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

Excerpted fromDeep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environmentby 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 constructionthe 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 faceheartened 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 daymore 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 countryby 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 ColoradoGlen Canyon, Davis, Parker, Headgate Rock, Palo Verde, all the way to Morelos across the Mexican borderand 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 damsdams at least five stories tallwere 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 electriciLeslie, Jacques is the author of 'Deep Water The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment', published 2005 under ISBN 9780374281724 and ISBN 0374281726.