Ｔｈｅ Ｅｆｆｅｃｔｓ ｏｆ?。簦瑁濉。粒睿簦椋模幔怼。停铮觯澹恚澹睿簟。铮睢。簦瑁濉。牛睿觯椋颍铮睿恚澹睿簦幔臁。校颍铮簦澹悖簦椋铮睢。椋睢。粒恚澹颍椋悖幔睢。祝澹螅?/h1>
2009-11-17 09:04:28趙倩
中國校外教育(下旬) 2009年14期
趙 倩
Abstract:This paper examines the far-reaching influence of anti-dam movement on the protection of environment in the second half of the 20th century in American West. It first introduces the historical background of dams built along the Colorado River-the most important river in the West, especially the construction of Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam. Then, the criticism of dams on the Colorado is examined with the emphasis on the anti-dam movement resulting from the awareness of the negative ecological impacts on the Colorado. In the conclusion, the author demonstrates the unparallel historical significance of the anti-dam movement in the environmentalism in developing the American West.
Key Words:ecological effects nature conquest environmentalism anti-dam movement
I. Introduction
The West is defined as an arid and semi-arid region, the only exception being the Pacific Northwest. The history of the West is filled with stories of adventure, conquest, and of frontier hardship. Before WWII, the history of the West was dominated by Turner's Frontier School, which treated the West as a unique American experience with features of a pastoral garden but paid little attention to the lack of water in the region and the effects of this factor on the pastoral dream. Thus, the Colorado River-the most important river of the West became the aim of the man's conquest from the early 1900s. In the span of less than a century, more than 20 dams were built on the river to transform the arid landscape for local development. However, from the 1950s the deteriorating ecological effects gave rise to the anti-dam movement in the West with the criticism of the Glen Canyon Dam as its focus. Thanks to the unyielding struggle carried out by the environmentalists, American public awareness of preservation was exalted and they began to give true reflection to their triumph over nature in the West.
II. The Big-Dam Building Decades
As the 20th century dawned, the Imperial Valley in California was among the first areas to tap the true potential of the river. According to Hundley, in early 1901, the 60-mile-long Alamo Canal, developed by private concerns, was completed to deliver Colorado River water for irrigation. From 1905 to 1907 when the Colorado caused great amounts of flooding in parts of Arizona and California, demands again grew for a storage reservoir and a dam on the river so as to get the floods under control and meet the water needs of the rapid growth of the lower basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada in population and agriculture . From 1918 to 1921, the upriver and downriver states were unable to resolve their differences. The conflict was most bitter surrounding Boulder Dam-a structure proposed to tame the Colorado.
The primary factor in damming the Colorado River was the demand for water to prosper this area, but the flood and drought cycles challenged development efforts and often washed out irrigation headgates, inundating fields and towns. Laguna Dam, the first major dam on the river was completed in 1909, "but the structure on the Colorado capable of controlling the river flow began with the construction of Hoover Dam in 1935" . After that, water development agencies such as the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers across the nation and particularly in the West launched "a forty-year binge" of dam building . According to Fradkin, there were more than 20 dams built on the Colorado River during this period of time, which both culminated in and ended in the last high dam built by the Bureau in 1963-Glen Canyon Dam. All these dams symbolized the progress made in the development of the water resources of the country during that period through federal efforts.
Hoover Dam in Black Canyon was considered as "one of the most spectacular feats of engineering in the history of the world when completed in 1935" . The big dam was extremely important step ever taken to tame this wild river and put it to work to supply water for domestic use, irrigation and to generate electric energy. Marc Rainser commented, "Hoover Dam, as a showcase, contributed a great deal to the renewal of people's confidence in the depression years of 1930's".
The establishment of the dam showed that the Americans could control nature in a powerful new way with the help of advanced technology. The dam was conceived as a massive and complex machine created by American industrial invention to conquer the surrounding arid landscape and to create an urban civilization, an agribusiness empire. This modern miracle was a culture power representing a new thought, which focused on means or effective instrument instead of the ultimate end and value. It was with this impressive and divine-like power that other dams included in the Boulder Canyon Project were built with the justification that such public works would help stimulate the economy.
