NATURAL RESOURCES: Dams v. Dinosaurs

Early one morning shortly after he had fought the McCarthy censure proceeding to a finish. Utah’s Republican Senator Arthur Watkins dragged himself from bed to answer his telephone. On the line was a presidential aide who wanted to know if Watkins could be at the White House by 9:30. Weary Arthur Watkins managed to put off the appointment until 10 o’clock, then went down to receive Dwight Eisenhower’s congratulations for a job well done. Just before he left, Watkins had an idea. “Mr. President,” he asked, “would you permit a suggestion for your State of the Union message?” Said Ike: “Go ahead.”

Watkins proceeded to put in a plug for something near to his heart: the billion-dollar power and reclamation project proposed for the Upper Colorado River Basin. There was, said Watkins, nothing socialistic about the idea; private utilities in the West were ready and eager to buy the power. Moreover, backing by the President would help refute some of the talk about the Administration’s “giveaway” policy on natural resources. “That’s a good idea,” said Ike, turning to an assistant and giving the necessary order.

The President did mention the Upper Colorado Basin project in his State of the Union speech. He went even farther than Watkins had hoped: last week, in his budget message, the President recommended that $5,000,000 be appropriated to get engineering started.

Treasure House. Ike’s powerful support was thereby given to a plan which has been talked about for some 50 years and has been passed over by four previous Congresses, largely because of unrelenting opposition from 1) Southern California power interests who profit under the present distribution of Colorado River water and 2) conservationists (e.g., Ulysses S. Grant III) who for years charged (erroneously) that the big dam proposed for Echo Park, Colo, would flood out the dinosaur remains in the national park there. They have since shifted their argument to the claim that if Dinosaur National Monument is invaded today, Yellowstone will be tomorrow’s victim. To the conservationists, Interior Secretary Douglas McKay has a trenchant answer.

Says he: “As it is now, 2,200 people a year see that park. On the other hand, more than 3,000,000 people live in the Upper Colorado Basin states and they are hungry for water. Which is more important?” The Upper Colorado Basin includes 110,000 square miles of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming. New Mexico and Arizona (the Upper and Lower Basin are defined in a seven-state compact signed in 1922, with the dividing line at Lee Ferry, Ariz.).

More than 43 million acres—an area larger than the six New England states combined—are already given over to public recreational use (the Federal Government owns 72% of all the land in Utah and 52% of Wyoming). Some 70% of the farming in the Upper Basin depends on irrigation but only a small portion of the land is irrigated. The Upper Basin is a treasure house: lead, gold, silver, zinc, coal, oil—and now, uranium. But the water is not to be had for full development of these resources.

The Big Six. The Upper Basin’s water shortage is the supreme irony, for through the area flows the nation’s fifth longest river, the Colorado, draining one-twelfth of the U.S. It rises in the Rockies of Colorado and Wyoming, travels some 1,400 miles southwest past mountain meadows, breathtaking gorges and desert wastelands.

It borders Southern California, which diverts its share of the water. Then it empties, with more than half its volume still unused (and of that which is used, the Lower Basin gets some 60%), into the Gulf of California. Along its vast upper reaches, the Colorado is the last great unharnessed river system in the U.S.

The project now being backed by President Eisenhower proposes six major dams at Glen Canyon, Echo Park, Cross Mountain, Flaming Gorge, Curecanti and Navajo. Each would have a dam, a reservoir and a power plant (exception: Navajo, for which no power unit is planned).

The Glen Canyon dam would be the most imposing; next only to the Hoover Dam, it would stand 700 feet high, provide storage for 26 million acre-feet of water, and produce 800,00 kilowatts of power. In addition to the Big Six, there would be 14 lesser projects, for irrigation purposes at such odd-sounding sites as Gooseberry, Seedskadee and Silt. The entire system, say its supporters, would open 300,000 new acres to farming, vastly enhance the agriculture of 470,000 acres now partly under irrigation, and produce 1,622,000 kilowatts of electrical energy for an area now in desperate short supply.

Insofar as the Administration is concerned, the Upper Colorado Basin has another great virtue. The people of the area want water; how they get it is less important. Missing, to a large extent, is the highly emotional issue of public v. private power that hampers reasonable discussion of power development in the Pacific Northwest. Administration advisers feel that they can make the Upper Colorado a showcase for their policies on power development. If so, they consider it well worth braving the wrath of Dinosaur fanciers and Southern California.