Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment - Hardcover

Jacques Leslie is the author of The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. A draft of Deep Water has won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, judged by Ted Conover, Sara Mosle, and Jonathan Harr. Leslie lives in Mill Valley, California.

Excerpted from Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment by Jacques Leslie. Copyright © 2005 by Jacques Leslie. Published in September, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

PROLOGUE

Start with the primal dam, Hoover. The first dam of the modern era is America’s Great Pyramid, whose face was designed without adornment to emphasize its power, to focus the eye on its smooth, arcing, awe-inspiring bulk. Yet the dam nods to beauty, with a grace that grows more precious year by year: its suave Art Deco railings, fluted brass fixtures, and a three-mile-long sidewalk’s worth of polished terrazzo-granite floors are the sort of features missing from the purely utilitarian public works projects of more recent decades. Hoover is a miraculous giant thumbnail that happens to have transformed the West. Take it away, and you take away water and power from twenty-five million people. Take it away, and you remove a slice of American history, including a piece of the recovery from the Depression, when news of each step in the dam’s construction—the drilling of the diversion tunnels, the building of the earth-and-rock cofferdams, the digging to bedrock, the first pour of foundation, the accretion of five-foot-high cement terraces that eventually formed the face—heartened hungry and dejected people across the country. And you take away the jobs the dam provided ten or fifteen thousand workers, whose desperation compelled them to accept risky, exhausting labor for $4 a day—more than two hundred workers died during Hoover’s construction.

The dam and Las Vegas more or less vivified each other; if Hoover evokes glory, Las Vegas, only thirty miles away, is its malignant twin. Even now, Hoover provides 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water, turning a desert outpost into the fastest-growing metropolis in the country—by all means, take away Las Vegas. Take away Hoover, and you might also have to take away the Allied victory in World War II, which partly depended on warplanes and ships built in Southern California with its hydroelectric current. And take away modern Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix: you reverse the twentieth-century shift of American economic power from East Coast to West. Take away Hoover and the dams it spawned on the Colorado—Glen Canyon, Davis, Parker, Headgate Rock, Palo Verde, all the way to Morelos across the Mexican border—and you restore much of the American Southwest’s landscape, including a portion of its abundant agricultural land, to shrub and cactus desert. Above all, take away Hoover, and you take away the American belief in technology, the extraordinary assumption that it above all will redeem our sins. At Hoover’s September 30, 1935, dedication, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes exactly reflected the common understanding when he declared, “Pridefully, man acclaims his conquest of nature.”

Hoover’s image became one of the nation’s most popular exports: after it, every country wanted dams, and every major country, regardless of ideology, built them. Between Hoover and the end of the century, more than forty-five thousand large dams—dams at least five stories tall—were built in 140 countries. By now the planet has expended $2 trillion on dams, the equivalent of the entire 2003 U.S. government budget. The world’s dams have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth’s rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field. They adorn 60 percent of the world’s two hundred-plus major river basins, and the water behind them blots out a terrain bigger than California. Their turbines generate a fifth of the world’s electricity supply, and the water they store makes possible as much as a sixth of the earth’s food production. Take away Hoover Dam, and you take away a bearing, a confidence, a sense of what nations are for.

Yet in a sense, that’s what’s happening. Even if Hoover lasts another eleven hundred years (by which time Bureau of Reclamation officials say Lake Mead will be filled with sediment, turning the dam into an expensive waterfall), its teleological edifice has already begun to crumble. In seven decades we have learned that if you take away Hoover, you also take away millions of tons of salt that the Colorado once carried to the sea but that have instead been strewn across the irrigated landscape, slowly poisoning the soil. Take away the Colorado River dams, and you return the silt gathering behind them to a free-flowing river, allowing it again to enrich the downstream wetlands and the once fantastically abundant, now often caked, arid, and refuse-fouled delta. Take away the dams, and the Cocopa Indians, whose ancestors fished and farmed the delta for more than a millennium, might have a chance of avoiding cultural extinction. Take away the dams, and the Colorado would again bring its nutrients to the Gulf of California, helping that depleted fishery to recover the status it held a half century ago as an unparalleled repository of marine life. Take away the dams, finally, and the Colorado River returns to its virgin state: tempestuous, fickle, in some stretches astonishing.

From the peak of dam construction in the early 1970s, when large dams rose at the rate of nearly a thousand a year, the pace has dramatically slowed. One part of the explanation is simple topography: particularly in the United States and Europe, the best dam sites have been used. The other part reflects a gradual appreciation of dams’ monumental destructiveness. Dam-planning processes, once the province of bureaucrats, engineers, and economists, have expanded to include environmentalists and anthropologists charged with limiting dams’ harm. And environmental and human rights activists in the United States and Europe have allied with groups in poor countries whose members are threatened with displacement. Though limited by their tiny budgets (and, typically, police intimidation), the groups discovered that if they could tie up projects in long delays, investors might withdraw.

The battle over dams now is at the core of conflicts throughout the world involving water scarcity, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, development and globalization, social justice, the survival of indigenous peoples, and the growing gap between rich and poor. As water has grown scarce in one river basin after another, some people have predicted water wars, but the mortal struggle involving dams is already a couple of decades old. How it is resolved will determine the fate of countless river basins and the life—human, animal, and plant—that they support.

Despite their paltry resources, dam opponents in recent years have won the more telling victories. Under pressure from its critics, the world’s largest dam financier, the World Bank, established policies to protect indigenous peoples and tightened its regulations to improve resettlement and limit environmental harm—but the Bank often ignored its own policies. In 1993, it established an appeals mechanism, the Inspection Panel, which allowed people adversely affected by Bank development projects to file claims—and dams became by far the likeliest Bank projects to elicit complaints. These constraints constricted dam construction. Between 1970 and 1985, the Bank supported an average of twenty-six dams a year, but as the projects grew politically charged, the number dropped to four a year over the next decade. And dams became the Bank’s most problem-ridden projects; as Bank senior water adviser John Briscoe put it, a major dam project “will often account for a small proportion of a country director’s portfolio but a major...