Davis Dam was built in 1953 for re-regulating Hoover Dam releases to meet downstream needs. It was followed by Morelos Dam, Palo Verde Diversion Dam and Headgate Rock Diversion Dam, "all built to serve the purpose of diverting water for agriculture purposes in Mexico, Southern California and Southern Arizona" . This furious dam building culminated in the authorization of the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) in 1956. Thus, in the upper basin CRSP led to a series of dams-Blue Mesa, Crystal and Morrow Point dams in Colorado, Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah, Navajo Dam in New Mexico. The list appears endless, "all of them echoing a lost, colorful frontier past, all of them in fact denoting a technological sameness and emerging industrial era" . Glen Canyon Dam, the last big dam built under CRSP in the Colorado River Basin, was the largest and key structure in controlling water releases to the lower basin. ONCLUSIOn
(The American 45~46).Just as Puritans celebrated westward expansion as one of their greatest achievements, millions of Americans felt proud of their water engineering in the West for the visible reason that they transformed desert lands and made them agriculturally productive. Those dams represented man's effective domination of nature with the help of advanced weapons and tool.
Ⅲ. The Rise of Anti-Dam Movement in the West
Between 1940 and 1950, the New Deals environmental legacies were significant as much as problematic. In 1940 the Bureau of Reclamation had many western dams in its planning docket, “but for the most part, ignorance and indifference to the adverse environmental impacts has accompanied their construction.Its agricultural programs and dam-building projects propped up western agricultural economies while sacrificing prairie landscapes across the West. Most importantly, this new-found preservation movement, largely sparked by the protests against several major dam projects, emerged as one of the most important new social and political movements to survive the 1960s and has taken root as an essential part of American life thereafter.
The event which launched the modern environmental movement was the battle between the economic interests and protectionist groups led by the Sierra Club. This time, the dams were not just named after the West's most storied rivers, but would be built in some of its most stupendous canyon landscapes under protection. The hot issue was the division of precious Colorado River water between the states situated in the Colorado River Basin through the Bureau of Reclamation's billion-dollar Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP). "Among the planned 10 dams were several that inflamed the environmental community to launch a protracted battle that lasted 15 years, from 1950 to 1965" . At issue in the beginning was the Bureau's decision to build a dam on the Green River at Echo Park that would have backed reservoir waters into Dinosaur National Monument's Yampa River Canyon. The Echo Park controversy was regarded as a "test case" in that it highlighted the conflict of two values-conquering and protecting the wilderness. Given the tragic experience of Hetch Hetchy, the protectionists led by David Brower, then executive of the Sierra Club, vowed to defend the wilderness with all their efforts. Then owing to the pressure from the protectionists and the public, the government endorsed a version of the Project without the controversial dams. As a result, the protectionists won a great victory in wilderness protection through successfully stopping a dam on the Green River.
Equally important was the determination of the resistance to water development in the case of Dinosaur Monument. The protectionists prepared themselves for a larger battle by pooling their efforts in several lobbying agencies, such as the Emergency Committee on National Resources and the Council of Conservationists. Meanwhile, the philosophy of ecological significance and land ethic was applied to the fight against the dam. Protectionists argued that Dinosaur was important both as an exhibit of normal ecological process and as a gesture of human respect for the biotic community of life. In the battle an increasing number of Americans became convinced of the importance of the wilderness in modern civilization. More importantly, the protection movement began carrying more weight with the government decision thanks to "the wider public support and the improvement in their skill as political fighters.
In fact, the successful passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 was to a large degree stimulated by the Dinosaur case. Determining to capitalize on the momentum of the triumph of the Echo Park decision, leading protectionists pressed for a more positive and systematic wilderness protection. Deeply influenced by the land ethic of Leopold, the ecological concerns were recognized in the Act content that "a wilderness may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value" . Realizing that modern industries were causing them with more and more damage to their environment, American citizens began to adopt cautious and positive attitudes toward their natural environment. As a result, during November 1958, 1,003 letters were received in the Senate hearings conducted in Oregon, California, Utah, and New Mexico. With the passage of the Act, the federal government formally expressed their intent to keep the wild portion of its land permanently wild. However, there existed discrepancy between the original proposal and the final act.
