Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [320]
Because of its unprecedented destructiveness, and due to a natural reluctance on the part of Canadians to let go of so much water for the sake of their paternalistic and overambitious neighbors, the tours organized by the Wenatchee Daily World in the 1960s encountered pickets at every airstrip in the bush carrying signs that read WATER THIEVES BEWARE. By 1981, anti-NAWAPA sentiment in British Columbia had, if anything, intensified. Everyone seemed to have heard of it, and nearly everyone was against it—“nearly,” because here and there one finds someone who is for it, at least for some smaller version of it. Declining emphatically to be identified, a fairly well known professor at a major university said, “The thing is too big and destructive as is, but a smaller version is worth considering. Compared to the damage the loggers are inflicting on the coast, a few big new reservoirs and canals might appear harmless. The water is worth a lot of money to us, potentially. We wouldn’t have to go out and fell whole forests for income. Besides that, I think Canadians are being very narrow-minded about the whole thing. We depend on you for food, and why shouldn’t we help our neighbor when she is running out of water if we have far more than we can ever use?”
The logging of which the professor spoke is by far the largest source of income in the province of British Columbia, and is being conducted with a careless abandon that might make even the U.S. Forest Service wince. Logging is also a cyclical industry, expanding and contracting in rhythm with such imponderable forces as U.S. deficits and housing starts. Agriculture is more stable, and water could be sold through forty-year contracts like those of the Bureau of Reclamation, ensuring a steady, predictable income every year.
Derreck Sewall, who teaches at the University of Victoria and is widely acknowledged as the foremost authority on water in Canada, says that Canada has its own water shortages looming, particularly in the Okanagan region of southern British Columbia—western Canada’s fruitbasket—and on irrigated parts of the Alberta plains, where the farmers are overdrafting groundwater as determinedly as their American counterparts. For the foreseeable future, he sees no possibility of NAWAPA’s being built unless Canada itself broaches the idea. “There’s a xenophobic, dirigiste mood in this country today,” Sewall says. “Canadians feel like a colony of the U.S., which is in a certain sense justified. You own 95 percent of our oil industry, for example. So the mood is against exporting our most vital natural resource. But eventually Canada will approach the United States and say, ‘You want some of our water? O.K. Here’s the price to be paid. We’ll deal with you in realistic terms. Water will be part of an overall program of resource development and protection. You want our water, then don’t build the Garrison Diversion Project, or keep the return flows out of Lake Winnipeg. We’ll give you a certain amount of water for each certain percent reduction in acid rain.’ Canadians will eventually come to realize that, as far as the U.S. is concerned, water has a value far beyond that which prevails today. You could almost say that we’ve got you over a tub.”
So what, all things considered, are the odds that NAWAPA will be built?
“We’re going to solve the water problem through conservation,” says one venerable U.S. hydrologic engineer. “We’re not going to build any NAWAPA projects, even if the Canadians invite us in.