Conservation groups defeated proposals to build a large dam within the boundaries of Dinosaur National Monument in western Colorado, thereby preserving the land and strengthening the presumption that national parks and monuments should not be developed.
The defeat of the proposed dam at Dinosaur National Monument marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement in the United States. This test case for the protection of a National Park Service natural area united more than twenty-five conservation groups, sharpened their political skills, and challenged the economic viability of large dams in the western United States.
In 1940, the Bureau of Reclamation
Until the controversy, Dinosaur National Monument’s canyons and plateaus were largely unknown. The first record of the exploration of the Green River was written by John Wesley Powell
With the exception of the dinosaur fossil quarry, which is easily reached from Vernal, Utah, most of the monument was undeveloped. Rough roads led to the edges of the canyons, and relatively few people braved the whitewater rivers in boats. In 1953, about five hundred people (more than the known total from the preceding ten years) went through the canyons by boat, and about twenty-two thousand visited the dinosaur quarry. These numbers nearly doubled in 1954, as the controversy over Echo Park brought the area sudden fame. The proposed dam near the Utah-Colorado border would have backed water sixty-three miles up the Green River and forty-four miles up the Yampa River, eliminating most of the rapids and covering the canyon walls to a depth of about five hundred feet.
The states that share the upper basin of the Colorado River—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico—began negotiating a compact to allocate the river’s waters in 1946. Irrigators in central Utah were particularly interested in acquiring water from the Yampa River in western Colorado. With a dam near Echo Park, the irrigators could transfer water from eastern Utah’s Uintah basin over the Wasatch Front to central Utah. The water from the Yampa would replace the Uintah basin water already used by farmers in the region.
The Upper Basin Compact was approved in 1948 and became effective in 1949. In 1950, the Bureau of Reclamation circulated initial plans for the Colorado River Storage Project
The Bureau of Reclamation proposed paying for the project through a complicated financial plan. Irrigators would be allowed a “suitable” period to develop farms before they would be required to make payments. For fifty years thereafter, they would pay as much toward the irrigation portion of the project as they were able but would not be charged interest. Electrical generation would pay the costs of power production and transmission, as well as the unpaid irrigation costs. The Echo Park project, including an additional dam within the monument at Split Mountain, and the Glen Canyon project would produce most of the water storage and electricity.
In April, 1950, Interior Secretary Oscar Chapman
In December, 1952, Secretary Chapman forwarded the bureau’s proposal for Echo Park to President Harry S. Truman and recommended that the secretary of the interior be authorized to construct the dam under the provisions of the Reclamation Act. By late 1953, the new secretary of the interior, Douglas McKay
In 1954, both the Senate and House Subcommittees on Irrigation and Reclamation
Faced with strong national opposition to Echo Park, irrigation proponents in the upper basin agreed to drop the Echo Park proposal for fear it would block approval of the larger plan. On March 29, 1956, Congress approved the Upper Colorado Storage Project, including the Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge, Navajo, and Curecanti dams; the legislation, however, included the phrase “no dam or reservoir authorized by the Act shall be constructed within a National Park or Monument.” The bill became law on April 11, 1956, as the Colorado River Storage Project Act.
Opposition to the Echo Park dam and the larger storage project came from a coalition of three interests: the preservationists, whose arguments focused on the idea of wilderness and technical challenges to the Bureau of Reclamation’s project analysis; those who were concerned about the budgetary impacts of such a large project; and development advocates in Southern California, who were competing for Colorado River water to quench the thirsts of desert agriculture and urban development.
The preservation movement had suffered a major setback when the Hetch Hetchy Dam was built within Yosemite National Park beginning in 1914. Construction of a second dam within a national park or monument would set a further precedent for development rather than for preservation. Similar proposals existed for dams within Kings Canyon, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Parks.
The leaders of about twenty-five preservation organizations formed a coalition to organize opposition to the Eisenhower administration’s policy of developing public lands, including the Echo Park proposal. Howard Clinton Zahniser of the Wilderness Society
Because there was no officially recognized wilderness system until 1964, protection of the area within the national monument was particularly important to the preservation interests. Many people characterized the controversy as a showdown. The preservationists suggested that the decision about Echo Park would settle, once and for all, the wilderness debate in the United States.
