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In 1967 my father took me and eight of
my brothers and sisters on a Colorado
River Whitewater trip through the
Grand Canyon. Just above our put-in
stood the Glen Canyon Dam, which had
been completed three years before; Lake Powell
was still filling. The new dam complemented
the Hoover Dam, nearly three hundred miles
downstream at the other end of the Grand
Canyon. Together they promised to irrigate a
thirsty West, generate hydropower, and create great
lakes with recreational opportunities for millions.
Critics thought the Glen Canyon Dam a wasteful
and reckless boondoggle for corporate agriculture
and greedy developers. Environmentalists said the
dam would destroy the Grand Canyon National
Park’s unique ecology and that the lakes would
lose horrendous amounts of water to evaporation
and seepage and would soon fill with sediment.
That year we camped on the Colorado’s
massive sandbars and bathed and swam in her warm 70-degree water and caught some native
fish from its abundant schools. In 2006, I returned
to paddle the Grand Canyon with my daughter Kick and my life-long hero and Harvard classmate
(we sat through anthropology class together)
Wade Davis – the real-life Indiana Jones – and
his beautiful daughter Tara, with whom Kick
had formed the kind of strong bonds that
occur so often during whitewater adventures.
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Wade Davis and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Photo courtesy of
MacGillivray Freeman Films. Photo by Barbara MacGillivray)
We embarked as guests of another of my icons,
Greg MacGillivray, the world’s foremost IMAX
cinematographer. I was sad to see that the spacious
sandy beaches and massive driftwood piles where
I had camped with my father were gone, the
sands that once fed them trapped above the dam.
The river, which should be warm and muddy, is
clear and a frigid 46 degrees. Four of her eight
native fish species are extinct, with two others
headed there soon. The canyon’s beaver, otter, and
muskrat populations have also disappeared, as have
its indigenous insect species. Sediment has already flatlined hydropower and nearly choked the upper
reaches of Lake Powell, which is in severe decline
as a tourist destination. The Colorado River no
longer reaches the sea or feeds the great estuaries
in the Gulf of California that once teemed
with life. Instead, it ignominiously dies in the
Sonoran desert. What was once a dynamic and
specialized ecosystem cutting through the greatest
monument to America’s national heritage has been
transformed into a cold water plumbing conduit
between the two
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largest reservoirs in the United
States – monuments to greed, shortsightedness,
and corporate power.
And the gravest prophecies of the scientists and
environmentalists have come true. The reservoirs
are emptying due to human consumption and
evaporation, a situation now exacerbated by
climate change. Lake Powell is now nearly a
hundred feet below its capacity level. Hydropower
revenues for repayment to the U.S. Treasury have
been at a standstill for six years. Recreation access at
the upper reaches of Lake Mead and Lake Powell
are now obstructed by savannahs of sedimentary
mud. Water quality is dropping precipitously and
farmers need more water to flush the dissolved
fluids from their fields. Sprawl development and
agribusiness consumption triggered by the dam’s
original promise continue their ferocious pace.
The Colorado River has nothing more to
give and a train wreck is imminent. But while
scientists continue to sound a warning, the river
managers insist on business as usual, encouraging
wasteful agricultural uses, the proliferation
of urban sprawl, and dramatic increases in
consumption. They have engineered a system
geared to reward the powerful, destroy the river,
and impoverish the rest of us.
The Colorado River is the poster child for
bad river management hijacked by the water
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