The construction of Echo Park Dam was called off because of the doggedness of the protectionists' efforts, but it was by no mean the last dam planned by the reclamation advocates. In 1963, despite official support from President Johnson and the Secretary of the Interior, the protectionists doubled its efforts to stop the dams in a brilliant organizational effort that banded Americans together to save their national treasures. Advertisements about dams on the influential newspapers led to one of the largest outpourings of public sentiment in American conservation history for protection of the Grand Canyon. More and more people joined the defenders of an undammed Grand Canyon. In addition, the protectionists argued convincingly that the dams were actually not efficient in storing water. Under such pressure, Marble Canyon Dam was cancelled in 1967. in the days that followed, David Brower and Francois Leydet took the uncompromising position that the dam in the Grand Canyon would cause great loss to Canyon's inspirational and aesthetic value. At last, the federal government conceded and President John signed a damless Central Arizona Project bill into law.
At the essence of the Grand Canyon dams controversy was the debate about priorities of development with regard to natural resources. Due to the traditional exploitative attitudes toward nature, dam projects for a long time got full backing from the beneficiaries championing utilitarianism and wise resource development. However, from 1950s to 1960s, "exploiters" of the free-flowing Colorado River were checked by those determined to "protect" it from becoming a victim of civilization. One Congressman observed that "hell has no fury like a protectionist aroused" . The actions of the Sierra Club pushed the environmental efforts to the front of public media, helping to change public perception of environmental groups from marginalized organizations to a major political force.
With the anti-dam movement flourishing in the 1950s, perceptions of dam building have changed. Once the symbols of development, now dams symbolize, for some critics, not progress but environmental and social devastation. In his book Desert Cadillac, Marc Reisner stated that "We can't imagine how dependent we've become on the liberties we've taken with the natural order". Thus, it is becoming wildly accepted that economic development in the West has turned out to be achieved at the great expense of environmental health. The adverse effects of dams have actually made them symbols of corporate and governmental arrogance and blindness, which exaggerated human conquest over nature through the science and technology.
Pondering over the environmental destruction in the West, Stegner further pointed it out that "if the unrestrained engineering of western water was original sin, it was essentially a sin of scale" . However, many dams built by the Bureau had been criticized to be the "cash register" dams, a major source of revenue for repaying reclamation project costs. The problem was largely exacerbated by the fact that except for the best land such as the Imperial and Central Valleys, most irrigated farming in the West was hugely unprofitable. Some critics have called the Reclamation Act the nation's first piece of welfare legislation for the common man. Thus, to offset the economic imbalances of western water development, the government responded by "building more large and high cash register dams in steep western canyons where rapid changes in elevation over short lengths allowed for cheap hydroelectric power generation" In addition to growing opposition to dams from the economic and political perspectives, the environmental consequences of damming the Colorado have received unusually nationwide attention. The environmentalists believe that dams built on the river have not only artificially altered the natural flow of the river, but also destroyed the beautiful scenery and cultural values associated with it. Hoover Dam dramatically altered the hydrologic regime of the Colorado River, for example. "Prior to the 1930s, it carried approximately 125 million tons of suspended sediment to its delta at the head of the Gulf of California, but now, the river does not discharge either sediment or water to the Gulf of California" . Since most main-stem dams on the Colorado have been built in splendid canyons, the dam built in the Hetch Hetchy Valley mercilessly drowned the scenic wonder as beautiful as Yosemite itself.
As to the negative ecological impact of Glen Canyon Dam on the part of the river through the Grand Canyon, Stegner described the seemingly peaceful and serene lake behind dam not only as a dirty tub with a ring of mud and mineral stain around but also as a tap creating a fluctuation of flow that destroys the riparian wildlife. With environmental ethics gaining more attention in the last decades of the 20th century, the old anthropocentric impulse is challenged by the new environmental ethics. The new ethic put great emphasis on the equal relationship between man and nature. In this relationship, "humans are members, not masters, of the life community and ethics must be extended beyond the human-to-human level to include human beings' relationship to nature" . From this perspective, human beings should recognize the intrinsic values of nature and the life forms dependent on it if the sustainability of both humans and nature are to be maintained.
