Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)
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Growing Up With Glen / Kathryn Miles
Abstract: Ecologists refer to it as 'shifting baselines.' Anthropologists call it 'environmental generational amnesia.' Both refer to the slow change in the ways we respond to and define the environment. As biologists and social scientists have deftly argued, definitions of environmentalism and sustainable resource use are often based on our earliest experiences with nature. We then use these memories as the basis for our understanding of the natural world and its use. Ultimately, this creates a generational approach to issues of conservation, particularly with regards to such contentious issues as water rights and the changing face of the American West. At no place is this changing perspective more apparent than the Glen Canyon dam. "Growing Up With Glen" addresses this change in perspective. Using a combination of personal narrative and cognitive theory, I explore generational responses to Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon dam. Specifically, I examine ways in which writers and thinkers born after the construction of Glen Canyon dam create their own baseline regarding the acceptability of the dam and the ways in which its reservoir does (and does not) represent the natural world. These ontologies provide useful perspective regarding both the emerging school of environmentalism and new thinking regarding water storage in the American West.
<1> 1982. Lake Powell has swelled to its highest water mark, creating a long, serpentining reservoir that snakes from the Glen Canyon Dam across the Utah/Arizona border. My family and I have returned to the lake for a two-week vacation. The weather is comfortably warm—never hot—and the cool green water of Lake Powell seems an endless labyrinth of unknown twists and turns, each one offering a new and overwhelmingly beautiful vista of red rock canyon. Perched in an inner-tube twenty feet from the houseboat my family has rented for the week, I feel the warmth of the bright canyon walls, still holding the heat from earlier in the day. Above them, a peregrine circles for one last meal before bed. Below all of this—the sky, the bird, the canyon walls, the eight-year-old girl—a watery tableaux unfolds. Spawning bluegill brush the pebbled bottom of the lake as they fashion the birthplaces for their fry. Catfish, lured out by darkness and cooling temperatures (for the sun sets early behind these canyon walls), begin their hunt among the vegetation and rotting logs and what looks like a rusting can of Tab.
<2> This is my most vivid version of Lake Powell.
<3> It is not my first visit to the lake, nor is it my first time floating upon its surface at sundown. Nevertheless, I am nervous: an imprecise description of the conflicting emotion I am experiencing—reverie for the peace of this cove; exhilaration over being a part of so much vibrant color and activity; terrified by the uncontrolled wildness of it all. I do not know that the water is clear enough for me to watch the fish because it has been artificially stilled. I do not know that the fish are not a natural part of the ecosystem—that they have been stocked by the National Park Service for our recreational pleasure—nor am I aware that far below me rests the remnants of a deep and wonderful canyon, now flooded by so much water. Most of all, I do not know that all of this is the result of a massive, circular bulwark of concrete more immense, more assuming than even the tallest of my red rock canyon walls. All I know is that I love this place.
<4> The details of this snapshot are mine. They are among the most vividly personal of all of my personal narratives. And yet, they derive from images and experiences shared by many. Others of my generation spent their childhood in this peaceful, watery world; together, we fashioned both our collective aesthetic and our political consciousness out of moments just like the one I describe above. We learned only later of the environmental, racial, and political controversies surrounding the artificial lake we grew up thinking was the most natural place on earth. As a result, we are a generation based in cognitive dissonance. We do not yet have a name, nor do we have a clearly-articulated environmental position regarding the lake where we developed some of our most enduring memories. We feel strongly about our experiences at what was once known as Glen Canyon, but we are also conflicted—troubled by the dichotomy of so much beauty complicated by so much controversy.
<5> In this regard, we are not alone.
<6> Indeed, Lake Powell is one of the most profound sites of environmental controversy in the United States. Before my cohort, there were other generations of people keenly interested in Glen Canyon and its reservoir. They, too, were conflicted, albeit for very different reasons. The historian Mark W.T. Harvey distinguishes these generations by their ideological perspectives. The first were the Progressive-era conservationists, who based their understanding of land management in civic projects such as the Bureau of Reclamation that emphasized husbandry and use. Later, they were confronted with the second-generation preservationists, who wanted to save the land from development altogether.[1] The zenith of their ideological clash occurred right where I was swimming—in any number of the side coves of what was once Glen Canyon.
<7> The war that was waged before me was a bitter one. Led by David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club, the new generation of conservationists battled the Bureau of Reclamation and its imperial interests in the waterways and scenic places of the American West. Of particular concern to both groups was the proposed dam at Dinosaur National Monument. Faced with the prospect of losing outright to the Bureau of Reclamation, conservation groups led by Brower adopted a new tactic: they would bargain with the Bureau and give them something in exchange for Echo Park. That begrudging gift was Glen Canyon—the site of what would become one of the Bureau's most ambitious water storage projects. The psychological and environmental cost of this gift would haunt Brower for the rest of his life, ultimately spurring him to take action in defense of nature across America. In the preface to his 2000 edition of The Place No One Knew (originally published in 1963 as eulogy to the flooding canyon), Brower laments: "Glen Canyon Dam would not have been built if I hadn't let a war be lost. Between 1950 and 1956 I switched from advocating a higher Glen Canyon Dam to insisting that there be no dam at all, but I was directed by the Sierra Club's executive committee to end my opposition to that mistake, and for no explicable reason I obeyed" (9).
