'Cracked' Makes Strong Case For Tearing Down Dams That Took Wild Rivers
Across West, author Steven Hawley writes, logic that justified damming rivers is wrong. Like Yosemite battle over Hetch Hetchy, Greater Yellowstone had its own fights
What if? The wild Yellowstone River adds majestic beauty to Paradise Valley, Montana and it possesses clout as the longest still-undammed river in the Lower 48. In the 1970s, some wanted to block its free-flowing course and create an artificial reservoir that would have submerged part of this breathtaking dell, in part to serve water needs for coal-fired power plants in the eastern part of the state. Photo by Todd Wilkinson
By Todd Wilkinson
For we Westerners, no Earth element today unites us more urgently in common cause than water flowing through rivers, yet competing human uses often create battlefields of winners and losers. Ironically, among of the biggest casualties are the natural things rivers support.
Few water management issues are more contentious and impactful than dams. Younger Mountain Journal readers or those from out of our region may not realize, for example, that as recently as the 1970s a proposal was made to plug the Yellowstone River in Paradise Valley, Montana and submerge part of that spectacular dell beneath an unnatural artificial reservoir created by a proposed 380-foot-high earthen dam at Allenspur located just south of Livingston.
Imagine if it had come to pass.
Nor might they know that, once upon an earlier time, plans were ginned up to dam the Yellowstone River inside Yellowstone National Park at the same time separate attempts were being made by powerful agriculture interests in Idaho to build dams in the vaunted wild Bechler region in Yellowstone's southwest corner.
Indeed water is the lifeblood of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, also representing the foundation of real estate development, nature-based tourism, farming and ranching. But even here, amid the perception of abundance, there are indications of growing demand outstripping finite supply. John Wesley Powell, the forerunning scientist who served as second director of the US Geological Survey, warned in the 19th century about trying to defy nature’s laws as they pertain to water in the arid West.
For writer Steven Hawley, blockading wild rivers may have once been seen as a panacea for managing water, storing it and promoting the trope of transforming deserts into gardens, but unintended consequences playing out over time have been devastating—and the onerous costs of impacts, Hawley says, are coming due.
This I did not know: "Really big dams, and the proliferation of millions of smaller ones, like so many other developments on the planet over the past three-quarters of a century, are an American invention," he writes in the introduction to his new book Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World.
Today, Hawley points to dam removals happening around the globe and for him this movement is a chance at humans achieving redemption, in re-connecting ourselves to not only rivers as teachers of true sustainability and masterpieces forged by time, but an opportunity to let them reclaim sacred reverence in modern life.
Cracked is a must read. It is a page-turning, everything-you-need-to-know report card on the legacy of dams and it solidifies the case for tearing them down. Just as the US was the progenitor of dam building, Hawley says it too is leader in showing what's possible.
Some of the big issues he addresses is the sanctioned extinction by policy makers of salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest, controversies surrounding reservoirs like Mead and Powell failing miserably to deliver on promised dividends, and billions of dollars spent trying to fix problems that dams created. He also dives into the contentious saga of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir created in Yosemite National Park to serve as a freshwater source for residents of San Francisco.
Conservationist John Muir famously referenced the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a spectacular twin to the otherworldly Yosemite Valley and after he lost the fight to prevent a dam from being built across the Tuolumne River, many say it broke his heart.
That Cracked is published by Patagonia Books should provide a strong hint of its message. Patagonia this spring was just named the most respected brand in America, owed to its concern for the environment.
The maker of popular outdoor clothing and gear has been outspoken in its corporate support for conservation in a variety of areas related to public lands, water quality, re-generative agriculture, sourcing organic cotton and the protection of wild rivers—all topics of keen interest to its founder Yvon Chouinard, who has a home in Jackson Hole and is passionate about both mountaineering and fly-fishing.
In 2022, Chouinard and family members announced that Patagonia would be directing its profits into campaigns aimed at confronting the climate change crisis, its effects manifested in a number of ways. Note: Mountain Journal has been a recipient of grants from Patagonia to advance our environmental reporting. Read the open letter Chouinard penned in which he called Earth its most important shareholder.