Ⅳ. Conclusion
The development of the Colorado River can be seen as a part of the process in which Americans strive to establish “an oasis civilization” in the arid west. This triumph over nature through large-scale water engineering was made possible by traditional and exploitative attitudes toward nature. However, vigorous opposition to such dams arose in the second half of the 20th century. The anti-dam movement led by the Sierra Club reached its climax during the 1950s-1960s by riveting the public attention to the social and ecological problems resulting from the excessive damming and diverting of the Colorado River. More and more people began to realize that this mastery over nature was achieved at the cost of a profoundly altered physical and biological composition of the river. Therefore, dams were denounced for destroying the riparian wildlife along the river and even driving a host of aquatic and terrestrial species to the edge of extinction. Due to the persistent efforts of the environmentalists, a series of important environment protection acts passed in the last decades of the 20th century. These acts have put restrictions on man's management of natural resources while increasing public consciousness of the need to protect wild rivers.
References:
[1]Hundley, Norris, Jr. Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West [M]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
[2]Kleinsorge, Paul L. The Boulder Canyon Project: Historical and Economic Aspects [M].California: Stanford University Press, 1941.
[3]Reisner, Marc Caillac Dersert.The American West and Its Disappearing Water [M]. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
[4]Fradkin, Phillip. A River No More: the Colorado River and the West [M]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
[5]Worster, Donald. Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West [M]. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
[6]Merill,Karen R. "The New Deal's West." A Companion to the American West [M]. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publisher,346-359.
[7]Flores, Dan. “Society to Match the Scenery: Twentieth-Century Environmental History in the American West.” A Companion to the American West [M]. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publisher,256-269.
[8]Sellars, Richard W. Preserving Nature in the National Parks: a History [M]. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
[9]Nash, F. Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind [M]. 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
[10]Stegner, Wallace Earle. The American West as Living Space [M]. Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 1987.
[11]Carothers, Steven W., and Brown Bryan T. The Colorado River Though Grand Canyon: Natural History and Human Changes [M]. Tuscon: the University of Arizona Press, 1991.
趙 倩
Abstract:This paper examines the far-reaching influence of anti-dam movement on the protection of environment in the second half of the 20th century in American West. It first introduces the historical background of dams built along the Colorado River-the most important river in the West, especially the construction of Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam. Then, the criticism of dams on the Colorado is examined with the emphasis on the anti-dam movement resulting from the awareness of the negative ecological impacts on the Colorado. In the conclusion, the author demonstrates the unparallel historical significance of the anti-dam movement in the environmentalism in developing the American West.
Key Words:ecological effects nature conquest environmentalism anti-dam movement
I. Introduction
The West is defined as an arid and semi-arid region, the only exception being the Pacific Northwest. The history of the West is filled with stories of adventure, conquest, and of frontier hardship. Before WWII, the history of the West was dominated by Turner's Frontier School, which treated the West as a unique American experience with features of a pastoral garden but paid little attention to the lack of water in the region and the effects of this factor on the pastoral dream. Thus, the Colorado River-the most important river of the West became the aim of the man's conquest from the early 1900s. In the span of less than a century, more than 20 dams were built on the river to transform the arid landscape for local development. However, from the 1950s the deteriorating ecological effects gave rise to the anti-dam movement in the West with the criticism of the Glen Canyon Dam as its focus. Thanks to the unyielding struggle carried out by the environmentalists, American public awareness of preservation was exalted and they began to give true reflection to their triumph over nature in the West.
II. The Big-Dam Building Decades
As the 20th century dawned, the Imperial Valley in California was among the first areas to tap the true potential of the river. According to Hundley, in early 1901, the 60-mile-long Alamo Canal, developed by private concerns, was completed to deliver Colorado River water for irrigation. From 1905 to 1907 when the Colorado caused great amounts of flooding in parts of Arizona and California, demands again grew for a storage reservoir and a dam on the river so as to get the floods under control and meet the water needs of the rapid growth of the lower basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada in population and agriculture . From 1918 to 1921, the upriver and downriver states were unable to resolve their differences. The conflict was most bitter surrounding Boulder Dam-a structure proposed to tame the Colorado.
