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By Root 1770 0

doing what they thought was right. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers knew that their dams would ruin the Columbia River fishery, or most of it, as the years and decades went by. But they convinced themselves, and the Congress—and, for that matter, most people living in the Pacific Northwest—that all the new power and water was worth the price. It was simply how everyone thought—then. In 1967, in order to be ready for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was coming out to dedicate John Day Dam and who wanted to feel the thrum of its turbines, the Corps closed the dam gates before the fish ladders were operational, condemning a migration of hundreds of thousands of salmon and steelhead to death. The vice president’s schedule couldn’t be changed. The Corps, a perfect representative of its era, never bothered to ask whether the same might be true of the fish.

By the seventies, however, America’s values were utterly different, because everyone’s experiences had changed. People who came through the Depression didn’t just eat salmon, they survived on it, and they were sick of it; it was known as poverty steak, because it sold for ten cents a pound. Those who were born later could only listen to stories of rivers you could cross on the backs of salmon, of creeks where they crowded themselves out of the water and flopped into the woods. Suddenly there was plenty of cotton and fruit grown on irrigation water; there was plenty of cheap steak, because subsidized water was raising millions of cattle on irrigated alfalfa and grass. There was plenty of cheap hydroelectricity, just two or three generations after the Depression, when many rural towns in the West had no electricity at all. All things man-made had become plentiful, but a great menu of things once abundant in nature had become scarce.

And now people were demanding some of it back.

It didn’t seem possible when I began writing this book, but by now it is beginning to seem plausible after all. After damming the canyons and dewatering the rivers in order to spill wealth on the land, we are going to take some of the water back, and put it where, one could argue—as more and more Westerners now do—it really belongs. Law has been the ignition, but a great, almost epochal shift in values has worked as the engine of change. In the mid-eighties, after being hammered by a landmark public trust decision, the city of Los Angeles reduced its diversions from the streams feeding Mono Lake by 60,000 acre-feet a year. The level of the lake, a vast salty haven for migratory waterfowl, began to stabilize after dropping dramatically over forty years. A few years later, the city actually returned some water to the Owens River, which began to flow again for the first time in almost half a century. It didn’t flow as it once did, but at least you could call it a river again. It flowed out of new history. William Mulholland was dead. The board of his Department of Water and Power had been all but taken over by environmentalists. The mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, said with genuine contrition that he wanted to repair some of the damage his city had done.

It was the same everywhere. In 1992, the newly appointed Commissioner of Reclamation, Dennis Underwood, hailed not from Bountiful, Utah, or Orchard City, Colorado, but from Santa Monica. His new regional director in California, Roger Patterson, had just decided to dedicate outflows from Folsom Lake to the California Delta instead of cotton farmers and was holding hundreds of thousands of acre-feet in Shasta Lake for the sake of fish instead of alfalfa. Patterson said he looked forward to implementing the just-passed Central Valley Project Reform Act—legislation that might have prompted Floyd Dominy to resign in disgust. After all, he had acquired a much more important constituency—a public that was beginning to wonder why such an agency even exists—and a loaded gun called the Endangered Species Act was aimed at his head.

Even in the Northwest, where the sheer size of the dams, and the sheer value of hydroelectricity, make change