The Drive for Protection (page 5 of 6)

An essay by Ray Wheeler

Turning the Tide

The flooding of Glen Canyon in 1963 hardened the resolve of environmental leaders never again to allow such a large dam and reservoir to be built at the heart of the Colorado Plateau.

Their resolve would soon be tested by the Bureau of Reclamation's 1964 "Pacific Southwest Water Plan", which included, among countless other goodies, a proposal to build not one but two huge new dams on the Colorado, one in Marble Canyon, directly upstream from Grand Canyon National Park, and one immediately downstream from the Park in Bridge Canyon. If the modern environmental movement was born with the battle to defeat the Echo Park dam, the successful campaign to stop the Marble and Bridge Canyon dams was the movement's coming-of-age.

Once again David Brower and the Sierra Club led the fight, with wide support from a large coalition of national and regional environmental groups. Once again the environmental lobby pulled out all the stops to orchestrate a brilliantly successful national public relations campaign. Once again they produced a flood of brochures, books and magazine articles, a documentary film, and a mountain of constituent letters to members of congress.

Environmentalists had tapped a deep vein in the national consciousness and had perfected a formula for success. With considerable help from the collapse of the Arab oil embargo and plummeting energy prices, for the next two decades environmentalists would win battle after battle on the Colorado Plateau.

In 1976, aided by a sudden sharp decline in demand for electrical power in Southern California, they killed off the Kaiparowits power project. In 1979 they forced the relocation of the proposed Intermountain Power Project, originally sited just 12 miles east of Capitol Reef National Park, to a Great Basin site well outside the Plateau Province. They defeated the proposed Trans-Escalante highway in 1979, the proposed Warner Valley power plant near Zion National Park and the proposed Alton coal strip mine near Bryce Canyon National park in 1980. And in 1984, backed by Utah Governor Scott Matheson and two-to-one support in statewide opinion polls, they killed a proposal to build a nuclear waste dump on the Davis Canyon site adjacent to Canyonlands National Park.

Follow this link to:
The Birth of a New Grand Plan