The primary factor in damming the Colorado River was the demand for water to prosper this area, but the flood and drought cycles challenged development efforts and often washed out irrigation headgates, inundating fields and towns. Laguna Dam, the first major dam on the river was completed in 1909, "but the structure on the Colorado capable of controlling the river flow began with the construction of Hoover Dam in 1935" . After that, water development agencies such as the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers across the nation and particularly in the West launched "a forty-year binge" of dam building . According to Fradkin, there were more than 20 dams built on the Colorado River during this period of time, which both culminated in and ended in the last high dam built by the Bureau in 1963-Glen Canyon Dam. All these dams symbolized the progress made in the development of the water resources of the country during that period through federal efforts.
Hoover Dam in Black Canyon was considered as "one of the most spectacular feats of engineering in the history of the world when completed in 1935" . The big dam was extremely important step ever taken to tame this wild river and put it to work to supply water for domestic use, irrigation and to generate electric energy. Marc Rainser commented, "Hoover Dam, as a showcase, contributed a great deal to the renewal of people's confidence in the depression years of 1930's".
The establishment of the dam showed that the Americans could control nature in a powerful new way with the help of advanced technology. The dam was conceived as a massive and complex machine created by American industrial invention to conquer the surrounding arid landscape and to create an urban civilization, an agribusiness empire. This modern miracle was a culture power representing a new thought, which focused on means or effective instrument instead of the ultimate end and value. It was with this impressive and divine-like power that other dams included in the Boulder Canyon Project were built with the justification that such public works would help stimulate the economy.
Davis Dam was built in 1953 for re-regulating Hoover Dam releases to meet downstream needs. It was followed by Morelos Dam, Palo Verde Diversion Dam and Headgate Rock Diversion Dam, "all built to serve the purpose of diverting water for agriculture purposes in Mexico, Southern California and Southern Arizona" . This furious dam building culminated in the authorization of the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) in 1956. Thus, in the upper basin CRSP led to a series of dams-Blue Mesa, Crystal and Morrow Point dams in Colorado, Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah, Navajo Dam in New Mexico. The list appears endless, "all of them echoing a lost, colorful frontier past, all of them in fact denoting a technological sameness and emerging industrial era" . Glen Canyon Dam, the last big dam built under CRSP in the Colorado River Basin, was the largest and key structure in controlling water releases to the lower basin. ONCLUSIOn
(The American 45~46).Just as Puritans celebrated westward expansion as one of their greatest achievements, millions of Americans felt proud of their water engineering in the West for the visible reason that they transformed desert lands and made them agriculturally productive. Those dams represented man's effective domination of nature with the help of advanced weapons and tool.
Ⅲ. The Rise of Anti-Dam Movement in the West
Between 1940 and 1950, the New Deals environmental legacies were significant as much as problematic. In 1940 the Bureau of Reclamation had many western dams in its planning docket, “but for the most part, ignorance and indifference to the adverse environmental impacts has accompanied their construction.Its agricultural programs and dam-building projects propped up western agricultural economies while sacrificing prairie landscapes across the West. Most importantly, this new-found preservation movement, largely sparked by the protests against several major dam projects, emerged as one of the most important new social and political movements to survive the 1960s and has taken root as an essential part of American life thereafter.
