Chapter 1: What We Talk about When We Talk about Dams The only laser light show commissioned by the United States Bureau of Reclamation enjoyed quite a run. Though it did not feature Pink Floyd blasted at decibels sufficient to feel the bass notes rattle your skull, nor any acclaimed innovation in the world of psychedelic art, it was projected with sober intent onto the massive face of Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington most every summer evening from 1989 until 2013. The premise of the show, evolved from a peculiar genre of American cold-war era advertising and Soviet-style propaganda that might be called Bad Disney, is that the Columbia River could suddenly speak. I''d heard about this summer spectacle for years. Friends had described the Orwellian flavor of the scene, where spurious claims made over giant outdoor loudspeakers and a movie screen 500 feet tall and a mile long were met with docile acceptance by nightly audiences. I made the long drive a decade ago to witness one of the final screenings. I''d heard that The Bureau of Reclamation, (BuRec) one of a slate of select federal agencies that builds, manages and distributes water and power from American dams, had belatedly come to the conclusion the ideas projected onto the face of their flagship project were outdated. The show could not go on.

This movie featured the absurdity of a cartoon salmon leaping in mock celebration over the dam that in real life is threatening to drive millions of them to extinction. Then, god-like, a menacing voice from behind the half-mile wide monolith of concrete issued forth: "Electricity! Hydroelectricity! Nonpolluting, inexpensive production of electric power from water. It may sound like a difficult concept for a river, but I understand all that involves me [. ] You have done what I could not accomplish alone. Through your engineering skills you have diverted part of my course, and spread my waters over the land. You have created the missing link in the cycle of life: the rainfall nature could not provide. You have irrigated the land. You have made the desert bloom! I was once a raging torrent of raw energy and thundering rapids crashing headlong to the ocean, my potential energy spent carving the land in my blind race to the sea.

Now my power is harnessed, and I am part of an efficient system that serves the people and the land!" The agitprop ended with a smattering of applause; a hasty herding of children, chairs, and blankets; and a retreat to nearby RV parks where motor homes were plugged in at one of those neatly trimmed green-lawn sites with picnic table and fire pit cast in concrete. Where, presumably, parents comforted frightened children by pointing out salmon aren''t cartoon monsters, and rivers don''t speak, at least not in English. Beyond the kitsch was the notion that the pre-dam wild river was a kind of sick, liquid Neanderthal, an angry irrational beast not yet fully evolved, a patient in need of a cure. The old river was a profligate energy waster, a reckless teenager; it took curves at high speeds, slashed at the soil, crashed into the ocean. It took an army of government engineers insisting on a Nature contained in straight lines to make it calm, sane, predictable, profitable, productive, and amenable to the demands of civilization. To fully realize its potential, to provide a vital element missing in nature, the river had to quit being a river. Only in its transformation to a moving part in an efficient machine that as its highest calling serves human want and need could water evolve into a sentient being. But that''s not what happened.

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century''s big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. The Federal government plugged the nation''s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into a revenue stream. Federal western water control projects'' main legacy will be remembered as one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices. The more than 90,000 dams on the American landscape can''t reasonably be blamed for destroying the nation''s entire biological inheritance. But they play, even for such gargantuan structures, an outsized role in that destruction. The pages that follow are a kind of speed date with the history of the past century of western American water control, it''s dams, diversions and canals, and just as importantly, the politics that evolved from them, with a couple prevalent themes to hold in mind. First, when it was finally acknowledged that no combination of private capital, pioneer gumption, and military protection would tame the arid Western United States, the federal government intervened with a water delivery program it promised would deliver, figuratively speaking, a rising tide that would lift all boats.

Dams would deliver water to families who wanted their own farms. Acreage limits, initially, 160, topping out at 960 before being abandoned altogether (more on that later) were written into the law christening the era of big dams. In doing so, it attempted to defy, through engineering, technology, and a massive capital investment, the cold analysis that arid western landscapes were limited in potential for civilization-building. That analysis has proven correct. It appears, as I''ll get to here in the pages to come, that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in arid country--growing increasingly arid under the ravages of climate chaos--is well beyond the benefits furnished. Next, despite law and policy that made it clear the federal investment in water storage and delivery should benefit working families on small farms, the intent of the law was systematically subverted, bent to serve those already with plenty rather than those in need. The pipes that deliver water are also bent, figuratively speaking, so that water runs "uphill toward money." While there''s nothing new in parsing yet another instantiation of the unscrupulously wealthy stealing the commons from an unsuspecting public, dams performed this service so well that soon enough every congressional district near a river in the western United States contained a critical mass of vocal boosters who wanted one.

When, in 1902, the Bureau of Reclamation was invented, a new cabal of powers turned their collective attention to dams. Making the desert bloom, it was uncritically assumed, was a giant leap for humankind, a project only a technologically advanced, eternally optimistic, and fabulously wealthy, powerful nation such as the United States could undertake. But the assumption that total control over water over a far-flung geography was a bold leap for civilization was short-sighted. Throughout human history, irrigation schemes and the formation of systems of government have had a symbiotic relationship. Any regime in any country that could harness water, especially where it was scarce, wielded an especially potent form of power--first over its environment, and later, over its people. The more complex the water system, the more centralized and concentrated seats of political and economic power tended to be. The regimes of antiquity tended to demonstrate, often in cruel and oppressive ways, the efficacy of centralized control, what might be identified in modern times as a combination of government authority, expertise, financing, and administration. So whether you were conscripted into labor in late nineteenth-century Egypt, a fellahin toiling alongside 300,000 others in the African sun on the Mahmudiyah Canal, a slave hauling ro.