DAMS IN DISTRESS

Across America citizens reassess a potent symbol of progress
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ

NO LESS THAN RAILroads, bridges, or cities, dams embody the American ideal of progress. In New England, as early as the seventeenth century, they converted falling water into industrial power. In the Tennessee Valley in the 1930s hydroelectric dams lifted the region out of poverty. In the Southeast, dams made swampland habitable. And in the West they tamed one of the wildest and most mountainous regions on earth. The nation currently has more than 75,000 dams more than six feet tall, nearly one for every day since independence. Yet there have been few folk songs about them, few artists inspired by them, and few romantic tales of their construction. Worse still, for a technology that had its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, they are already falling into disfavor.

As Elizabeth Grossman details in Watershed: The Undamming of America (Counterpoint Press, 248 pages, $27.00), in many cases the argument for demolition seems clear-cut. On Wisconsin’s numerous rivers, scores of dams built for long-gone factories—some of them subsequently converted to generate small amounts of electricity—have deteriorated to the point where it would cost more to fix them than to remove them. Meanwhile, they have sharply cut fish populations and interfered with other natural processes that require swift-running water.

In north-central Florida the Rodman Dam was built in 1968 as part of an ambitious canal project that was canceled three years later. Although the reason for its construction no longer exists, it continues to drastically reduce water flow in the Ocklawaha River, kill manatees that get crushed in its gates, and pollute the area’s groundwater, among other offenses.

Yet almost everywhere she goes, the author encounters opposition to dam removal, sometimes overwhelming. Just as a bridge or canal or industrial building can become a cherished part of the scenery, some people find their local dams to be beautiful. Moreover, communities have grown up around the slack water that dams create—both the lakes and reservoirs behind them and the placid streams in front. It’s incontestable that dams destroy ecosystems, but so do houses and lawns and urban parks. The argument over dam demolition sometimes boils down to pitting the interests of boaters, swimmers, water-skiers, and lake fishermen against those of hikers and stream fishermen.

The first few chapters of Watershed are fairly well balanced. Grossman lets her opponents speak for themselves, like the Floridian who cites positive ecological effects from the Rodman Dam and says, “Flooding the river for the reservoir was the wrong thing to do. But the reservoir’s been here for thirty-five years and people enjoy it.” As the author moves west, however, she grows more and more polemical, to the point where she seems never to have met a dam she didn’t hate. By her last stop she can sweepingly dismiss the usefulness of four dams on the lower Snake River that generate 5 percent of the entire Northwest’s electricity and permit navigation from Lewiston, Idaho, to the Pacific.

The question of dam removal is an important one, taking in issues of habitat conservation, changes in industry, the ownership of natural resources, Indian rights, the claims of local residents against those of the larger community, and even the very notion of progress. Many past dam projects would never have been started in today’s more ecologically aware conditions, and at least some of them could probably be removed with no great loss. Grossman’s book is a significant contribution to the debate, but a little more willingness to see things from the other side would have made it a lot more convincing.

FLORIDA CALLS THE PLUMBER

After more than a century fighting nature, Floridians think about working with it instead

THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS can relocate anything except sunshine. That, in brief, is why modern Florida exists. It would be hard to find a spot anywhere in the lower 48 more inimical to human habitation than South Florida’s Everglades in its wild state: treacherous swamps, frequent floods, dense and dangerous vegetation, swarming insects, deadly diseases, hungry alligators, and the everpresent stifling blanket of heat. Yet there’s plenty of sun, and for that, many Americans—from farmers to city refugees to snowbirds—will happily see Mother Nature dosed with sedatives and put in a nursing home.

The process began long before the Corps got involved. As detailed in The Book of the Everglades, edited by Susan Cerulean (Milkweed Editions [paperback], 264 pages, $18.95), in 1848, just three years after Florida became a state, a federal law was passed “to authorize the drainage of the Ever Glades.” Although nothing came of that effort, in the 1880s Hamilton Disston, a sugar magnate, drained more than two million acres near Lake Okeechobee. In 1905, when Miami was still a small town, Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward wrote: “It would indeed be a commentary on the intelligence and energy of the State of Florida to confess that so simple an engineering feat as the drainage of a body of land 21 feet above the sea was above their power.”

Indeed, the task of replumbing Florida has always seemed simple: Some canals here and there, a few dikes and levees, and you’ll have plenty of dry land and all the fresh water you need. Yet problems emerged almost as soon as the reengineering of the Everglades began. Drained land south of Lake Okeechobee is a rich organic muck ideal for farming—except that when exposed to the air, it slowly oxidizes and disappears. As early as the 1920s canal designers made their ditches extra deep to allow for this sort of erosion of their banks. Today the topsoil in some places is as thin as three feet. Some environmentalists suggest letting Lake Okeechobee overflow to replenish the soil, though people with homes nearby are unenthusiastic about this idea.

Vanishing soil is just one of the problems that human habitation has created in the Everglades. Others include the extinction of numerous plant and animal species, and the severe endangerment of many more; the crowding out of native plants by exotic interlopers; and the destruction of enormous areas of wilderness.

In the last two decades a consensus has begun to emerge that things have gone too far. Earlier this year President George W. Bush and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida signed a joint federal-state plan to restore the Everglades. Yet the interdependence of Florida’s ecological systems means that solutions are not always obvious. Florida Bay, at the state’s southern tip, has been suffering for years from the diversion of fresh water that used to flow down through the Everglades, flushing out the bay and decreasing its salinity. The answer might sound simple: Just restore the freshwater flow. Unfortunately, today’s “fresh” water is filled with agricultural runoff, and a number of scientists believe that increasing the flow to the bay would only worsen its algae problems. One project currently under way will build about 300 aquifer storage and recovery wells to pump fresh water into the ground instead of letting it run into the Atlantic. But can the aquifer hold an extra 1.7 billion gallons without sustaining structural damage? No one is sure.

As is true of most collections, the pieces in The Book of the Everglades vary widely, from Indian legends to eloquent jeremiads by the novelist Carl Hiaasen. Taken together, though, the diverse articles show hints of a welcome trend: Floridians of all stripes are starting to realize that their goal should be neither to subjugate nature to humans, as was the dominant view for most of the twentieth century, nor to restore nature in its primeval state, as some extreme environmentalists advocate. Rather, they should strive to reconcile the two by reducing disruptions of nature to a minimum while still allowing for varied human activities.

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