engineers, began to hold it at arm’s length. (In April of 1965, Commissioner Floyd Dominy went so far as to deliver a mild reprimand to an overenthusiastic Bureau engineer who had spoken too loudly and fondly of NAWAPA. “While I agree that ... potential interregional water transportation ... is a subject in which the Bureau is intensely interested and with which, I hope, the future will find us closely identified,” Dominy wrote his subordinate, whose name was Lewis Smith, “I do not believe the time is ripe for us ... we should, however, be prepared to move quickly should we have the opportunity.”) But the idea was kept alive by diehard believers: former Utah Democratic Senator Frank Moss (who in 1985 was still being kept on retainer by the Parsons company as a NAWAPA lobbyist), Hawaii Senator Hiram Fong, the late Governor Tom McCall of Oregon (proving that one could be a conservationist and a NAWAPA booster, too). “This is a plan that will not roll over and die,” Moss lectured anyone who would listen. “It may be fifty years or it may be a hundred years, but something like it will be built.”
By the late 1970s, Frank Moss was beginning to feel vindicated. People were gunning each other down in gas lines. California had just come through the worst drought in its history by a gnat’s eyelash. Nuclear power seemed on the verge of collapse. The Islamic revolution was the latest threat to America’s imported oil. Thousands of lakes and whole forests were dying from acid rain, a consequence of sulfur and nitrogen emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. Suddenly, the monster project that had been all but given up for dead began to twitch again. In October of 1980, at a California conference on “A High-Technology Policy for U.S. Reindustrialization” sponsored by the Fusion Energy Foundation—an offshoot of the U.S. Labor Party, which despises the Soviet Union but envies its inveterate commitment to gargantuan public works—Dr. Nathan W. Snyder of the Parsons Company reintroduced NAWAPA to a large and enthusiastic audience. “Ultimately, the decision to build NAWAPA—or a project similar to it—will determine, in some part, the future economic well-being in North America,” said Snyder. “Water is the most basic of all resources. Civilizations grew or withered depending on its availability.”
The Canadians, for their part, have viewed