Steven Hawley
Enter now Hawley's book and the no-holds barred approach he takes in Cracked with dismantling the age-old arguments of being beacons of progress. As part of its advocacy, Patagonia created separate publishing and film divisions to address environmental issues and it has taken sharp aim at the controversial legacy of damming rivers to fuel development and agriculture,
Cracked fits within a genre of books examining how water management in the West, driven by powerful real estate and ag interests, in league with influential “water buffalo” civil servants at the US Bureau of Reclamation like Floyd E. Dominy, has created an unsustainable house of cards with dam building and water allotment.
Some of the biggest water projects have been those affiliated with the Green-Colorado; Snake-Columbia and Missouri-Platte-Mississippi River systems. Interestingly, the headwaters of those drainages all originate in the wild high country of Greater Yellowstone, making Hawley’s hard-hitting analysis poignant—and timely.
There is not solely the geographic dimension, but large populous downstream states wield tremendous political power and the consequences of overallocation present important policy questions for states like Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. This spring, as just one example, the BuRec informed Wyoming that releases into the Snake River through Jackson Lake Dam in Grand Teton National Park would be reduced because downstream reservoirs were filled to capacity by heavy winter snows. However, lower flows would have brought harm to both fish populations in the Upper Snake and to recreational floating and fishing. A compromise was struck between the BuRec, the National Park Service, state of Wyoming and river advocates, to keep release levels intact.
Hawley’s book isn’t wonky. It reads like a primer for those who want to understand the consequences of dams in a larger context, similar to what Marc Reisner did with his classic Cadillac Desert that exposed the faulty notion of limitless water supply that could sustain prosperity without end.
Hawley’s book isn’t wonky. It reads like a primer for those who want to understand the consequences of dams in a larger context, similar to what Marc Reisner did with his classic Cadillac Desert that exposed the faulty notion of limitless water supply that could sustain prosperity without end.
Reckonings already have come, and many more await. The combination of trends with climate change bringing reduced snowpacks and growing human population puts states on a collision course with limited supply that cannot be solved by better efficiency in water use.
While some in the water management establishment have portrayed Hawley’s storytelling as biased—indeed, it is—river restoration efforts, centered around razing down dams, have in many instances proved him right. In the case of saving salmon from the same kind of near annihilation that beset bison, the clock is ticking faster.
A resident of Hood River, Oregon, Hawley was a writer and co-producer of the award-winning documentary Dammed to Extinction (2019) that chronicled how a collapse of salmon is endangering the persistence of orcas and other sea life. He also penned the book, Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Recovering Salmon, Revitalizing Communities. Last summer, his essay about bi-partisan efforts to resuscitate devastated salmon runs in Idaho was published in Mountain Outlaw magazine.
The message: concrete isn't forever. The Elwha River in Washington State was freed of its dams on the Olympic Peninsula in 2014. The region is the ancestral land of the Lower Elwha Klallom, a tribe whose culture evolved with the presence of healthy salmon populations. Photo courtesy John Gussman. To see more of his work go to dcproductions.com
How a dam was removed and a wild river restored: A view of the decommissioning of Elwha Dam. Source: Wikipedia Commons
Recently, Mountain Journal had a conversation with the author and it’s one we know you will find intriguing, whether you live in Greater Yellowstone and the West or not.
Todd Wilkinson: What's the biggest thrill for you when visiting a wild river or one being brought back to natural life?
STEVEN HAWLEY: It’s that feeling you have, maybe E.O. Wilson’s term “biophilia” is apt, that you’ve experienced a portion of both the Earth and yourself that is wild and free. I think this feeling ought to be the M.O. of the conservation movement in all its facets. Unfortunately, the movement seems to have shied away from this. We’re all paralyzed by the apocalyptic visions of the future, perhaps so much so that we’ve forgotten our own, as well as our home land and waters’ considerable ability to heal. So that feeling, ensconced in a place you’ve fallen in love with, is really the basis of the most effective kinds of conservation campaigns. And when you see a place that’s been drowned out by a dam remembering very quickly how it did things so gracefully before it was inundated, it strikes you as miraculous. Magic. Life affirming. We desperately need more of this kind of thing these days.