<8> With this mitigated support of Sierra Club—and the end of opposition from the club's director—the Bureau of Reclamation scrapped their plans for a large concrete dam at Echo Park and, instead, set their sights on the Glen Canyon dam, located just below the Utah/Arizona border. Construction began on the concrete arch dam a year later, and the conservationist debate shifted from what had been preserved to what had been lost. In exchange for Glen Canyon, the people of the southwest were given the newly formed Lake Powell, the reservoir that flooded 186 miles of Colorado River Canyon. The first generation of conservationists saw this as a fair trade. The second generation did not. As a result, Lake Powell—the second largest man-made lake in the United States—assumed the mantle of our nation's most bitter environmental controversy, having received this distinction hand-me-down fashion from Dinosaur National Monument.
<9> To be sure, the reservoir has served as the site for countless environmental debates: and it is no small site. At its fullest capacity in the late 1970s and early 1980s—the years when I and others of my generation first encountered it—the lake contained 21.5 million acre-feet of water and had a preternaturally tranquil surface area of over 100 square miles. Filled by the once silted, turbulent currents of the Colorado River, the water in Glen Canyon was made perpetually calm and potably clear by the Glen Canyon Dam. But while the water at the lake settled into this still clarity shortly after the dam penstocks opened, the controversy surrounding these gates still roils with a muddy intensity that even the undammed Colorado River would appreciate.
<10> This controversy is more than academic or ideological for me and other members of the third generation. It is also deeply personal, for much of our own history is wrapped up in Lake Powell and other Colorado River Compact initiatives. Even still, I didn't know about the controversial history of the place when I first fell in love with Lake Powell. I was born in 1974: fifty-two years after the Colorado River Compact (or CRC) was signed, ultimately carving up the majority of the water in the west between seven U.S. states. Eighteen years after Congress approved the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and blasting began. Eleven years after the formal filling of Lake Powell commenced. Eight years after Lady Bird Johnson dedicated the structure. Two years after the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area was established.
<11> As a result of my relatively late arrival on the scene, I spent most of my childhood unaware of the political controversies in the area as well. My lack of awareness about this ideological battle may seem inconceivable to those who lived through the first two decades of debate about the Glen Canyon Dam. I understand such a response: indeed, one can—and many have—written lengthy tomes about the breadth and depth of these battles: beginning with creation of the CRC in 1922, intensifying with the stand off between Brower and the Bureau (personified in the form of its charismatic leader, Floyd Dominy), and continuing today in seemingly countless books on the subject.[2] Although some of the immediacy has dampened with time, little of the potency has. As Harvey observes, "the loss of Glen Canyon proved to be more than just a highly regretful occurrence: it became a touchstone for environmental action along the Colorado River and Plateau for the next generation" (299).
<12> This debate began and continues to be about the preservation—and now reclamation—of Glen Canyon. I say reclamation because the canyon now, of course, lays beneath the massive lake, preserved only by the nature writing of John McPhee, the photography of Eliot Porter, the monkey wrenching of Edward Abbey's most popular fictional heroes, and the aging memories of those lucky enough to have visited Glen Canyon before construction began there in 1956. I am not one of those people. I am, I suppose one might say, their ideological daughter—granddaughter (or even great-granddaughter) to the nascent environmental movement of the postwar United States. Throughout my introduction to the Glen Canyon region, I was too young to read McPhee and company, or to notice when the environmental group Earth First! arrived on the political scene by unfurling a giant banner—over one hundred yards long—intended to represent a giant crack in the seemingly unbreakable structure. And I certainly didn't know that a growing number of concerned citizens and coalitions of environmental organizations would band together with the Glen Canyon Institute and other NGOs to remove Lake Powell from maps and tourist guidebooks as well as suburban plumbing and electrical wiring—preserving it only in minds and words as a cautionary tale about U.S. consumption of energy, natural resources, and cultural heritage.[3]
<13> I wouldn't learn about these aspects of the Colorado until much later when, as a college student taking my first environmental studies course, I was shocked to discover that my beloved lake—one of the first places where I ever really loved nature—wasn't a lake at all, but a reservoir: a plug stopping up the natural flow of the Colorado and creating a new version of river water both for the burgeoning rafting industry and the many residents of the southwest who had come to depend upon (or at least have been told that they depend upon) its flow.
<14> Had any of us heard, our professor asked of his mostly Midwestern students, of this place called Lake Powell? Heard of it? I had been to it. I had loved it. I waxed on about my visits to the lake in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Nearly full, the reservoir created a seemingly endless string of narrow channels and private coves. My family and I would vacation there, often near the San Juan branch. We'd spend a few hours every day or two selecting one of these coves as one would a walk-in campsite. Then we'd lay anchor and spend our days swimming, hiking around the omnipresent red rock at Navajo Point and Hole-in-the-Rock, or catching fish for the evening meal. I remembered spending hours staring at the caves once used by Anasazi dwellers, wondering what their lives had been like, or floating on an inflatable raft, watching giant carp and bass go about their daily routine over ten feet below me. It was a wonderful, wild place, I assured my fellow students—warm sun and narrow little trails through the red rock during the day, followed by swims in the shadowy coves in the late afternoons and dinner cooked over a fire on a sandbar. You wouldn't believe the sunsets, I told them, or the stars so thick it was difficult to tell where one ended and the next began. I loved the solitude there. The immediacy of the natural world there.
