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By Root 1507 0

best sites disappeared as fast as the rivers on which the dams were built. By the eighties, you were left with ludicrous projects like the Narrows Dam, where you had to build a subsurface dam twice as large as the one aboveground in order to stop the river from seeping out underneath. A full-size Lake Auburn, which could hold 2,400,000 acre-feet of water—but would deliver only two or three hundred thousand acre-feet a year, because most of the American River is already captured and appropriated; Auburn Dam would need awesome runoff in order to fill up and remain full—is projected to cost about two billion dollars, which means it will cost twice as much. Hoover Dam, which captures thirty million acre-feet of water (and routinely delivers nine or ten million acre-feet a year) was completed in 1936 for forty-eight million dollars—million—and change. If you are the Bureau of Reclamation, you are left trying to justify a dam that would yield 3 percent of Hoover’s water, and perhaps 8 percent of its power, and cost ten times more in uninflated dollars. You also have to explain why you are building a gigantic dam next door to a presumably active earthquake fault.

Finding the money to erect pyramids such as this was no problem for the pharaohs who ran Congress thirty or forty years ago, when the whole federal budget was smaller than the portion that pays interest every year on a $4 trillion national debt. But today, when a clutch of visionaries representing Utah water districts troops into the U.S. Capitol to lobby for some new taxpayer-financed dam, they get the same response the departing bunch from Texas just received: It’s conceivable—conceivable—that Congress might find a little money for the project, if the local sponsors agree to pay, let us say, one-half of the cost—up front. That is how water projects that are a matter of life or death become projects a region can live without.

But the thorniest desert in which today’s water lobby finds itself wandering is the ecological legacy of its predecessors. By erecting thirty thousand dams of significant size across the American West, they dewatered countless rivers, wiped out millions of acres of riparian habitat, shut off many thousands of river miles of salmon habitat, silted over spawning beds, poisoned return flows with agricultural chemicals, set the plague of livestock loose on the arid land—in a nutshell, they made it close to impossible for numerous native species to survive. So today, if you want to erect a dam on any tributary of the Colorado River, you have to worry about its effects on the squaw-fish, a federally listed endangered species. If you want to siphon more fresh water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, you have to ponder the effect on the spring- and winter-run chinook salmon, on the nearly vanished striped bass (an introduced species, but one with a big and tough sport fishing lobby), on the Delta smelt (a serious candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act), and on two dozen, three dozen, who knows how many land-based species whose precarious hold on existence might be lost through the conversion of remnant deserts or marshes or grasslands to crops, or of fecund estuaries into sterile saltwater sumps.

The fiercest environmental battles of the 1990s are likely to be fought in the American West, and many of them—most of them—may, to one degree or another, involve the Endangered Species Act. But some would be fought even if that act were written out of law. The battles over salmon in California will probably seem as nothing compared to those in the Northwest, because there salmon are a real industry; the Columbia River’s commercial and sport fishery is valued in the many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Columbia was once the greatest salmon river in the world: Fifteen million fish returned every year to spawn; today there are fewer than two million, and half of the watershed’s salmon runs (dozens in all) are in fairly imminent danger of going extinct.

What it all boils down to is undoing the wrongs caused by earlier generations