TW: When did you reach a threshold of awareness about the impact of dams that motivated you to write a book?
HAWLEY: In the early 1990’s, when commercial fisherman started galvanizing around the fact that they were being forced to cut back because of the toll that dams were taking on salmon runs up and down the Pacific Coast.
"We’re all paralyzed by the apocalyptic visions of the future, perhaps so much so that we’ve forgotten our own, as well as our home land and waters’ considerable ability to heal. When you see a place that’s been drowned out by a dam remembering very quickly how it did things so gracefully before it was inundated, it strikes you as miraculous. Magic. Life affirming. We desperately need more of this kind of thing these days." —Author Steven Hawley
TW: As you think about the West and freshwater supplies, what kind of a reckoning are we rapidly racing toward?
HAWLEY: As I write in the book, there are a number of catastrophic possibilities in the near term. The Colorado River will quite likely cease to flow beyond Glen Canyon Dam, maybe within the next decade, unless the Bureau of Reclamation finds the funding and expertise to drill new bypass tunnels around the dam to accommodate the ever-diminishing water levels at Reservoir Powell. With more frequent and intense storms cycles, the odds of dam failures will increase. For instance, the meltout of the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, which is three times normal in the southern Sierra, will, and already is causing flooding. Will the aging water infrastructure there hold out? Robert Bea, an expert on all kinds of major modern disasters who is interviewed in Cracked, thinks that oversight and regulation of big dams like Oroville, where the spillway failed in 2017, is so lax that a something horrible occurring is almost inevitable.
TW: Compared to the point of where you started your research to now, what are some of the things that shifted or unexpected epiphanies you had?
HAWLEY: In visiting Chile, I was humbled by the widespread activism visible everywhere you went. As the oppressive era of the Pinochet dictatorship fades from memory, Chileans are falling in love with the lands and waters of their country. And responding with appropriate levels of passionate defense against all kinds of hare-brained industrial schemes. It strikes me as emerging more from a place that I tried to describe in the answer to the first question here: a defense of the wild and free that Chileans seem to see reflected between themselves and the beauty in their country.
The "bathtub ring" in Reservoir Powell. The Colorado River supplies water to 40 million people, 30 million of whom, experts say, may lose water in the foreseeable future due to engineering design flaws. Powell is located on ancestral lands of the Navajo, Hope and Southern Paiute. Photo courtesy Justin Sullivan. To see more of Sullivan's work go to justinsullivanphoto.com
Promotors of Reservoir Powell on the Colorado River promised that the artificial "lake" behind Glen Canyon Dam—second highest concrete dam in the US—would be a major mecca for water sport enthusiasts and a booming local economy forever. As years of drought, silt deposition and evaporation shrunk back the volume of stored water, the marina bears little resemblance to its former bustling glory. Photo by Todd Wilkinson
TW: What needs to happen at Powell and Mead and generally speaking what would that mean for a healthy Colorado, the tribes, whitewater rafting and water supply to those with straws in the system? You refuse to invoke the descriptive terms that were originally given to them: “Lake” Powell and “Lake” Mead.
HAWLEY: The iron grip that industrial agriculture has on the Colorado is going to have to be loosened. That one sector uses 70 to 80 percent of the Colorado every year. Some of it for profitable ventures like growing alfalfa for export to China. We will look back on the years that Arizona grew cotton as the height of hydro-foolishness. Note I did not write that farmers will have to quit farming. The good ones will learn to do it better, and a few of them already are doing so.
TW: Some say elements of water law define reason. How do you fix that?
HAWLEY: It was heartening to see the Biden Administration encouraging state water managers to think outside the ridiculously outdated policies dictated by the right of prior appropriation. That’s a 19th century Gilded Age rule that says those who file for water rights first get the lion’s share of the water. And if you don’t use those rights you give them up to someone else who will. It holds nothing that incentivizes conservation or cooperation. It’s a policy that encourages greed and waste.
TW: You allude to the disaster that happened with the failure of the short-lived Teton Dam on the west side of Greater Yellowstone. What happened there, why did it happen and what's the take home message for readers?
