all of this with a mixture of horror, amusement, and avarice. Few seem to believe that NAWAPA will ever be built, but anyone important who mentions it on either side of the border usually rates several column-inches in the Vancouver Sun. A number of times in the past several years, Canadian television crews have trooped into the United States to film the sputtering irrigation pumps in West Texas, the salt-encrusted lands in the San Joaquin Valley, and the ghostly abandoned orchards in central Arizona. In western Canada, at least, paranoia about NAWAPA seems to be the reigning state of mind. A few years ago, a British Columbia television journalist named Richard Bocking wrote a blistering book entitled Canada’s Water—For Sale? which attacked not only NAWAPA but the huge and, as far as Bocking is concerned, pointless dams and reservoirs being built and planned by the provincial utility, B.C. Hydro—reservoirs that, as Bocking pointedly noted, could serve someday as off-the-shelf storage basins for a water-exportation scheme. The more conspiratorially minded in Canada’s environmental community are convinced that an intimate confederacy exists among water developers—a kind of freemasonry of engineers—which makes them willing, even eager, to aid one another’s grandoise ambitions at the expense of their own nation’s interests. It happens to be true that in Canada most of those favorably disposed toward NAWAPA belong to the water-development fraternity. A Canadian professor of hydrologic engineering, Roy Tinney, has even proposed a somewhat less stupefying version of the plan, nicknamed CeNAWP, that would divert the Peace and Athabasca rivers and some of the water in Great Slave Lake to southern Alberta and the American high plains. Every now and then a British Columbia politician has dropped a coy hint that his province (which is, politically speaking, far more independent of Ottawa than an American state is of Washington) might be open to some mutually profitable continental water scheme—someday. Moira Farrow, a reporter for the Vancouver Sun who has covered water policy for years, says that some of the province’s leading political figures are privately awed by the NAWAPA plan—as if they wished they had thought of it themselves.
There is, in fact, a great deal in the plan for Canada, as there is for Mexico, which has a surplus of oil but a chronic, and grim, and worsening shortage of food. Canada would get more hydroelectric power than the United States—some 38 million kilowatts under one version of the plan; Mexico would get 20 million acre-feet of water, enough to triple its irrigated acreage. Canada would also get a great deal of irrigation water, and, if the contemplated navigation canals are built, a shipping route between its mineral-rich northland and the Mississippi and Great Lakes.
It is Canada, however, that would have to suffer the worst of the environmental consequences, and they would be phenomenal. Luna Leopold, a professor of hydrology at the University of California at Berkeley, says of NAWAPA, “The environmental damage that would be caused by that damned thing can’t even be described. It could cause as much harm as all of the dam-building we have done in a hundred years.”
Every significant river between Anchorage and Vancouver would be dammed for power or water, or both—the Tanana, the Yukon, the Copper, the Taku, the Skeena, the Stikine, the Liard, the Bella Coola, the Dean, the Chilcotin, and the Fraser. All of these have prolific salmon fisheries, which would be largely, if not wholly, destroyed. (Since the extirpation of around 90 percent of the Columbia’s salmon run, the Fraser, the Stikine, and the Skeena have become the most important salmon rivers on earth.) In the western United States, the plan would drown or dry up just about any section of wild river still left: the Flathead, the Big Hole, the Selway, the Salmon; the Middle Fork of the Salmon, the Yellowstone, the Madison, the Lochsa, and the Clearwater would largely disappear. In Canada and the U.S. alike, not just rivers but an astounding amount