Cracked: A Resource for Activists

FOREWORD

I’ve been giving voice to the needs of wild salmon and their rivers for four decades. My activism has felt futile in any kind of political sense, but even futile protests prevent impotent rage from reaching toxic levels, and occasionally dissident voices are heard on a level that defies expectation. My 1983 novel, The River Why, bewildered the New York and Boston publishers who rejected it by becoming a Northwest classic that continues to sell by the thousand though the love scene between its fisherman hero and a wild chinook salmon is far more tender than the love scene between the hero and the beautiful young woman he weds. The life of my protagonist helped inspire the creation of dozens of watchdog river and watershed councils, a trend that has since spread nationwide.

My all-time favorite activist project was in 2006, when with Patagonia the company’s help, we launched thirteen river dories in a huge, fresh-harvested Washington wheat field. We peopled the boats with fly fishers, oarsmen, oarswomen, and fishing guides, and rowed our dories and cast our fly rods in the stubble. Our aim was to bring home, in a single image, the fact that the wild salmon and steelhead of the Rocky Mountain West and salmon-dependent orcas of the southern Salish Sea are being driven to extinction by four boondoggle dams on the lower Snake River.

The wheat field’s owner welcomed us as friends because he had known and loved the free-flowing Snake and the farms and orchards that thrived in its riparian zone until they were inundated in the 1960s and ’70s. Four hundred and fifty miles of slack water then began superheating the Columbia and Snake Rivers, stagnating the flow young salmon need to carry them to sea, and stuffing both rivers full of smolt-devouring predator species to negate the incomparable fecundity of a salmon refugia the size of Massachusetts laced with pristine high-elevation spawning rivers and streams. I wrote a prose poem entitled Lost River about the salmon tribes decimated by loss of culture, spirituality, wealth, and traditional fishing places. We produced a poster that became a Pacific Northwest icon and raised thousands of dollars for salmon activists.

It pains me to say that, sixteen years later, the wild salmon and steelhead of the interior West are in complete collapse, the salmon-dependent orcas of Southern Puget Sound are blinking out with them, and the bankrupt bureaucracies that wiped them out, Bonneville Power and the Army Corps of Engineers, have just been refunded by Washington State’s liberal senators, an act akin to hiring meth cooks to run the nation’s drug rehab programs.

But despite the blundering of malfeasant lobbyists and politicos, it thrills me to add that the most inarguably eloquent and beautifully illustrated testimonial against dams, Cracked, is poised to inspire tremendous change.

Steven Hawley has written, and Patagonia has brilliantly supported, an undamming book powerful beyond anything I thought possible in a time of cynicism, greed, and cave-troll politics. Cracked is itself a mass-breaching of the lies, corruption, and betrayals that have fueled an insane parade of dam-building by disembodied bureaucracies and totalitarian governments worldwide. This book from beginning to end is a tour de force. It affirms Nick Cave’s thesis that a cynic is just an optimist with a crushed heart that can be mended and filled with hope once again. I know this because one such heart, as I read Cracked, was beating in me.

Steven’s final chapter, What Spirits Might Wear in 2050, is an apotheosis. Patagonia’s multitude of photographs, charts, and maps are both beautiful and devastatingly powerful. And John Muir’s, David Brower’s, and Steven Hawley’s climactic words carry so much river love that they left me singing the names of the Idaho and eastern Oregon rivers I’ve walked more than a thousand miles, not beside but, in (two dozen pairs of re-soled wading boots my evidence).

Steven and Patagonia have created a masterpiece that will fire generations to do for many rivers what Muir’s long gaze and language are still doing for Yosemite’s fair sister, Hetch Hetchy, and her iconic river, the Tuolumne. We possess, en masse, the power to restore world wonders the dam-building frenzy has temporarily stolen and defiled. Let the return of wonders begin with the energies set free in this river-lovers’ bible. With calm clarity, this book shows us how to judge the value of a dam and begin removing the dangerous and valueless ones. This book reminds us that it is rivers, not reservoirs, that allow natural selection to select naturally and biodiversity to diversify.