<15> The silence from my classmates was entire. They had read their Edward Abbey. They knew to hate the place. They looked down at the seminar table, as if embarrassed for me. Still confused, I looked at them expectantly. What was this all about?
<16> The stories came flooding out: second-hand anecdotes about the sins of the Glen Canyon Dam culled from any number of sources. I felt like I had been in a coma. The other members of my seminar maligned the dam, pulling their well-worn copies of The Monkey Wrench Gang out of their backpacks and reading underlined passages as you might expect a seminarian to read from a Bible. And I? I fell silent, trying to catch up: countless preservationists, conservationists, ethnographers, and recreationalists had, at least metaphorically, launched their own projects and ideologies of resource use on these same waters where I had approached Romantic awe at the apprehension of nature? Impossible.
<17> But, as I would soon learn, it wasn't impossible at all. This was a tough lesson for someone who always counted herself as a bleeding-heart tree-hugging, dirt-worshipping, down-with-the-man-and-development kind of person, too. I listened to Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger; I read my Rachel Carson and William Wordsworth. I believed in the evils of development; I wanted to protect and preserve every natural place that I could. But I never once considered that the anchor of my environmental aesthetic and ethic—my family trips to Lake Powell—floated on a canyon drowned by 26,215,000 acre-feet of water. Thus began a philosophical and personal crisis that continues today. Can someone count herself as an Environmentalist with a capital "E" and still love Lake Powell? What happens when someone inverts the normal introduction to the issue and meets the reservoir on its own terms before reading the polemics written about it? Can a contested reservoir be counted as a natural place? I didn't know. I'm not sure I know now. But I want to find out.
<18> I began my process of re-education the only way I knew: I read everything I could find on the subject, working backwards through Abbey and McPhee to Zane Grey and eventually John Wesley Powell himself. And then I came to a new, equally troubling, conclusion: I love this literature. I love these writers: their quiet (and not so quiet) pathos, the eloquence with which they speak on behalf of the land, the ways in which they have inspired countless others to take up their own noble projects in the name of environmentalism. But I love this literature with the same kind of distant voyeurism with which I appreciate anything else about historical study, which is to say I love it as one might love a museum display: behind glass, at arm's length. For as much as I appreciate and even empathize with these words, they are not my own. Nor is the era, nor is the milieu out of which they rise. David Brower is right: Glen Canyonis a place I never knew. And, until that English course, it never occurred to me to distrust—much less dislike— Lake Powell. Reservoir or not, that place was why I was sitting in an Environmental Literature class to begin with—why I wanted to take up the charges of the Browers and Abbeys of the world.
<19> In time, I learned that I am not alone. Forty years after the damming of Glen Canyon, a new school of environmental writing is emerging about the reservoir the dam created. Ours is a complicated perspective regarding water rights in the West, one very different from previous generations who remember the Colorado before it became a series of artificial lakes and pools interrupted by regulated flow. Lake Powell was—and is—the only version of the Colorado River we have known, and our thoughts concerning its use reflect that ontological basis.
<20> What are we to do, those of us born in the postdiluvian era: the A.D. (After Dam) years? We must adopt a different tack. Leading the charge is Jared Farmer, a self-professed skeptic and sometime-hater of Glen Canyon Dam and the reservoir it created over forty years ago. Like me, Farmer was also born in the post-Glen Canyon era; he has earned a well-deserved reputation as a successful mediator between those who favor the pre-dam canyon and those who love Lake Powell. As Farmer himself admits, this is no easy task: particularly given that doing anything to lend tacit support to a dam and a flooded canyon goes against every conservationist bone in his body. Nonetheless, he writes:
My generational bias is strong. As bad as I feel about Glen Canyon, I cannot sing a dirge. I never knew the place; I came to a world without it. Seeing Lake Powell as a fact of life, I have to ask, What's the use in hating it? I'd rather make peace with the place, though heaven knows it's hard. For some, impossible. Those who knew and loved the Glen have concrete reasons for bitterness. I honor the remaining people of the river, and understand if they question my purpose. For if I had known the canyon. . . . (xvii)
<21> The ellipses there are Farmer's, not mine. But I do claim much of the sentiment. I respect the Navajo people who once called the canyon their home, and I lament their loss with great sincerity. I admire the environmentalists who fought so ardently to preserve the canyon. But like Farmer, I have never lived a day without Lake Powell. I didn't even know that there was such a thing as Glen Canyon until years after I had first been there. I am not of either generation outlined by Mark Harvey. Maybe if I had known the canyon, I would feel differently. Maybe if I had known that there was a canyon before I so entirely offered up my affection to the lake. . .
<22> As Adam M. Sowards writes in the Western Historical Quarterly review of Farmer's work, this epochal perspective is an increasingly significant one.[4] After all, the fact remains that those of us born after 1965 come at this controversy with a very different pair of eyes and set of values. We read about Glen Canyon the same way we read about every other act of Manifest Destiny undertaken by the U.S. government and its voting citizens. We perceive places like Lake Powell the same way we look at Appalachian forests and tall grass prairie: with an appreciation for what is, and with the realization that we will never, ever know what was. We are a conflicted generation.