Site of the Teton Dam that failed on June 5, 1976, killing 11 people near Rexburg, Idaho
HAWLEY: A huge dam collapsed there in June of 1976. The Bureau of Reclamation knew the risks, knew the ground there leaked like a sieve, and went ahead and built Teton anyway. The take home message is that Teton, or something like it, will happen again. Both the Bureau and The Corps of Engineers have been grossly negligent at times in considering the safety of downstream residents, human and non-human. I think of this tiny Corps project in Heppner, Oregon. They literally built a dam in a neighborhood on the edge of town. They did this to test out a new construction method that, it turns out, doesn’t hold water very well. So you go to Heppner, you see a massive amount of algae and even green grass and shrubs growing on the downstream side of this dam. Robert Bea, the safety expert, told me that if you see green growth on the downstream side of a dam, run.
TW: In many high growth areas, in which water use is outstripping supply and climate change is altering snowpack and runoff, there is talk of building more dams in some of the smaller mountain streams to hold water. While there are no firm proposals, around, for example, Bozeman, Montana, and in the Upper Green River Valley of southwest Wyoming, there has been talk and speculation. What kind of caution would you impart?
HAWLEY: It will cost more than it comes to. Put it this way: if the water supply to your house has been reduced, is your solution to install more sinks and showers, or a bigger bathtub? Add to that simple logic the cost of evaporation, which will only rise in a warming world, and methane emissions from reservoirs—now the sixth largest source of methane on planet earth—and I’d say rethinking water use in all its phases is going to be a better solution than the knee-jerk, 20th century reaction that tells you to build a dam.
TW: People have a general sense of the negative impact of dams on salmon and native fish populations in the Pacific Northwest states. Please put it in perspective. Are the near annihilation of salmon runs analogous to what happened with bison?
HAWLEY: We are hanging on by a thread to what few salmon runs we have left. In some ways, it’s worse than the massacre of bison. That was the result of ignorance, frontier violence, racism and venal greed. Dams wiping out salmon has taken place during what was supposedly an era of good government and more enlightened thinking, during the birth of social justice and environmental movements. A few small but utterly corrupt branches of the federal government, in their servile function to corporate agriculture and industry, have managed to oppose or paralyze honest efforts to restore salmon for half a century now.
At top: famous photo of bison skulls and bones shipped to a facility in the Midwest where they were converted into fertilizer as part of a thoughtless slaughter of millions that led to near extinction of the species. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Above: Spawning salmon as captured by photographer Pat Clayton. Dams strung along the Snake and Columbia river system have caused a catastrophic collapse in salmon numbers, pushing some runs to the point of extinction. To see more of Clayton's collectible nature images, go to fisheyeguyphotography.com
TW: With regard to the conscious destruction of America’s great salmon populations, a wonder of the world, what’s the legacy of those who knew the consequences and let it happen anyway?
HAWLEY: It will be remembered as one of the worst lessons we have illustrating the adage that politics is the art of deferring a decision until it is no longer relevant. Of course, that assumes we fail, and I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t think there’s at least a sliver of hope that we can still do the right thing.
TW: What has spurred the greatest change in thinking from the reign of the Water Buffaloes and who deserves credit?
HAWLEY: That dams and those who benefit from them control all the water. That was the main lesson on the Klamath. Farmers there thought that since the federal government supplied them with what seemed to them to be an unlimited supply of water, that they owned all of it. Laws actually say something quite different, and it took the work of Klamath and Yurok and Hoopa Nations, and some savvy conservationists like Glen Spain, who represents commercial fishermen, to disabuse these particular water buffaloes of the notion they had the right to control it all.
The loss of salmon "will be remembered as one of the worst lessons we have illustrating the adage that politics is the art of deferring a decision until it is no longer relevant. Of course, that assumes we fail, and I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t think there’s at least a sliver of hope that we can still do the right thing." —Hawley
TW: In your writing you note how there are plenty of places where can be decommissioned and taken down but there are other places where it's far more complicated or perhaps, as so-called pragmatists claim, where they ought not to come down. Could you please address the differences?