This book sees the Earth as our sentient mother; the land, flora, and fauna as her body, clothes, and skin; the seas, lakes, and rivers as her organs, veins, and arteries; and reminds us that her breathing body is a holiness without which we cannot live. This book renews faith that the man, woman, or child who strives to defend Earth’s holiness even in poverty or political impotence, and even against seemingly impossible odds, is not just a hero but an integral part of her, hence every bit as holy as she whom they seek to defend.

– David James Duncan

Federal dams on the Snake River have drowned sites of great cultural significance. Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation ancestral lands, Washington. BEN HERNDON

INTRODUCTION

This book was written with a reliance on one of the basic tenets of good faith in the written word; that interested readers may extrapolate to the universal from the examination of the specific. Your home water may not be depicted here, but the patterns of destruction that come with any dam-building regime are as recognizable as the American flag, and as reliable as the sunrise.

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. The American gospel of dams was spreading to major watersheds worldwide as early as the 1950s. Those busy beavers at the United States Army Corps of Engineers were already globetrotting back then, promoting the virtues of megatons of concrete as a panacea for ills economic, agricultural, industrial, and hydrological. Their sales pitch, at home and abroad, was less than forthcoming about the inevitable risks and the colossal damage that would ensue.

The largest lake in Southeast Asia, Tonle Sap, was, until recently, filled by the seasonal swell of the Mekong River system, which would overrun the Tonle Sap River, pushing it backward in spring, filling the lake, and producing one of the world’s most productive freshwater fishing grounds. Dams, beginning with eleven cement monsters on the Chinese side of the Mekong (where it is called the Lancang) began to reduce this annual event. Finally came a dam on the Tonle Sap River itself.

By 2019, inflows in the lake were a fraction of their former glory. The annual catch of fish from the lake had plummeted by 80 percent. Subsistence fishing accounts for a large fraction of available protein for millions of people who live along the Mekong. The possibility of starvation was also neglected as an outcome of dams when the idea was bought and sold here.

A countervailing worldwide phenomenon has been the reaction of ordinary people when their well-watered places on this little blue-green marvel of a planet are taken away from them—however temporarily. Australians mobilized recently to scrap a $350 million dam planned for the Mole River in New South Wales, while simultaneously facilitating the removal of small dams in the same region. South Africans removed dams in Kruger National Park. Japan got into the global swing of things with the removal of Arase Dam. France joined in by removing the Vezins Dam on the Sélune River in 2020, now the flagship of European river unplugging—in fact, in 2021, 239 dams, weirs, and other concrete causes of the sclerosis in Europe’s rivers were removed.

The world over, the most exciting aspect of the global phenomenon of dam removal is its growing place among the many inspiring, spontaneous, democratic uprisings popping up everywhere. They proliferate because we are threatened as never before by the prospect of business as usual, sponsored by the myopic and greedy enterprises that define a certain deadly brand of capitalism, promoted and protected by many governments, both democratic and despotic. Dam removal should remind us that every act of resistance matters.

Andy Stone is an American who has traveled to Southeast Asia a dozen times to help organize resistance to dams. In 2009, he chanced into a meeting with the Rak Chiang Khong Conservation Group in rural Laos. A small farm community was about to be displaced by dam construction. I learned decades of history, heard dozens of stories, Stone says of his experience working in Laos. They stopped an armed military land grab from displacing undocumented hill tribes. They strapped themselves to rocks to prevent channel blasting. They helped refugees reforest a watershed to avert violent eviction—and returned water to streams.

Of the many stories Stone told, one stands out in my mind. The matriarch of a village where he spent the bulk of his time was also lead rabble rouser, community organizer, and dissident. She earned money by selling brooms she made herself. She had, as a rural villager reliant on the bounty of the river, a million good reasons to oppose a dam that would ruin her and her people. The defiantly personal, however, remains most resonant: I have never, she told Stone with a fierce grin on her face, sold my labor.