<23> Take Matthew Barrett Gross, for instance. The editor of The Glen Canyon Reader, Gross devotes much of the volume's introduction to an account of his own paradoxical relationship with Lake Powell. In these opening pages, he recalls without pretense a conversation he entertained with an outing group he was hired to take on his first expedition to Lake Powell:
The truth is that you can search and search and search, I said, but if you believe Lake Powell was a mistake, you'll never find a satisfactory reason as to why they flooded Glen Canyon. . . . Blaming ourselves by saying it was an unknown place is crap; David Brower can carry that guilt, perhaps, but what about me? I was born in 1972. I might as well feel guilty for the extinction of the giant sloth. It was wrong, I believe that, and we have a moral obligation to bear witness to the wrongs of history. But we have to know our history. (8)
<24> I think that Gross is right. And so I return to my own history. It begins with my family moving to Phoenix, Arizona, in August of 1974. I was six weeks old when we moved to the Southwest: far too young to know anything other than life in one of the United States' fastest growing—and driest—cities. This place where I grew up was founded over a hundred years earlier because Ancient Hohokam canals eased the establishment of new—and equally artificial—water systems (Kupel 33). I grew up in an area without snow, without much rain, and without any water save the heavily chlorinated version diverted from the Salt River and sent gurgling out of our kitchen facet and patio hose: far more whimper than bang. Lake Powell, then, seemed an oasis both for what I perceived to be its quiet vitality and its welcoming immediacy: never before had I explored so many coves; never before had I seen so many fish and birds and snakes and other wildlife. If anything, I was overwhelmed—terrified in the original sense of the word by the vastness of the scene. Red sandstone cliffs created by volcanic uplift towered overhead. Narrow side canyons, smoothed by the flow of ancient streams seemed so narrow I wondered if I would be able to slither through like the lizards running at my feet. I worried that the place was too wild—that we would never find our way back, that we would get lost in all of the enormity, the empty solitude of the place.
<25> Thus as an adult researching the Glen Canyon area, I find myself identifying with others in the A.D. generation who encountered something approaching peace in the area. One such person is Patrick Landewe. In his article, "Battle of Images: Glen Canyon Dam and the Fight for the Future of the Arid West," Landewe asks his readers' indulgence as he reflects upon his own personal experience with Lake Powell. He explains, "like many readers of environmental literature, I first learned about Glen Canyon through the writings of John McPhee and Edward Abbey." But, he adds, his experiential relationship with the dam did not necessarily square. During what Landewe describes as "an overnight stay in one of the side canyons of Glen Canyon," he details the very real way in which this area does, indeed, serve as a place of sanctuary for some people. I include his quote in its entirety here both because of its lyricism and because I think it strikes a chord for those who have encountered similar experiences:
in the desert twilight within the enclosure of the canyon, I was overcome by silence. It was the most absolute and profound silence I have ever experienced in my lifetime. Oddly enough, I was reminded of a line from the movie Kun Duhn, a biography of the early life of the current Dali Lama. When the Chinese invaded Tibet, they erected loudspeakers outside the palace monastery of the Dali Lama which broadcast political speeches and martial music. The young Dali Lama said to one of his companions, 'They have taken away our silence.' Without making any strong claims about the parallels between U.S. westward expansion and the Chinese annexation of Tibet, I understand this statement to be a definite comment on modernity: 'they have taken away our silence.' In the wilderness, such as the desert canyon country of the Colorado River, we regain the silence we have lost in the city. (260)
<26> That's what I remember most about Lake Powell: silence of the sort that only wilderness can provide. That is what I, as a young child, took away from the once-canyon, and that part of my history is what still defines me today.
<27> As someone who now studies theories of cognitive development and their environmental basis, I take this history very seriously. I believe that a child's conception of self and world is formed exclusively through the physical reality of his or her perceptions. The world and everything in it mean only as much as the child can garner through the senses: there is no apprehensible or symbolic significance to what the child perceives outside of the basic pleasure/pain impulses, no sense of history or connection other than those readily apparent to the senses. Termed the sensorimotor stage by developmental psychologists, this first stage of knowing—which occurs before a child becomes socialized by way of formal schooling—allows for a certain freedom of discovery and an individualization of world views.[5] Contemporary child psychologists tell us that children during this period are "epistemological archetypes" in the sense that they engage in a more holistic apprehension of the world that is unfiltered through ideology, history, and politics.[6] The impressions made during this period stick—and all other ideas are subsequently filtered through them.
