THE once MIGHTY COLORADO RIVER

THE once MIGHTY COLORADO RIVER

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA
Where the Headwater of the Colorado River Begin from Meltwater
(Karass)

Introduction

I grew up in a town bordered by a river wherein people would stand for hours to wait for a trout to tug on their pole.  Every season, that same river, without fail, drowned a life from our small community.  A river's bounty is offset by its treacherous nature.  Like all living things they give and take.

Pay Close Attention

Drought Lowers Lake Mead's
Water Levels 2007 (Butow)

The once mighty Colorado River is the most disputed, litigated water in the world--every droplet is already spoken for.  The river now dries out in Mexico, 100 miles from its mouth ("As Colorado River Dries Up, The West Feels The Pain").   Its dams are in trouble, too.  A 2008 study by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California, found that there is a fifty-fifty chance that by 2021 the water level of Lakes Powell and Mead (the reservoirs above Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam) will not be high enough to reach the “gravity-fed intakes” to operate the spillways.  The scientists point out that, in addition to overuse, the climbing temperatures of global warming, and drought are causing water levels to rapidly drop. (Spotts)  This is alarming news because in the American West thirty million people depend on the Colorado River for their drinking water. ("As Colorado River Dries Up, The West Feels The Pain").  A quarter of the nation’s fresh produce is grown with Colorado River water.

The River’s history goes back millions of years, yet we have decimated it beyond recovery in less than 150 years.  Throughout the world the same fate is falling onto other rivers. Two events happened within days of each other that kick started the American West's development while at the same time led to the undoing of the Colorado River, a dynamic, untamed, life force. The reckless environmental policies that soon followed still exist today.

Top:  John Powell and Crew Members After Their May 24, 1869
Expedition Down the 'Unexplored' Colorado River

Bottom:  Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad
Golden Spike Ceremony  May 10, 1869 ( Gendreau)

Two Parts Become One

Ten days after a ceremonial golden spike was driven into the completed railroad, a one-armed college professor and his volunteer crew pushed off from shore in four small wooden boats towards the ‘unexplored’ portion of the Colorado River.  As they did so, a native excitedly signaled that they were going to die!  Their odyssey down the untamed Colorado River took three harrowing months.  Our nation’s manifest destiny was becoming a reality.  The year was 1869.  The western frontier was popping; citizens were pouring into the west by rail for many reasons.  One of them was the famous land rush of 1889.  Towns appeared out of nowhere in a single day.  
“At twelve o'clock on Monday, April 22d, the resident population of Guthrie was nothing; before sundown it was at least ten thousand. In that time streets had been laid out, town lots staked off, and steps taken toward the formation of a municipal government" (Howard).

Not All Rivers Are Created Equal

(Moon Over Grand Canyon)

The Colorado River is the largest river in Western America.  It flows through five states, over 1,400 miles from its headwaters to mouth.  The river travels through skyscraping canyons; the highest point in Arizona is over 12,000 feet high.  The uppermost layer of the towering canyons are made of limestone, fossilized marine skeletons formed 260 million years ago (Kaiser, Grand Canyon: The Complete Guide)!  The harm that we have caused this primeval river has led others to treat their rivers the same way.  The “deranged models of U.S. water control have been cloned across the developing world always with the same bottom line:  drowned riverine ecosystems, displaced communities, flooded sacred sites, extinctions, and resource privatization” (Woelfle-Erskine, Allen, and Cole, "Who Needs Dams? by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine"). 

Give Them An Inch

Fremont Petrographs on Sandstone Walls, UT  2005  (Corbis)
The Fremont AD 700 to 1300 (Wikipedia)

An important part of the River’s history are Natives; Navajo and Hopi are still there today.  The Navajo strive to fit themselves within the natural world.  The land itself is sacred to their culture.  There are myths and legends for every formation on their landscape.  In the 1600's the Navajo readily adapted sheep into their way of life when introduced to them by the Spaniards; the Puebleans taught them how to weave the wool.  Today Navajo women are known worldwide for their colorful woven rugs; they can cost in the thousands of dollars at auctions and galleries.  The Navajo can trace their history along the River back 1000 years (Hopkins 82-89).