Though I’ve never dipped a toe in the Mekong or any of its tributaries, I thought of her generous pride often when writing this book. I hope you’ll think of her too.

Las Vegas sprawl is reliant on Colorado River water. What will happen when the water runs out? Southern Paiute ancestral lands, Nevada. ALEX MACLEAN

Workers ride a pipe during the construction of Grand Coulee Dam. Early working conditions were so awful that employees walked off the job in droves. Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation ancestral lands, Washington. PUBLIC DOMAIN

CHAPTER 01

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT DAMS

The only laser light show commissioned by the United States Bureau of Reclamation enjoyed quite a run. Though it did not feature Pink Floyd blasted at decibels sufficient to feel the bass notes rattle your skull, nor any acclaimed innovation in the world of psychedelic art, it was projected with sober intent onto the massive face of Grand Coulee Dam, in eastern Washington, most summer evenings from 1989 until 2013. The premise of the show—evolved from a peculiar genre of American Cold War–era advertising and Soviet-style propaganda that might be called Bad Disney—is that the Columbia River could suddenly speak.

I’d heard about this summer spectacle for years. Friends had described the Orwellian flavor of the scene, where spurious claims made over giant outdoor loudspeakers and a movie screen five hundred feet tall and a mile long were met with docile acceptance by nightly audiences. I made the long drive a decade ago to witness one of the final screenings. I’d heard that the Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec), one of a slate of select federal agencies that builds, manages, and distributes water and power from American dams, had belatedly come to the conclusion that the ideas projected onto the face of their flagship project were outdated. The show could not go on.

This movie featured the absurdity of a cartoon salmon leaping in mock celebration over the dam which in real life is threatening to drive the fish to extinction. Then, God-like, a menacing voice from behind the half-mile-wide monolith of concrete issued forth.

Electricity! Hydroelectricity! Nonpolluting, inexpensive production of electric power from water. It may sound like a difficult concept for a river, but I understand all that involves me. … You have done what I could not accomplish alone. Through your engineering skills you have diverted part of my course, and spread my waters over the land. You have created the missing link in the cycle of life: the rainfall nature could not provide. You have irrigated the land. You have made the desert bloom! I was once a raging torrent of raw energy and thundering rapids crashing headlong to the ocean, my potential energy spent carving the land in my blind race to the sea. Now my power is harnessed, and I am part of an efficient system that serves the people and the land!

The agitprop ended with a smattering of applause; a hasty herding of children, chairs, and blankets; and a retreat to nearby RV parks where motor homes were plugged in at one of those neatly trimmed green-lawn sites with a picnic table and a fire pit cast in concrete. Where, presumably, parents comforted frightened children by pointing out salmon aren’t cartoon monsters, and rivers don’t speak, at least not in English.

Beyond the kitsch was the notion that the pre-dam wild river was a kind of sick, liquid Neanderthal, an angry irrational beast not yet fully evolved, a patient in need of a cure. The old river was a profligate energy waster, a reckless teenager; it took curves at high speeds, slashed at the soil, crashed into the ocean. It took an army of government engineers insisting on a nature contained in straight lines to make it calm, sane, predictable, profitable, productive, and amenable to the demands of civilization. To fully realize its potential, to provide a vital element missing in nature, the river had to quit being a river. Only in its transformation to a moving part in an efficient machine could water evolve into a sentient being—one that as its highest calling serves human want and need. But that’s not what happened.

Concrete cartoon: The Bureau of Reclamation tells its side of the story on the face of its largest dam. Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation ancestral lands, Washington. PETER ESSICK

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century’s big dam-building frenzy has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. The federal government plugged the nation’s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into a revenue stream. Federal western water-control projects’ main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices.

The more than ninety thousand dams on the American landscape can’t reasonably be blamed for destroying the nation’s entire biological inheritance. But they play, even for such gargantuan structures, an outsized role in that destruction. The pages that follow are a kind of speed date with the history of the past century of western American water control; it’s dams, diversions, and canals; and, just as importantly, the politics that evolved from them, with a couple of prevalent themes to hold in mind.

