This is Grand Canyon we’re talking about
Excerpted from an interview with Martin Litton, September, 1994

   The thing about Glen Canyon Dam is that when the Elliot Porter book, The Place No One Knew, came out, the concern was what would be drowned—not what the downstream effects would be. People didn’t stop to think about what it would do to the Grand Canyon to have the Colorado River stopped up there and released in surges, the way it’s been ever since Glen Canyon Dam was built. So that wasn’t an issue.

   The government doesn’t really give a hoot what happens down here. That’s the problem; we don’t elect the people who will take care of the Earth that we love. I spoke with the then regional director for the Upper Basin of the Bureau of Reclamation, David Crandall, a man I respected, a man I’d had a lot to do with in the years when we were first talking about this surge and these ups and downs that have destroyed the beaches and hurt the river in so many ways. We talked about putting the peaking power at Hoover Dam—where it should be—could cut down a lot of wires and save a lot of copper, because not as much of the power would have to go so far. And he said, “Well, from the standpoint of the federal taxpayer, and the rate payer, and the nation at large, and the people who care about our national parks, that’s the way it should be done.” He openly stated that to me. And my question was, “Then why don’t you do it that way?!” And he looked rather shocked. His region is centered in Salt Lake City—that’s the Upper Basin. And his answer to me was, “Well, if we did that, Boulder City would get the credit.” That’s the only reason that they see in the Upper Basin for not letting this dam produce steady power, which is now being done by the Navajo Power Plant that pollutes the air so you can see the smoke cloud from outer space and so forth. Glen Canyon Dam could still be doing that.

   The favorite alternative, the preferred alternative of all the different programs and plans they have, involves 5,000 lows and 2[5],000 highs. It states it very clearly. That’s what we’re headed for. Once they’ve numbed the river community, or people who care about this national park, who care about anything, they’ve worn us down, they’ve gotten us so we don’t care any more, then here come the lows and the highs, and what’s left of these camps, and what’s left of nature down here that took centuries to produce, is forgotten. And their hope is that by that time nobody will care very much. People will be so tired of fighting this that they won’t bother, they won’t go to court and get the results that we should get. The Bureau of Reclamation wants to appear not only indomitable, but infallible.

   But all they have to do to correct one big mistake is to let that water come out, seasonally adjusted, going up as the summer approaches, and gradually going down with the fall, being at it’s lowest point of 5,000 feet or so in the middle of winter, and then coming up again in the spring. There would then be ample water all through the river-running season to give us something more than this trickle we’ve got out here now, and to produce a decent experience for Americans and others who want to come down here and really savor the soul of the Grand Canyon. We’ll never do that until we have the water go up and down seasonally. Nature can adapt to that—it always did. The plants came and went and the fish came and went, and they could spawn and so forth and so on. But now, nothing is normal.

   This interim flow period, who knows how long that’s going to last? That’s intended to kind of quiet you down. You don’t notice that things are so bad. They are bad! But they’ll really be bad when they drop this thing to half of what it is now, or less, every day, and raise it to three times what it is now every day. And we’ll be right back where we were, and yet people who come down here and run this river, who make a living at it, are giving in to this, just surrendering to this. We don’t have to surrender! It’s our canyon, it’s our national park. We need to straighten out this situation, let that dam work—who cares—but let it send out the flows.

   Therefore, being realistic, and being reasonable, and very reasonable, we say, “Okay, we won’t tear down the dam, as long as the dam is operated for the maximum benefit of Grand Canyon National Park.” Hoover Dam can take care of everybody below there.

   The Secretary of the Interior will listen. It only takes one paragraph to explain to him where we are. But is that ever going to be forthcoming? Not that I know of. He can fix it. Will he? Does he care enough? Does he know enough? He’s been told, but unfortunately he seems to be rather political too. He will do what is right, though, if the newspapers and television, radio, books, people—anyone!—if only enough people stand up and fight for it. But people are not fighting for it. It’s like a lot of cattle being led to the slaughter—they don’t know where they’re going and they don’t care.

   There are several reasons why the river should be natural. One is the joy of running on a natural river, and knowing that you’re as close to nature as you can be. And the other is, whether we run it or not, nature has its right. It has a right to be here untrammeled, unfettered. Man doesn’t have to screw everything up, and yet we go out of our way to do so.

   The West was open for grabs. After Powell, everybody was going to start irrigating and doing all kinds of things in the West, and those things can’t be done, of course, but greed was the motive. We’re all greedy for one thing or another, but some of our desires, I think are on a higher plane than some of those of others. And we have no right to change this place, even though our change is only very temporary. In the long run, as Pat Reilly used to say, you’ll never know those dams were there. In a hundred thousand years, there won’t be a trace of ’em. And there won’t be a trace of us either. But do we have a right even to interrupt nature, even for a short time? To exterminate species? To kill the last fly? That’s not really our right.

   We’re the aberration on Earth—humans are what’s wrong with the world. And it shouldn’t show down here. We should be as close to what creation brought us, as we can be. And we need to be sensitive to it, aware of it, and appreciative of the fact that we have this place to enjoy because of natural processes, which we had no control over, and couldn’t have changed, but just the same, we’re off on the edge of nature, and we ought to show appreciation. It’s the same thing about throwing garbage around and so forth. Those are things that are so obvious and we can easily control. But when we’re here, we should stop and think that we as a people, we as a race, we’re controlling the present, as we have the past of this place, and the future of the Grand Canyon. And as an experience, which is a soulful experience, a really deep experience, this canyon can be for people who are attuned to it, we should make it the best possible experience.

   It’s been said that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. You can’t repeat what we’ve done here, because once it’s done, it’s done.

   It’s not important that we physically enjoy being here. What’s important is that it’s here. And I think a lot of satisfaction, a lot of pleasure in wilderness is experienced by people who never go to the wilderness, or who rarely do, or maybe can’t or may someday, or may have in the past, can’t do it any more—because it’s knowing it’s there, that’s where the real satisfaction is.

   Grand Canyon National Park had a line drawn around it, and that’s why it has some measure of protection. Every national park, every wilderness, every national monument, every state park—it’s got a line drawn around it and there are things you cannot do inside that line, and that’s what the protection is. But to think that you’re going to convert people into ecologists overnight, the way some of these idealists seem to think we can do, that’s the fallacy. Better get those lines drawn, and then hang onto them, and eventually they’ll coalesce, eventually we will care.

   So we’d better draw some lines, and we’d better do it in a hurry before we think that we’ve converted our people to the point where they’re going to take care of nature.