The Hopi are long-established enemies of the Navajo, although forced to live next to one another.  Hopis claim to have lived on their land for 30,000 years; archaeological evidence points to this as true (Hopkins).  Navajo people outnumber all tribes in North America, but "the Hopis have the most intact culture…they tend to be religious, conservative and do not readily accept outsiders." Their beliefs encompass "a deep reverence for the earth and staying in tune with it...The Hopi threw more than one overzealous Spanish missionary over the cliffs...and resisted white culture and religions long after other tribes" (Hopkins).  American culture is very different from the Hopis, as one of their Elders eloquently explains.

"A message from the Hopi Elders to the United Nations:  The white man's advanced technological capacity has occurred as a result of his lack of regard for the spiritual path and for the way of all living things.  The white man's desire for material possessions and power has blinded him to the pain he has caused Mother Earth by his quest for what he calls natural resources" (Hopkins 89-93).

 

Not Just The Words To A Song

Colorado River in Grand Canyon

For at least a millennium to the present day, these indigenous people accept and adapt to the River as it is, drinking the water and eating the salmon.  The Colorado River’s fortune took a tragic turn when the U.S. started expanding west.  Land ownership was an idea brought from Europe, encompassed in the term Manifest Destiny.  John L. O’Sullivan, remembered for using the term first, wrote in 1845,  “our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (Hietala).  The meaning of manifest destiny came to represent a mission; the stated cause to violently take control of a vast territory, like the song says, ‘from sea to shining sea.’   In 1848 Manifest Destiny was achieved when the land we know now as California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico became part of the United States.  The raging Colorado River was now under the control of a capitalistic system.  The natural order was soon to change forever.

A Fight to Prevent Replumbing

Aerial View of Farmland next to Barren Desert, AZ  2012
(Mcbride)

After his miraculous ride down the River, John Wesley Powell, the one-armed college professor, became head of the U.S. Geological Survey of the western frontier.  The arid landscape, he thought, would keep the population low.  He was a proponent of damming the Colorado River, although his vision was more realistic than the influential men who would overcome him with pork barrel politics.  Powell envisioned damming the river to make 3% of the land viable for farming. Environmentalists consider him to be the first conservationist because he fought a heated battle with corrupt politicians in Congress.   But guess who won?  He was disposed of by falsely accusing him of dishonesty. Woelfle-Erskine, Allen, and Cole, "How the West Was Dammed by Jeffrey St. Clair")

  

Over irrigation turns the land into a saline wasteland
San Joaquin Valley, California  (Warren)

The Water Imperialists

Our capitalistic system was at work when the western U.S was developing.  There was so much land, but it was so dry!  "In the arid west, water was liquid wealth...Dam water turned worthless desert land into something that could be speculated on, subdivided and sold as a small slice of paradise...government agencies built bigger and bigger dams, across ever-deepening canyons.  This dam-building frenzy by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers led to the rise of its supreme monuments, the mega-dams" (Woelfle-Erskine. "Who Needs Dams?").  Many of us think of hydraulic electricity when we think of mega-dams, but originally dams were built to provide a surplus of inexpensive water for irrigating the desert.  The arid California desert has become an agricultural center because of dams, diversions and channelization of the Colorado River.

  

Get A Glass of Water Before You Read This

Hoover Dam in Twilight 2001  (Steinmetz)

When Hoover Dam was completed in 1936 it stood 726 feet high, and 1,243 feet at the top.  It is considered the greatest structure ever built in the U.S.  The amount of concrete they used was unprecedented:  3,250,000 cubic yards for the dam, plus another 1,110,000 cubic yards for the power plant (Wikipedia).   Much of the dams water went to the Imperial Valley-- bone dry, desert land in southern California, that gets only 3 inches of water a year, and in the summer heats to over 100 oF’s-- so it became lushly irrigated farmland.  The man who first diverted Colorado River water to this area was not a farmer, he was a land speculator.    Today, channels send water over 300 miles away to ‘remote’ desert country so that it can support the millions of people living there.  Places like Tucson, Phoenix, Los Angeles.  River water is used to irrigate 1 million acres of desert.  “If you eat lettuce in the winter time you are drinking from the Colorado River” ("As Colorado River Dries Up, The West Feels The Pain").  In 1922, when seven states agreed to share the water they (ahem) overestimated how much the River had.  The overextended amount of water was, and still is withdrawn anyway by more than 100 dams.