First, when it was finally acknowledged that no combination of private capital, pioneer gumption, and military protection would tame the arid western United States, the federal government intervened with a water delivery program it promised would deliver a rising tide that would lift all boats. Dams would deliver water to families who wanted their own farms. Acreage limits, initially 160, topping out at 960 before being abandoned altogether (more on that later), were written into law christening the era of big dams. In doing so, the federal government attempted to defy, through engineering, technology, and a massive capital investment, the cold analysis that arid western landscapes were limited in potential for civilization-building. That analysis has proven correct. It appears, as I’ll get to in the pages to come, that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in arid country—growing increasingly more arid under the ravages of climate chaos—are well beyond the benefits furnished.

Next, despite law and policy that made it clear the federal investment in water storage and delivery should benefit working families on small farms, the intent of the law was systematically subverted, bent to serve those already with plenty rather than those in need. The pipes that deliver water are also bent, figuratively speaking, so that water runs uphill toward money.

While there’s nothing new in parsing yet another instantiation of the unscrupulously wealthy stealing the commons from an unsuspecting public, dams performed this service so well that soon enough every congressional district near a river in the western United States contained a critical mass of vocal boosters who wanted one.

When, in 1902, the Bureau of Reclamation was invented, a new cabal of powers turned their collective attention to dams. Making the desert bloom, it was uncritically assumed, was a giant leap for humankind, a project only a technologically advanced, eternally optimistic, fabulously wealthy, and powerful nation such as the United States could undertake. But it was short-sighted to assume that the total control of water—across a far-flung geography—was a bold leap for civilization.

… the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in arid country … are well beyond the benefits furnished.

Throughout human history, irrigation schemes and the formation of systems of government have had a symbiotic relationship. Any regime in any country that could harness water, especially where it was scarce, wielded an especially potent form of power—first over its environment, and later, over its people. The more complex the water system, the more centralized and concentrated seats of political and economic power tended to be. The regimes of antiquity tended to demonstrate, often in cruel and oppressive ways, the efficacy of centralized control, what might be identified in modern times as a combination of government authority, expertise, financing, and administration. So whether you were conscripted into labor in late nineteenth-century Egypt, a fellah toiling alongside three hundred thousand others in the African sun on the Mahmoudiyah Canal, a slave hauling rock for the construction of the Roman aqueduct, or a Chinese peasant in the Han dynasty digging dikes and diversions to tame the Huang He River, the ultimate power and authority of the system under which you labored was as ugly, as hard, and as obvious as the callouses on your hands and feet. In pre-industrial times, water grew the glory of nations. Oligarchies ruled, built water storage and delivery systems, and generally made sure the benefits were delivered to them. America, high on the promises of the Enlightenment, in legal terms at least, set out to be different in this regard. But even the road to a well-watered hell is paved with good intentions.

Early laws governing rivers and streams on the East Coast of the United States were based on English riparian legal concepts, which held to a more egalitarian tradition of access and use. In the America of the late nineteenth century, Enlightenment-based intent was increasingly alienated from a starkly unenlightened reality.

As a massive, federalized water control effort was gaining steam, America had immersed itself in the extravagant excess of the Gilded Age. The term, coined by Mark Twain in 1873, refers to advances of the day in metallurgy that allowed a thin veneer of precious metal to wrap up a core of some considerably less valuable material. Twain thought it an apt metaphor for the state of his country. What is the chief end of man? queried Twain in 1871, riffing off a well-known religious line of inquiry from Protestant catechism. To get rich. In what way? Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. It was an age of corruption in legislative bodies from the White House to Tammany Hall. It was the era when the term political machine was coined. Rampant fraud, theft, and abuse accompanied the rush to fulfill the vision of a nation stretching from sea to shining sea.