The event which launched the modern environmental movement was the battle between the economic interests and protectionist groups led by the Sierra Club. This time, the dams were not just named after the West's most storied rivers, but would be built in some of its most stupendous canyon landscapes under protection. The hot issue was the division of precious Colorado River water between the states situated in the Colorado River Basin through the Bureau of Reclamation's billion-dollar Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP). "Among the planned 10 dams were several that inflamed the environmental community to launch a protracted battle that lasted 15 years, from 1950 to 1965" . At issue in the beginning was the Bureau's decision to build a dam on the Green River at Echo Park that would have backed reservoir waters into Dinosaur National Monument's Yampa River Canyon. The Echo Park controversy was regarded as a "test case" in that it highlighted the conflict of two values-conquering and protecting the wilderness. Given the tragic experience of Hetch Hetchy, the protectionists led by David Brower, then executive of the Sierra Club, vowed to defend the wilderness with all their efforts. Then owing to the pressure from the protectionists and the public, the government endorsed a version of the Project without the controversial dams. As a result, the protectionists won a great victory in wilderness protection through successfully stopping a dam on the Green River.
Equally important was the determination of the resistance to water development in the case of Dinosaur Monument. The protectionists prepared themselves for a larger battle by pooling their efforts in several lobbying agencies, such as the Emergency Committee on National Resources and the Council of Conservationists. Meanwhile, the philosophy of ecological significance and land ethic was applied to the fight against the dam. Protectionists argued that Dinosaur was important both as an exhibit of normal ecological process and as a gesture of human respect for the biotic community of life. In the battle an increasing number of Americans became convinced of the importance of the wilderness in modern civilization. More importantly, the protection movement began carrying more weight with the government decision thanks to "the wider public support and the improvement in their skill as political fighters.
In fact, the successful passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964 was to a large degree stimulated by the Dinosaur case. Determining to capitalize on the momentum of the triumph of the Echo Park decision, leading protectionists pressed for a more positive and systematic wilderness protection. Deeply influenced by the land ethic of Leopold, the ecological concerns were recognized in the Act content that "a wilderness may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value" . Realizing that modern industries were causing them with more and more damage to their environment, American citizens began to adopt cautious and positive attitudes toward their natural environment. As a result, during November 1958, 1,003 letters were received in the Senate hearings conducted in Oregon, California, Utah, and New Mexico. With the passage of the Act, the federal government formally expressed their intent to keep the wild portion of its land permanently wild. However, there existed discrepancy between the original proposal and the final act.
The construction of Echo Park Dam was called off because of the doggedness of the protectionists' efforts, but it was by no mean the last dam planned by the reclamation advocates. In 1963, despite official support from President Johnson and the Secretary of the Interior, the protectionists doubled its efforts to stop the dams in a brilliant organizational effort that banded Americans together to save their national treasures. Advertisements about dams on the influential newspapers led to one of the largest outpourings of public sentiment in American conservation history for protection of the Grand Canyon. More and more people joined the defenders of an undammed Grand Canyon. In addition, the protectionists argued convincingly that the dams were actually not efficient in storing water. Under such pressure, Marble Canyon Dam was cancelled in 1967. in the days that followed, David Brower and Francois Leydet took the uncompromising position that the dam in the Grand Canyon would cause great loss to Canyon's inspirational and aesthetic value. At last, the federal government conceded and President John signed a damless Central Arizona Project bill into law.
At the essence of the Grand Canyon dams controversy was the debate about priorities of development with regard to natural resources. Due to the traditional exploitative attitudes toward nature, dam projects for a long time got full backing from the beneficiaries championing utilitarianism and wise resource development. However, from 1950s to 1960s, "exploiters" of the free-flowing Colorado River were checked by those determined to "protect" it from becoming a victim of civilization. One Congressman observed that "hell has no fury like a protectionist aroused" . The actions of the Sierra Club pushed the environmental efforts to the front of public media, helping to change public perception of environmental groups from marginalized organizations to a major political force.
With the anti-dam movement flourishing in the 1950s, perceptions of dam building have changed. Once the symbols of development, now dams symbolize, for some critics, not progress but environmental and social devastation. In his book Desert Cadillac, Marc Reisner stated that "We can't imagine how dependent we've become on the liberties we've taken with the natural order". Thus, it is becoming wildly accepted that economic development in the West has turned out to be achieved at the great expense of environmental health. The adverse effects of dams have actually made them symbols of corporate and governmental arrogance and blindness, which exaggerated human conquest over nature through the science and technology.