NOTHING IS FREE

Resevoir with receding shoreline
Aerial view of a marina on Lake Powell
above Hoover Dam (Mcbride)

Although the Colorado River is drying out, there are still some good things to say about dams in general, right?  Power boaters love reservoirs.  Too bad they have a high rate of evaporation.  "The residence time of a reservoir (the time a given drop of water remains in one) is usually shorter than the residence time of a lake" (Morris and Burgis as qtd. in Pielou 107).  The difference is remarkable.  A study comparing Kansas reservoirs to Michigan lakes the same size was 14 months, and 4.5 years.  

Coal Burning Power Plant Near Grand Canyon
Page, Arizona  2006 (Momatiuk-Eastcott) 

When I first started writing this paper I thought that although dams, especially the mega-dams, were wasting and polluting water, poisoning land, killing fish, displacing ancient peoples from their sacred lands, etc., at least they were a clean, renewable energy source.  It is now apparent that hydroelectricity is not necessarily renewable. (‘Ya, need water, damnit!)  I also learned that hydropower is not necessarily clean energy.  Decaying organic material in the reservoir releases greenhouse gases, namely methane and carbon dioxide.  If peat is decaying, ancient plant material built up over centuries, the reservoir will keep emitting the harmful gases into the atmosphere as long as the reservoir is there.  “A reservoir powering a hydroelectric plant can sometimes give off as great a quantity of greenhouse gases as a coal-fired generator yielding the same electric power” (J.W.M. Rudd, R. Harris, C.A. Kelly, and R.E. Hecky as qtd. in Pielou p. 208).

IT COULD ALWAYS BE WORSE

The problem with dams is a moving target:  Is the problem over population?  Is it corrupt leadership?  Is it our capitalistic system?  Is it a lack of spiritual harmony with the land, as the Hopi leader pointed out, that got us here in the first place?  (No wonder I had a hard time starting this paper.)  How can we let this continue?  Forcing the owners to shut down a functioning dam has happened only once in 1999:  The Edwards Dam, Maine.  This is a tough truth because there are 75,000 dams in the U.S.  Imagine dismantling a mega-dam.  Could it ever happen?  We drained the Colorado River to make desert terrain viable farmland. 

'A family waits on the river's edge to load all their
belongings into a boat and begin a long journey to a new
region of China.'  Their home will soon be under
the Three Gorges Dam's reservoir.  2001  (Sacha)

This “deranged model of U.S. water control” is happening all over the world.  The story of the Three Gorges Dam, recently built in China, is unfolding.  Its proportions are out of a horror story.  An area large enough to make a channel a mile and a half wide, and 400 miles long was flooded.  The reservoir behind the dam drowned 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,350 villages.  Over 1.6 million people were relocated.  Not only that, there are hundreds of “factories, mines, and waste dumps [that] were inundated as the reservoir filled; now their effluents are combining with untreated sewage that continues to be dumped into the Yangtze River to create a festering mire” (Lohan p. 91).  As the reservoir fills, landslides are happening:  4,700 of them, according to a group of hydraulic engineers and environmentalists.  The Chinese government admitted that because of the landslides a million plus more need to be relocated.  That was in March 2007.  Could the Three Gorges Dam be another Chernobyl?

Three Gorges Dam Infrastructure
Hebei Province, China  2007  (Pyle)

Three Gorges Dam on Yangtze River  2004  (Liu)

Dams are physical structures--like an old car-- things start to go wrong until you cannot fix them anymore.  Many "defunct dams continue to block rivers and prevent fish from spawning upstream.  Cracks and structural weaknesses can undermine the structure of a dam"  (Woelfle-Erskine, Allen, and Cole, "Who Needs Dams? by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine").  Hydroelectric dams are licensed, and must be renewed every fifty years.  We have Theodore Roosevelt's foresight to thank for this.  He thought that "The public must retain control of the great waterways.  It is essential that any permit to obstruct them for reasons and conditions that seem good at the moment should be subject to revision when changed conditions demand" (Woelfle-Erskine, Allen, and Cole, "Who Needs Dams? by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine").

