Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [321]
“NAWAPA is the kind of thing you think about when you’re smoking pot,” says another. “People who say it will be built are crazy. Ralph Parsons himself told me he wasn’t really serious about it. He just needed the foundation as a tax dodge.”
“We won’t build the big NAWAPA,” says a third. “But I’d bet we’ll build a baby NAWAPA. No one knows how much money water will be worth in the future, but it’s going to be worth a lot. When we see we’re about to lose millions of acres of the most productive farmland in the country and thousands of towns are going to go bust, it will just be a tremendous shock. If we stop talking about water importation for a while, the Canadians will bring it up themselves.”
Recently the Soviet Union decided, after many years of planning, to shelve a scheme that would divert the Ob River, three-quarters the size of the Mississippi, from its northerly course into the Arctic Sea and send it fifteen hundred miles or so deep into the steppes of central Asia. A second diversion, which would shunt the Sukhona River into the Volga, has not yet been shelved, but remains in doubt. Together, the two projects are about as ambitious as a NAWAPA scheme built to two-fifths scale. As a result of the decision, the Aral Sea will continue to decline indefinitely at its current rate of eleven and a half feet per year, due to irrigation withdrawals. “Central Asia will simply have to get along with more rational use of its own resources,” said a group of Soviet water planners in an official statement. Then they added, “At least until the 21st century.”
On April 21, 1981, the premier of British Columbia, Bill Bennett, on a tour of California, gave a speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. Castigating those who wanted to stop building dams, Bennett told his audience that a way must be found to harness and preserve the fresh water pouring out of British Columbia to the ocean. “Dams are more than hydro,” he explained. “They preserve our greatest resource and control wild runoff.” A questioner then asked whether, since British Columbia at the moment had no plans to use the water Bennett wanted to “conserve” for anything other than hydroelectric power, his call for more dams meant that his government was considering the exportation of water to the United States. The answer was no, Bennett said firmly. Then he added, “But come and see me in twenty years.”
Shortly after Bennett’s speech, Canada was smacked particularly hard by the worldwide recession that followed in the wake of the Reagan economic policy. In British Columbia, the timber industry went moribund, and plans for several huge hydroelectric dams on the Peace, Liard, and Stikine rivers were indefinitely shelved. The provincial utility, B.C. Hydro, cut its staff force from 11,000 to 6,000, and unemployment went into double digits throughout the country. As a severely chastened Canada began crawling, slowly and unsteadily, out of the deepest economic morass it had seen since the Depression, one could detect a strikingly different attitude on the part of some of its prominent politicians toward a NAWAPA-style water-diversion scheme. Early in 1985, the leader of Quebec’s Liberal Party, Robert Bourassa, began to push an eastern Canadian version of NAWAPA, the GRAND Canal (for Great Replenishment and Northern Development Canal Concept), which would turn James Bay into a freshwater lake by constructing a tremendous dike across its northern side. The big rivers feeding the bay would pool below the dike, forming a freshwater reservoir nearly the size of Lake Ontario. The