<28> This notion of a palimpsest of ideas is where my experience of Lake Powell diverges from those shared by people like Patrick Landewe, Matthew Barrett Gross, and Jared Farmer. I was three years old when I first visited the lake. My notion of 'natural' was created on the lake long before I could read or even understand its creation. My experience, then, is a perfect inverse of Landewe, Gross, and Farmer: they arrived at the reservoir through its polemical literature. It was only after that education that they arrived on the shores of the Lake Powell and discovered that it was neither as profane nor as stagnant as some writers would have us believe. They, then, approached the place prepared to be dismayed, or at least wary. But, as Farmer reports when detailing his first visit to the lake, it is hard to be wary of something that is so beautiful, particularly when one does no really know what lay there before: "if it were ugly, a wasteland nobody wanted to see, my story would be unambiguously tragic. But in fact, some three million people per year come to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and it's easy to see why. Deep blue water, soaring red cliffs. . . . Visitors search for a word that describes Lake Powell; more often than not, they settle on 'paradise'" (Farmer xii).[7]
<29> Nevertheless, Farmer also makes clear that he does not always share this sentiment. To the contrary, he readily admits that his relationship with Lake Powell (which, he often reminds the reader, is called "Lake Foul" or "The Blue Death" by its detractors) has always been one premised on an awareness of the environmental controversy that hovers over the lake: the fact that, more often than not, an individual's entire system of environmental ethics can often be determined based upon what shoreline he or she stands on when it comes to the Glen Canyon debate. For him, then, those powerful first impressions create a sort of wall that blocks other more recent experiences of the area, and they ultimately serve as the lens through which he views the canyon and its controversy. As a means of illustrating this point, the adult Farmer tells us that what he remembers most about his first trip to Lake Powell, which was part of a "summer superactivity" for his Mormon youth group, was his ulterior motives for going: "I hated the reservoir, but my hate, born out of books, was incomplete. Never before had I been on the water" (120). In spite of this predisposition, Farmer recalls with no small amount of surprise that he could still appreciate the splendor of the scene and the days spent doing "the usual Lake Powell things—fishing waterskiing, cliff-jumping" (120). Even still, his reluctant appreciation of the trip was marred by the impulse of his fellow trippers to spend their time partying at Bullfrog Marina and screaming to catch the echo at Rainbow Bridge. Recalling a later trip to the lake, he critiques this same consumerism and the fact that many (or even most) houseboat rentals come replete with "beds, toilet, hot water, shower, fridge, stove, and barbeque. An upgrade ($1500 more per week) comes with TV, VCR, more toilets, more showers, more everything. . . . According to one sales representative, some of the top-of the line boats come with helicopter landing pads, hot tubs, saunas, hardwood dancing floors, designer furniture, 'and of course, multiple air conditioners'" (161).
<30> I have no doubt that this is true—that a number of people experience Lake Powell with these and other accoutrements designed to filter, if not mask, a more immediate relationship with the landscape. It is not, however, the way that all people approach the region. Speaking from my own perceptions, I saw little of the motorized experience of the lake and even less of the party scene. In the awkwardly-fashioned house boat we rented with close friends, my family and I preferred to keep to the edges: any number of the little inlets that make the lake look more human circulatory system than enclosed body of water. We were lured by one of the many brochures printed at the time by the Department of the Interior, rife with lyrical, winsome descriptions full of alliteration and accompanied by dramatic full-color photographs. And so my small family of four joined what, at that time, the National Park Service estimated were just over one million recreational visitors to the lake annually. But it didn't feel that way. It was a rare day indeed when we would come upon other individuals out there on the water. So much so that when we would happen upon another person, we would often tie off our boats together and chat for twenty minutes before continuing on our individual courses. In this solitude, I would float adrift for hours in the many green coves of the San Juan branch, marveling at how easily I could make out the fish and vegetation below me and how comfortable my parents seemed in letting me float away for hours with little or no supervision other than my PFD and tiny inflatable raft. I would sit on a sandbar for what felt like days at a time, watching as the sun moved above the canyon walls and changed the colors of the lake from blue to green to black as it began to set. This became tranquility incarnate for me. This became Lake Powell.
<31> Unlike the boys in the Mormon youth group, I didn't have the strength, grace, or desire to stay up on water skis behind a peppy speed boat. I didn't see the throngs of people or gasoline slicks. My family never rented a houseboat with a T.V. and other accoutrements. Whether out of frugality or a desire for a more unadulterated experience, my parents chose the austere over the opulent when it came to vacationing in and around Lake Powell. We shared our no-frills houseboats with two other families: an arrangement that necessitated taking meals on sandbars and hoisting all six children up onto the roof of the boat where we slept under the stars those precious few minutes when we weren't terrified of rolling off and into the lake.
<32> On the last day of one of our trips, after we had refueled and returned our house boat, trailered our smaller fishing boat, packed up our paddles, PFDs, and camping gear, we left Wahweap Marinaand stopped at Glen Canyon Dam for one last look at the lake. There, standing on the 5,370,000 cubic yards of concrete, we were blinded by the whiteness that surrounded us: the starkness of the southwestern sun at noontime, the platinum reflection of that light on the concrete of the dam itself, and the churning water leaving the barrage penstocks. If, wearing thick sunglasses and squinting through your eyelashes, you were able to look past all of that whiteness, you would get one last look at the red sandstone—150-million-year-old tightly packed dunes that make up the canyon surrounding the river and dam.
<33> This, according to David Brower, is one of the world's worst places for a dam. "Navajo sandstone," he once opined, "is not what you should build dams in or on" (9). As any rock climber knows, the stone is notoriously difficult to drill into and maintain a few bolts, let alone structural support for an enormous monolith of concrete. Not only that, but the porous sandstone allows for approximately 10.5 million acre-feet of water seepage annually. Nevertheless, in 1963, the U.S. Department of the Interior finished building a dam here rivaled in sheer magnitude only by its counterpart, the Hoover Dam just downstream. In its completed form, the Glen Canyon Dam spans 1560 feet across the base of Lake Powell; the width of the roadway where I would stand with my family is 35 feet across. It is an undeniably massive structure. So massive, in fact, that it is easy to forget it was built section by section until 26 separate vertical blocks created a palimpsest of concrete layers strong enough to stop the flow of the Colorado. In 1964, the American Society of Civil Engineers named the Glen Canyon Dam the outstanding engineering achievement of the year. Whatever your opinion of the dam or the reservoir it creates, it's difficult to disagree with their assessment.