Words of The Master

View Looking Across the Po River
Rome, Italy  (Bettmann)

In addition to providing hydroelectricity and irrigation, dams control the quickness of the current making the river navigable, and they also stabilize  an area from floods.  I have never lived through a flood.  The river nearby my home town never flooded while I lived there.  But devastate they will--without warning.  Those of us who have never experienced a river flood cannot fathom the fear factor for those who have.  Dams have helped humans populate riverbanks that were not possible before.  For Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest minds of any period, rivers were more powerful than fire; they were a sublime mechanical energy.  He studied water and wrote about it extensively.  I looked up the great rivers he would have encountered in Milan, Rome and Paris.  They are  the river Po, Tiber, Rubicon, Seine.  Or may be he witnessed the river Fiora in Albina, Italy overflow (See picture below).  His description of a flood makes me believe that he must have lived through one, or seen the destruction of one firsthand.  

"Amid all the causes of the destruction of human property, it seems to me that rivers hold the foremost place on account of their excessive and violent inundations.  If anyone should wish to uphold fire against the fury of impetuous rivers, he would seem to me to be lacking in judgement, for fire remains spent and dead when fuel fails, but against the irreparable inundation caused by swollen and proud rivers no resource of human foresight can avail; for in a sucession of raging and seething waves gnawing and tearing away high banks, growing turbid with the earth from ploughed fields, destroying the houses therein and uprooting the tall trees, it carries these as its prey down to the sea which is its lair, bearing along with it men, trees, animals, houses, and lands, sweeping away every dike and every kind of barrier, bearing along the light things, and devastating and destroying those of weight, creating big landslips out of small fissures, filling up with floods the low valleys, and rushing headlong with destructive and inexorable mass of waters" (Richter).

Flood in Tuscany leaves serious devastation in Albina, Italy
2012  (Brodolini)

 

CONCLUSION

The Master is saying that a river is untamable.  And yet we have strapped down the Colorado River with collossol dams that were unknown to him.  I wonder what he would have thought of mega-dams?  Although rivers can destroy what man can build up alongside them, they can also sustain us with food and most importantly water.  As individuals we can make a conscious effort to take less from the planet in many small ways by driving less or buying organic foods, etc., but the once mighty River has clearly lost the battle.

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 protects native salmon species
in the Colorado River (Short)

Powell Survey:  Paiute Transporting Water
ca. 1872 (Hillers)

I am pessimistic about the future, especially if globalization, fed by our laws, continues unchecked.  Colorado River water travels hundreds of miles, through three mountain ranges to water lawns, golf courses, fill swimming pools, etc.  Hydroelectricity supplied by Hoover and Glen Canyon Dam is getting used to light the Las Vegas strip, and many other sprawling desert cities that exist only by continuing to drain the Colorado River.  Native people mourn lands now under reservoirs, and the millions of salmon, now gone, that sustained them throughout their history. Only four native salmon species return to the Colorado River.  A river is a living and breathing entity only if it flows freely.  No matter how well we think we have mastered Mother Nature, even if it takes centuries or millenia she will eventually find a way to even out the balance, so we better watch out!

Aerial view of The Strip in Las Vegas, NV
(Davidson)

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HOW YOU LOOK DOES SAY SOMETHING ABOUT YOU 

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The Colorado River Begins Here

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Works Cited

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Grand Canyon. N.d. Photograph. N.p.

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John Powell and Exploration Members. ca. 1879. Photograph. Corbis. Web. Corbis NA007378

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Woelfle-Erskine, Cleo, Laura Allen, and July Oskar. Cole. "How the West Was Dammed by Jeffrey St. Clair." Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 2007. N. pag. Print.

Woelfle-Erskine, Cleo, Laura Allen, and July Oskar. Cole. "Who Needs Dams? by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine." Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull, 2007. N. pag. Print.