HAWLEY: Did I write that any dam should not eventually come down? If I did, I’d like to revise that…it’s a matter of priorities. We can’t remove every dam all at once. But there are six dams I take aim at in the book, Glen Canyon, four dams on the lower Snake River, and O’Shaugnessy on the Tuolumne. Those are places in the way of the return of some startling and soul-stirring beauty, some of the great nerve centers of the continent, and we would be doing future generations a great service by getting rid of them.
TW: For those who aren't familiar, please riff a bit on Hetch Hetchy, which represents one of the most crushing defeats for wildland conservationists in US history. And please share your thoughts about the potential for restoration.
HAWLEY: Well, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, behind O’Shaugnessy Dam on the Tuolumne River, which runs through Yosemite National Park, is often blamed for killing the founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir. Muir called it Yosemite’s twin.When the dam was completed over a century ago, Muir’s health declined in the wake of his failed campaign to stop it. It never should have been built in the first place. But some brave conservationists continue to call for its removal. The campaign is at something of a low ebb, due to recent ongoing drought in California and the well-funded opposition that whips up fear in the hearts of San Franciscans, who get some of their water from Hetch Hetchy. But the facts are that the chain of dams and reservoirs on the Tuolumne offer a way to get rid of O’Shaughnessy and maintain or even improve water storage for the city, particularly in drought years, since San Fran has poor drought-year water rights.
Waterfalls draping the mountains and the Tuolumne River flowing tranquilly through its middle, this is what the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park looked like early in the 20th century. Photo courtesy National Park Service
This is how the valley appears today, submerged behind O'Shaughnessy Dam with the reservoir providing drinking water for residents of San Francisco. Photo courtesy National Park Service
TW: It would be an ultra-extraordinary thing to accomplish—restoring the ecology of place and grandeur to Yosemite, which is already considered otherworldly.
HAWLEY: I believe Yosemite’s twin could re-emerge relatively quickly. The facts have to be married to the passion for the place. Dams were removed on the Elwha, and part of the rationale was the same as those advocating for freeing the Tuolumne: the dam lies within a national park. The Elwha campaign started in the mid-1980’s as a long shot.
TW: Nothing shapes the ecology, economy, culture and larger sense of place in the West than rivers. Yours is a weighty book but you've managed to make it uplifting by emphasizing what's possible. What does addressing the damage that's been done and restoring the spirit of rivers mean? Are you hopeful?
HAWLEY: I gave up the privilege of being a pessimist when I had kids beginning almost 20 years ago now. The last chapter in the book is titled “What Spirits Might Wear in 2050," and offers the vision of free-er Snake, Colorado and Tuolumne Rivers. It also contains something of what I alluded to earlier, that the beauty we see in free-flowing water can be reflected to help re-locate a beauty we ought to be seeking, and see, in ourselves. Wild and free.
So many of us moved out West in pursuit of what in retrospect was an ersatz version of that phrase. Marlboro man, drive your pickup across the trout stream on the way to the lonely snow-capped summit type of bullshit. What gives me hope is that taking out dams could be part of a movement to make the West, and the rest of the country, please, truly wild and free. If that sounds outrageously optimistic given the challenges we face, well, I can only suggest that that’s what environmental non-fiction should be doing.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World is available wherever good books are sold.For further reading (a few water-related stories that appeared first in MoJo)
What Does River Conservation Really Mean?A conversation between MoJo's founder and Tom Sadler, MoJo's correspondent in Washington DC, public land conservationist and avid fly fisher
Bonus to valued readers/supporters of Mountain Journal! If you have a free evening and want to to be educated about issues involving dams and rivers in the West, click on link below to screen the award-winning documentary, DamNation, in its entirety. The film was the directed by Ben Knight and Travis Rummel and produced by Patagonia
About Todd Wilkinson
Todd Wilkinson, founder of Mountain Journal, is author of the book Ripple Effects: How to Save Yellowstone and American's Most Iconic Wildlife Ecosystem. Wilkinson has been writing about Greater Yellowstone for 35 years and is a correspondent to publications ranging from National Geographic to The Guardian. He is author of several books on topics as diverse as scientific whistleblowers and Ted Turner, and a book about the harrowing story of Jackson Hole grizzly mother 399, the most famous bear in the world which features photographs by Thomas Mangelsen. For more information on Wilkinson, click here. (Photo by David J Swift).