<34> As a young child, I didn't see the connection between this massive structure—the thing we went to see after we docked our boat and left—and the lake it created. The lake was beautiful and calm: a hushed blue of coves and other shady, secret places. This thing—this dam—was loud and glaring white and crowded. Enough so, in fact, that I certainly didn't agree with the Bureau of Reclamation request that we visitors consider the Glen Canyon Dam as the perfect example of "Man and Nature in Perfect Harmony." I did not see this "monumental undertaking as a New Eden of harmonious relation between human industrial technology and the natural world" (qtd. in Landewe 257).
<35> There has never been anything harmonious for me about the Glen Canyon Dam: it does not fit within my memories of days on Lake Powell; it has no place in my natural aesthetic. This seems bizarre to most people. Jared Farmer, for instance, reveals with disbelief that he has "actually encountered teenagers in Utah who believed Lake Powell was a natural lake" (180). It is not difficult for me to understand how someone could arrive at such a conclusion. Recall that Lake Powell has 1960 miles of shoreline and five major marinas, four of which are miles from the dam itself.[8] It is more than likely that someone could, in fact, spend a week—or even longer—on Lake Powell and never even see the dam itself. Would that be environmentally responsible or open-minded? No. Does it happen all the time? Indubitably.
<36> For those of us who have, in fact, experienced this version of Lake Powell only to find out later that the coastlines we explored were created by the massive concrete dam, our beliefs are no less conflicted than those who arrived at the reservoir wanting to hate it. In some regards, you might even say that our perspectives are even more conflicted. We feel guilty for loving Lake Powell—embarrassed to have such fond memories of nature in an unnatural place.
<37> I didn't fully understand the impact of this position until last summer, when I delivered a paper on the Colorado River at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. During the Q&A session afterwards, the conversation turned to Glen Canyon and its dam, and I spoke of my paradoxical feelings about the place. After the session ended, another of the conference attendees approached me. Lowering her voice as if to avoid notice, she admitted, "I grew up on Lake Powell. I love it to." We spent the rest of the evening sitting at the closing banquet sharing stories about our childhoods on Lake Powell and what to do with those memories as adult environmentalists. Did I ever hike around some of the old sandstone caverns? Did she know that contemporary Navajos are unable to practice ceremonial offerings in these places because of the reservoir? Did she remember swimming in water so clear you could see the rock and vegetation twenty feet below? Did I know that so much trash and boat batteries had been dumped in the lake that the state levied over a million dollars in fines against the marinas?
<38> We know all of these things—and their profound significance—on an intellectual and historical level. We believe in the profundity of these negative effects on both an environmental and spiritual level. We do not want to endorse anything that has compromised Navajo tradition. We do not want to encourage anything that so clearly leads to environmental degradation. But we have a problem: much of our aesthetic—and even more of my commitment to the environment—is predicated on this so-called "underwater landfill" (Farmer 177). That, in large part, is what prompts this sense of guilt.
<39> This is the same generational self-reproach that led Matthew Barrett Gross to admit with surprise and dismay that he, too, fell in love with Lake Powell upon his first meeting. The canyons surrounding the reservoir, he writes, "were no different" than other wild places he had fallen for during his days as a river guide:
In retrospect, this recognition seems banal. Yet I had convinced myself that Glen Canyon had been stolen from me, reduced to nothing more than books and photographs and the reminiscences of an older and dying generation. . . . Yet here I was, looking at the landscape that surrounded Lake Powell, and what I saw was Glen Canyon. The tattered edges of Glen Canyon, to be sure, but Glen Canyon all the same. (5)
<40> After reading narrative accounts such as those offered by Gross and Farmer, after talking late into the evening with other closeted members of the Lake Powell sometimes-fan club, I began to wonder how one could possibly make sense of all this guilt—this abiding sense of ignominy and shame over a rhapsodic response to natural beauty. I use that last adjective deliberately and with no small amount of consideration: for, regardless of what we want to believe; regardless of how ardently we want to agree with David Brower when he tells us in The Place No One Knew that Lake Powell is as dead as the canyon that now lays buried underneath its waters, we have seen otherwise. We have clambered over rocks and felt dry dust pebbles below our feet as we hiked side canyons. We have stood in reverie below scarped plateaus and monocline mountains, tracing preshistoric sea fossils with our fingers and hop-stepping to avoid lizards, snakes, and kangaroo rats. We've felt the tangle of underwater branches and the smooth, submerged sand as we swam. And for that, we feel both grateful and terrible.
<41> To try and understand the hows and whys behind this sense of iniquity, I turn to the burgeoning field of Ecopsychology. One of its founders, Peter H. Kahn Jr., suggests that each generation approaches the environment differently—that that generation, at least at a young age, can only know the environment as it stands before them, tattered from previous generations' use and otherwise altered by human interaction. It is through this initial "interaction with a physical and social world children construct knowledge and values" (Kahn 105). What this means in terms of cognitive—and ethical—development is that each generation comes to believe that the world they see is natural, is pristine. Because the young members of a generation do not know what came before, they do not know that a place has been changed, degraded, or otherwise altered from its untrammeled condition. Thus, "we all take the natural environment we encounter during childhood as the norm against which we measure environmental degradation later in our lives. . . . Each generation in its youth takes that degraded condition as the nondegraded condition—as the normal experience" (Kahn 106). To explain this concept, Kahn coined the phrase "Environmental Generational Amnesia" in 1995 after studying the responses of inner-city children to their environments.[9] Although the experience of these original subjects is very different from those of us raised in southwestern suburbs, the term still carries currency regardless of race and class otherings.