In the 1860s, under the auspices of the Homestead Act, an estimated eight million acres of public lands in California alone were turned over to private ownership. Like the Reclamation Act passed forty years later, the law was intended to put working farm families on land that could become theirs. In Rivers of Empire, historian Donald Worster describes what happened instead. Most of the land came into the hands of a group of Sacramento and San Francisco ‘appropriators’ who lied, bribed, hired dummy entrymen, and manipulated laws to amass holdings of gargantuan size, writes Worster. The outcome was that, by 1871, over 2,000 individuals owned more than 500 acres apiece, and 122 of them held an average of 71,983 acres … In many cases, the land so amassed was merely held for speculation, the owner selling it for a good price later on, getting $2 to $10 or more for an acre that had cost him 60 cents or $1.25. Regulatory enforcement was lax, and much of the wealth intended for the average rural settler wound up benefiting the investors in the coastal cities.

Another popular turn of phrase then was robber baron. These decades marked the rise of almost mythologically wealthy captains of industry—the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, Mellons, Vanderbilts, and Astors. They, and families like theirs, made their money in the rapid innovations of the day: the railroad, the telephone, refrigeration, the lightbulb. They made fortunes in the raw material for manufacture of such goods—steel, timber, petroleum, copper, gold, silver, iron. The new economy catalyzed rapid emigration from farm to city. It was a time of brutally abject poverty. Eleven million of the twelve million families in the United States lived on less than $1,200 a year; their per capita income was $380 annually.

The era marked a low ebb of human rights in America. Jim Crow law and policy relegated African Americans to another century of state-sanctioned racism. Native Americans in the West were relentlessly pursued and mercilessly slaughtered, the survivors relegated to islands of poor country on reservations. As the massive disparity of wealth polarized the country, America seemingly was becoming, simultaneously, more and less civilized. According to the Public Broadcasting Service, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau is said to have remarked, after a brief tour of the United States, that the nation had gone from a stage of barbarism to one of decadence—without achieving any civilization between the two.

The Emergence of the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation

The drive to dam every river emerged out of the Gilded Age spirit, and the mercenary mindset that went with it. Engineers, planners, and politicians promoted, and plenty of people accepted, the concept that rivers had to be sacrificed. It was for the good of the country, the argument went. But that turned out not to be true.

The historical context out of which America’s dam-building craze arose created a system—rife with corruption, inequality, and racism—whereby the benefits of water control, just as had been true throughout history, accrued to a few while many paid the costs. Among the first to pay were migrant workers. Within forty years of its inception, federal dams created the demand—or as most large-scale farmers will acknowledge, the necessity—for guest workers in the United States. Yet this contradicts what was supposed to be a foundational mission of the Bureau of Reclamation—offering struggling families a path toward economic stability by putting them on their own farms and delivering the water to make them viable. BuRec was created to offer working families a way to improve their economic lot in life.

Later, dams were celebrated as a key asset in victories in both World War II and the Cold War. But this claim doesn’t hold water either. Thoroughly damming the Columbia River appealed to America’s post-war sense of pride, and its saber rattling at the Soviet Union. But it did so with a Soviet-style system of infrastructure development, a government-sponsored capitalism with a communist-style, military-flavored central planning element that utterly transformed much of the western United States. The mythology around dams—that they were built for the greater good of the nation, that they helped secure and promote the American way of life—owe their existence to the era in American history out of which the lust for water control was realized. Under the guise of equality and freedom for all, water, like many other American resources, began flowing uphill toward money.

The metastasizing inequality of civilization—the masses plunging toward a poverty-driven barbarism and the wealthy forming the gold-plated backbone of a new Consumers’ Republic—prompted some critics, artists, and philosophers over the next century to consider with renewed scrutiny the freshly paved road which humankind was traveling in their new-fangled horseless carriages. This endeavor of social criticism persisted through the ensuing wars, genocides, economic roller coasters, and an expanding funhouse of technological discovery. Insightful observers wrote about the mindset necessary to create an economy and society where wealth was concentrated at the top. They scrutinized oppression in its various forms. They wrote about the obliteration of nature as a prerequisite to dominating other humans. Some of them applied these ideas to the rapid industrialization of the American landscape. An eco-crank, Edward Abbey, an erudite European dissident philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, and an early critic of technology, Lewis Mumford, had