Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy

Foreword: Why So Important a Story Is So Little Known

FOREWORD Why So Important a Story Is So Little Known WILLIAM CRONON I n the decade following the Second World War, the government of the United States proposed to build the world’s highest dam in the nation’s deepest gorge, a place called Hells Canyon on the Snake River between Idaho and Oregon. Deeper by more than a quarter mile than the Grand Canyon of Arizona, Hells Canyon was—and is—virtually unknown to most Americans. Unlike the Colorado River’s far more celebrated chasm, it has never been a destination for tourists from all over the world. When the Bureau of Reclamation proposed for Hells Canyon the greatest hydroelectric structure that any nation had yet constructed, few argued that such a dam would violate the sublime beauty or pristine wilderness of the Snake River gorge. At a time when dams were almost universally acclaimed as among the most benign and heroic technological achievements that humanity had ever conceived, there seemed little reason to doubt that the Hells Canyon High Dam would join other great engineering triumphs likeBoulderandBonnevilleandGrandCouleeasevidenceof howanenlightened government could benefit its citizens by harnessing nature’s gifts to advance the goal of human progress. Farms would flourish in the desert, factories would yield a cornucopia of goods and jobs, cities would grow to ever greater prosperity, and ordinary Americans would gain the countless benefits of cheap electricity—lights, motors, phones, radios, televisions, appliances—that made the American standard of living the envy of the world. Here, surely, was a project that would fulfill the longstanding dream of progressive conservation: the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time. Who could doubt its countless benefits? Despite all these advantages, the Hells Canyon High Dam was never built. Moreover, the failure of the project was so complete that most Americans have never heard of it. Even historians, engineers, and environmental IX activists who make it their business to keep track of such things rarely mention the fate of Hells Canyon in the stories they tell about rivers and dams in the American West. Unlike the famously unbuilt Echo Park Dam that the Bureau of Reclamation proposed to construct within the boundaries of Dinosaur National Monument at about the same time, the Hells Canyon High Dam has basically been forgotten. Not much better known are the three much smaller dams that were built instead, not by the federal government but, crucially, by a private power company that against all odds succeeded in defeating the enormous governmental forces arrayed against it. This historical neglect is both curious and unfortunate, since the controversy surrounding Hells Canyon in the 1950s arguably foreshadowed many of the debates that would emerge by the end of the twentieth century as unresolved questions for American environmental politics in the twenty-first century. If ever there were a history worth remembering as we seek to understand our present environmental circumstances, surely this is it. How the Hells Canyon High Dam came to be forgotten, and why our failure to remember it is unfortunate, turn out to be far more interesting historical questions than our neglect of them would suggest. We can therefore be grateful that this little-known never-built dam has finally been chronicled in Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy, written by an author ideally suited for the task. Karl Brooks, an environmental historian at the University of Kansas, is a native Idahoan who grew up in Boise, less than a hundred miles from Hells Canyon. Trained as an attorney, he first learned of the dam controversy while working on a legal case during the 1990s. Having served three terms in the Idaho State Senate, he was intimately familiar with the state’s politics, and instantly recognized the significance of the Idaho Power Company’s success in defeating the federal government’s proposed dam in the 1950s. When Brooks eventually decided to trade his legal and political career for that of an academic environmental historian, he seized upon the Hells Canyon High Dam for his first major research project. The result, happily, is a subtly argued and gracefully written book that finally gives this undeservedly forgotten story the treatment it deserves. To understand why the defeat of the Hells Canyon High Dam remains important today, one must temporarily set aside a much more familiar historical narrative that portrays an emerging opposition to western dam construction as a first beachhead in the rise of a new...