<42> It also does much to explain the changing semiotic value of Glen Canyon and Lake Powell. Akin to the ecological notion of shifting baselines, which suggests that those slow ecological changes make it difficult for us to realize that damage is occurring, the idea of envrironmental generational amnesia suggests that, with each passing social epoch, we will gradually form new ways of seeing and being in the world. These ways will be based, above all else, on our own immediate experience with the world in its present condition.[10] As Harry Heft explains, "animate beings exist in relation to a flow of events, and their functioning is best understood as that of dynamic, organismic processes in context. Animate beings selectively engage in environmental features and selectively enter places in order to benefit from the functional opportunities things and places offer" (xxiii). Lake Powell serves a need and fills a niche for many people: it offers a natural experience the way that Central Park or the Everglades National Park do. A heavily conserved and managed one, but still a natural experience. And when that experience is the first of its kind for a perceiver—when that perceiver is told nothing other than to go out and be in this natural space—the perceiver filters out any other way of approaching the landscape.
<43> This may seem common-place—or even intuitive. And that's exactly how Heft wants us to perceive the phenomenon. A Jamesian empiricist, Heft supports the Neo-Romantic assertion that identifies "pure experience as the ground of all knowing" (26).[11] His theory is based upon an ecological framework that identifies an individual representative of a species as functioning within a larger organizational system. This theory privileges our experience within the larger organizational system (read: environment) as a defining characteristic and formation of self. The environment, argue theorists such as Heft and Kahn, has a profound influence on individual development, particularly with regard to the formation of ethical systems and self-identification.
<44> What complicates this theory is the palimpsestic aspect of our development. When I, for instance, went to school and learned about the other history of Lake Powell, my path of experience and comprehension forked, creating a sort of schism or disconnect. As Heft explains, "experience is unitary, but at the same time, it can simultaneously be part of two constellations of relations; that is, a part of two distinguishable contexts" (29). I now have two different cognitive structures that I can use to select my ways of knowing. Both are etched within my mind in such a way that they can be equally actualized to make sense of more theoretical issues such as environmental use. The known object (in this case, Lake Powell) and its knower (in this case, me) "are each embedded in contexts of relations that have their own distinguishable structures. The knower and the object known are coexisting domains of relations, and any particular experience can be located simultaneously in both domains" (Heft 29-30).
<45> This does little to resolve the conflict in the minds of this, the post-dam generation of environmentalists. But it at least explains that conflict is how we are supposed to feel. The Glen Canyon Dam is not going away any time soon. Nor is the controversy surrounding it. Patrick Landewe is right when he predicts that Glen Canyon dam will maintain its pivotal place at the center of many future water-use controversies. And I agree with him that "recognizing and understanding the various value-systems that enter into the controversies over the dam is important for maintaining civility while having the widest possible conversation about the future of the Colorado River basin" (260).
<46> To his conclusion I would add that these various value-systems are, for better or worse, changing with each generation. I also second Jared Farmer's notion that, "no matter how popular, Lake Powell cannot make up for Glen Canyon, because, very simply, it's not an equivalent place. Likewise, the reservoir's accessibility and the lost canyon's beauty do not cancel out one another" (178). Nevertheless, I continue to maintain that something has been gained. Not something equivalent or identical or even all that effective in the sense of water storage, but something that is a very real, very significant, experience for those who have come of age on the surface of Lake Powell. I am deeply mindful of the ways in which this reservoir has influenced—and continues to influence—individuals, and mostly for the right reasons: a firm commitment to conservation, an interest in the flora and fauna, a respect for the Anasazi people who first called it home and the Navajos who continue to do so. Calling Lake Powell unnatural or dead delegitimates that experience. Yes, in an ideal world there would be no need for hydroelectricity. Yes, in an ideal world manmade structures would not stunt, interrupt, compromise, and impede the flow of any natural system. I sincerely hope that we achieve that ideal world, and I want nothing more than to see positive steps towards it in my lifetime.
<47> In the meantime, however, we as environmentalists would be well served to acknowledge the ability for nature—even in the most seemingly unnatural places—to affect and mold us. We ought to, as William Wordsworth once famously recommended, let nature be our teacher whenever possible, and even to recognize nature in altered or re-created forms, such as Lake Powell. As Andy Fisher explains in Radical Ecopsychology, "being authentic, being what we are, is not simply a matter of nonconformity, but also of bringing ourselves before our experience and pursuing only those possibilities that arise from this felt starting place" (62).[12] For many, that starting place is Lake Powell. For them (and for me), it is as authentic experience as any other: one that defines an entire school of environmental consciousness; one that redefines what it means to grow up with Glen.
Works Cited
Abbey, Edward. Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside. New York: Owl Books (a division of Henry Holt and Co.), 1984.