Pondering over the environmental destruction in the West, Stegner further pointed it out that "if the unrestrained engineering of western water was original sin, it was essentially a sin of scale" . However, many dams built by the Bureau had been criticized to be the "cash register" dams, a major source of revenue for repaying reclamation project costs. The problem was largely exacerbated by the fact that except for the best land such as the Imperial and Central Valleys, most irrigated farming in the West was hugely unprofitable. Some critics have called the Reclamation Act the nation's first piece of welfare legislation for the common man. Thus, to offset the economic imbalances of western water development, the government responded by "building more large and high cash register dams in steep western canyons where rapid changes in elevation over short lengths allowed for cheap hydroelectric power generation" In addition to growing opposition to dams from the economic and political perspectives, the environmental consequences of damming the Colorado have received unusually nationwide attention. The environmentalists believe that dams built on the river have not only artificially altered the natural flow of the river, but also destroyed the beautiful scenery and cultural values associated with it. Hoover Dam dramatically altered the hydrologic regime of the Colorado River, for example. "Prior to the 1930s, it carried approximately 125 million tons of suspended sediment to its delta at the head of the Gulf of California, but now, the river does not discharge either sediment or water to the Gulf of California" . Since most main-stem dams on the Colorado have been built in splendid canyons, the dam built in the Hetch Hetchy Valley mercilessly drowned the scenic wonder as beautiful as Yosemite itself.
As to the negative ecological impact of Glen Canyon Dam on the part of the river through the Grand Canyon, Stegner described the seemingly peaceful and serene lake behind dam not only as a dirty tub with a ring of mud and mineral stain around but also as a tap creating a fluctuation of flow that destroys the riparian wildlife. With environmental ethics gaining more attention in the last decades of the 20th century, the old anthropocentric impulse is challenged by the new environmental ethics. The new ethic put great emphasis on the equal relationship between man and nature. In this relationship, "humans are members, not masters, of the life community and ethics must be extended beyond the human-to-human level to include human beings' relationship to nature" . From this perspective, human beings should recognize the intrinsic values of nature and the life forms dependent on it if the sustainability of both humans and nature are to be maintained.
Ⅳ. Conclusion
The development of the Colorado River can be seen as a part of the process in which Americans strive to establish “an oasis civilization” in the arid west. This triumph over nature through large-scale water engineering was made possible by traditional and exploitative attitudes toward nature. However, vigorous opposition to such dams arose in the second half of the 20th century. The anti-dam movement led by the Sierra Club reached its climax during the 1950s-1960s by riveting the public attention to the social and ecological problems resulting from the excessive damming and diverting of the Colorado River. More and more people began to realize that this mastery over nature was achieved at the cost of a profoundly altered physical and biological composition of the river. Therefore, dams were denounced for destroying the riparian wildlife along the river and even driving a host of aquatic and terrestrial species to the edge of extinction. Due to the persistent efforts of the environmentalists, a series of important environment protection acts passed in the last decades of the 20th century. These acts have put restrictions on man's management of natural resources while increasing public consciousness of the need to protect wild rivers.
References:
[1]Hundley, Norris, Jr. Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West [M]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
[2]Kleinsorge, Paul L. The Boulder Canyon Project: Historical and Economic Aspects [M].California: Stanford University Press, 1941.
[3]Reisner, Marc Caillac Dersert.The American West and Its Disappearing Water [M]. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
[4]Fradkin, Phillip. A River No More: the Colorado River and the West [M]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
[5]Worster, Donald. Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West [M]. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
[6]Merill,Karen R. "The New Deal's West." A Companion to the American West [M]. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publisher,346-359.
[7]Flores, Dan. “Society to Match the Scenery: Twentieth-Century Environmental History in the American West.” A Companion to the American West [M]. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publisher,256-269.
[8]Sellars, Richard W. Preserving Nature in the National Parks: a History [M]. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
[9]Nash, F. Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind [M]. 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
[10]Stegner, Wallace Earle. The American West as Living Space [M]. Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 1987.
[11]Carothers, Steven W., and Brown Bryan T. The Colorado River Though Grand Canyon: Natural History and Human Changes [M]. Tuscon: the University of Arizona Press, 1991.