The preservationists gained financial support from Edward C. Mallinckrodt
Brower was particularly effective in challenging the bureau’s estimates of water losses through evaporation at alternative reservoir sites. Storage reservoirs in desert regions are particularly vulnerable to water loss through evaporation. In their testimony, bureau officials stressed that if Echo Park was excluded from the project, it would mean the loss of 350,000 acre-feet of water through evaporation. Brower exposed errors in the bureau’s calculations for Echo Park and for an alternative of a higher Glen Canyon Dam. The errors caused embarrassment to the bureau and weakened its case in the eyes of the public and some members of Congress.
Additional opposition to the larger Colorado River Storage Project came from those who questioned the economics behind such a large public undertaking. Economists and some politicians questioned the Bureau of Reclamation’s economic analysis of the proposed projects including the use of a basin-wide accounting system—in which stronger projects “carried” those that were not cost-effective on their own—the advisability of expanding agricultural production in the upper basin through public subsidy, the use of electrical generation to pay irrigation costs, and the fact that irrigators would not pay interest on irrigation costs.
Careful analysis of the project’s cost-effectiveness revealed significant problems. Developing new agricultural lands in the relatively cold and arid upper basin would be an expensive public investment. Given the financial constraints of the early Cold War period, it was relatively easy for legislators from outside the West to oppose such an expensive regional project. In the wake of the Echo Park dispute, the use of economic analysis became an increasingly important tactic of environmentalists opposed to large federal development projects.
Finally, developers in Southern California opposed the larger Colorado River Storage Project. Completion of the Boulder Canyon project (Hoover Dam) made water and power available for agriculture, industry, and domestic use in the desert of Southern California. The Colorado River Compact
The combination of these three sources of opposition was enough to defeat the Echo Park dam proposal, but the balance of the larger project was completed. Preservationists chose to limit their opposition to Echo Park rather than to attack the larger development project. In retrospect, some environmentalists consider that decision a mistake. When Glen Canyon Dam was completed, the reservoir inundated hundreds of miles of uniquely beautiful canyons that few people had visited. The loss of Glen Canyon became a symbol to modern environmentalists on the Colorado Plateau, just as Hetch Hetchy had become a symbol to earlier preservationists.
Many environmental historians mark the Echo Park fight as a landmark in the developing environmental movement. The twin tactics of mass media use to influence public opinion and critical economic analysis to undermine large public development projects were successfully used many times in following years.
-
Blackstock, Alan, ed. A Green River Reader. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005. General history of the Green River and its denizens and explorers. Includes two essays about the Echo Park project. Bibliographic references. -
McPhee, John. Encounters with the Archdruid. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. An exploration of David Brower’s personality. The third section, which contrasts Brower with Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy, is particularly instructive with regard to Western water development. -
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982. Presents the development of the concept of “wilderness” and the importance of Echo Park in the larger scheme of wilderness protection. -
Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986. A pointed and thorough journalistic analysis of the costs of water development in the western United States. -
Richardson, Elmo R. Dams, Parks, and Politics: Resource Development and Preservation in the Truman-Eisenhower Era. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973. A review of the larger political and policy issues associated with conservation in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. -
Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. An essential source for biographical information on John Wesley Powell by an author whose works define the region. -
Stratton, Owen, and Phillip Sirotkin. The Echo Park Controversy. University: University of Alabama Press, 1959. A detailed case study of the administrative policy process used in the Echo Park decision. -
Wyant, William K. Westward in Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. An accessible, balanced treatment of the history of public lands and the conservation movement.
Roosevelt Creates Jackson Hole National Monument
Brower Becomes Executive Director of the Sierra Club
Controversial Glen Canyon Dam Is Completed
Great Swamp Wildlife Refuge Is Dedicated
Five States Take Steps to Halt Lake Erie Pollution
Scenic Hudson Case Stops Storm King Power Plant
Johnson Establishes North Cascades National Park
Sierra Club Helps Block Dams on the Colorado River
Brower Forms Friends of the Earth