Brower, David and Porter, Eliot. The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado. Commemorative Edition 2000: The Beginning of a Century. Salt Lake City: Gibbs-Smith, 2000.
Farmer, Jared. Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999.
Fisher, Andy. Radical Ecopsychology. Albany: SUNY UP, 2002.
Gross, Matthew Barrett. The Glen Canyon Reader. Tuscon: U of Arizona P, 2003.
Harvey, Mark W.T. A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1994.
Heft, Harry. Ecological Psychology in Context. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 2001.
Kahn, Peter H. Jr. "Children's Affiliations with Nature." Children and Nature. Ed. Petery H. Kahn Jr. and Stephen R. Kellery. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 117-152.
Kupel, Douglas E. Fuel For Growth: Water and Arizona's Urban Environment. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2003.
Landewe, Patrick. " Battle of Images: Glen Canyon Dam and the Fight for the Future of the Arid West." The Image of America in Literature, Media, and Society. Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 1999. 257-263.
Piaget, Jean. Child and Reality. Trans. Arnold Rosin. New York: Grossman, 1973.
Sowards, Adam M. "Review: Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country." The Western Historical Quarterly. 31:2 (Summer 2000). 230-231.
United States Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation. "Reclamation: Managing Water in the West." http://www.usbr.gov (accessed 10 December 2005).
Notes
[1] For a more thorough account of this division, see the preface and Chapter Six, "Wilderness for a New Generation" of A Symbol of Wilderness. [^]
[2] To name a few—a very few—of these works in addition to those referenced in this article: Russell Martin's A Story That Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1989); C. Gregory Crampton's Ghosts of Glen Canyon: History Beneath Lake Powell (St. George, UT: Pub Place, 1986); Katie Lee's All My Rivers are Gone: A Journey of Discovery Through Glen Canyon (Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 1998); Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968); Philip R. Geib et al's Glen Canyon Revisited (Salt Lake City: University of Utah P, 1996); John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); Elizabeth Sprang's Good-bye River. (Reseda, CA: Mojave Books, 1979); and Wallace Stegner's The Sound of Mountain Water (New York: Penguin, 1997). [^]
[3] In his essay on Glen Canyon, Patrick Landewe aptly calls this debate "a media battle" in which the "symbolic value" of the dam has achieved a controversial volume that nearly exceeds the literal capacity of the reservoir it holds (257). Indeed, as Landewe concludes in his essay, if analyzing the culture of Glen Canyon and its dam "teaches us anything, it is that Glen Canyon dam remains a 'nerve-center of controversy' because it occupies a place where several points-of-view or world-views collide. To question the value of the dam or interpret its significance is to raise discussion or support an ideology" (260). [^]
[4] Sowards writes, " Glen Canyon is dammed. Never in Farmer's life, as is true for a growing number of westerners, has the fact been different, and this generational difference brings a much needed perspective to a history too long dominated by Floyd Dominy. . . and Edward Abbey" (231). [^]
[5] As Jean Piaget explains, the sensorimotor stage allows for what he calls "spontaneous" development: a child learns by personal discovery and experience, rather than by what others can teach. During this stage of development, a child lacks symbol-making abilities and, thus, communes with—rather than interprets—perceptual objects (35). As a result children become attached and internalize this physical environment as a part of their early definitions of self. [^]
[6] For more on this theory, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964) and Sandra Harding's "Subjectivity, Experience, and Knowledge." in Who Can Speak? ( Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 120-136.) [^]
[7] Though many do so begrudgingly, opponents of the Glen Canyon dam often admit that, although they disagree with its existence, they do so the beauty of the reservoir it creates. Even Edward Abbey, environmental curmudgeon extraordinaire admits that, while he refuses to acknowledge Lake Powell as anything other than a giant "bathtub," it is "the most beautiful reservoir in the world" (133). [^]
[8] It is interesting to note that one of these marinas, Hite, is currently closed due to low water levels. Perhaps David Brower's silt prophesies are coming true. [^]
[9] His original use for the phrase came about as a way to explain shifting views of nature in inner-city children. Specifically, Kahn was interested in understanding how urban youths make sense of the sometimes profound lack of nature in their lives and the ways in which this lack often relates to environmental racism. For a full account of Kahn's creation of the Environmental Generational Amnesia theory, see his essay "Environmental Views and Values of Children in an inner-City Black Community." Child Development. 66:3 (1995). 1403-1417. [^]
[10] The idea of "shifting baselines" was first proposed by Daniel Pauly in 1995. It has since become the basis for much ecological and social science research. Additionally, an entire movement has been framed around the term. Their headquarters: www.shiftingbaselines.org. [^]
[11] Throughout his book, Heft relies heavily upon William James's seminal essay, "Does Consciousness Exist?" (1904, 1912) as the basis for his explanation of empiricism and its ecological ramification. In the essay, William James seeks to avoid the pitfalls of Cartesian dualism by adopting a more holistic understanding of the human mind that privileges "the primal stuff" of pure experience without "rejecting mental phenomenon outright" (Heft 26). [^]
[12] Fisher, who like Heft, bases his theory on the notion that an exploration of self must occur within a larger ecological framework, is primarily interested in the way in which our approach of nature dictates self and development. He emphasizes immediate physical experience insofar as "the body is the site of intersection of inside and outside, self and world; it belongs to both realms and mediates their relations" (64). [^]