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Postscript
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PASTORAL AND MONUMENTAL 292 At midcentury monumental dams were but one among many landmarks and structures that people experienced and consumed through postcards, snapshots , and a welter of mass media. By the 1960s dams were still being built and expansive water control and supply systems remained an integral part of America’s urbanizing culture. But in many ways large dams had done their job too well. They had become normalized. The cultural excitement attached to major New Deal projects held fast in the public imagination, but such excitement proved elusive for the next generation of dams. Scenic river valleys, white water rapids, towns, family farms, and American Indian homelands continued to disappear under rising reservoirs , making the idea of dams as wellsprings of unmitigated good ever harder to sustain. Citizens from many walks of life were coming to see that there was no free lunch—that for all the good they brought in terms of flood control, hydroelectric power, irrigated agriculture, and municipal water supply, dams took an undeniable toll on riparian landscapes and riverine environments. A question loomed ever larger as the decades passed: Were the benefits worth the cost? Analysis of the anti-dam and dam removal movements of the latter twentieth century lies beyond the scope of this book. But it is clear that a protest culture fomented by the Vietnam War, in combination with the skeptical questioning of government incited by the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, provided powerful impetus to environmentalists who saw in dams a malevolent threat to the natural order of the world. Opposition to dams certainly drew upon earlier precedents as dwindling populations of spawning fish provided an enduring flashpoint. But an ecological awareness that had largely been absent in the first half of the century came into ascendance. Now dams were to be Chapter Four postscript postscript 293 decried not simply because of their assault on scenic vistas but also because of how they disrupt the balance of nature. Native fish species of little value to the commercial and sport fishing communities assumed a significance unimaginable only a few years before. The diminutive snail darter almost stopped construction of the Tellico Dam in eastern Tennessee, and the previously unheralded humpback chub of the Colorado River brought renewed attention to the effect of upstream dams upon the sandbars and fragile ecologies of Grand Canyon National Park. For the small-scale pastoral dams that were so much a part of rural and small town life at the beginning of the twentieth century, much had changed as the decades passed. Power from small mill dams meant little once the mills themselves had closed (perhaps to be demolished or, if lucky, transformed into retirement homes, apartment lofts, or discount outlet malls). By the latter part of the In the 1930s no one expressed concern that this stretch of the Colorado River above Hoover Dam would be inundated by Lake Mead. After all, it holds seemingly little scenic value when compared to the dramatic landscapes of the Grand Canyon or the High Sierra. But riparian sandbars are actually of great import in propagating native fish species such as the humpback chub. By the 1990s, the river environment captured in this postcard from the 1920s closely matched the type of riverscape that biologists were seeking to restore to the Grand Canyon. [3.236.219.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:19 GMT) postscript 294 century, fossil fuel and nuclear power plants were built on a scale of hundreds of thousands kilowatts (sometimes more); the few hundred horsepower offered by many old mill dams represented scant more than a rounding error. Some communities still held an attachment to a relic mill dam in their midst, but the cultural ties spurred by work and economic sustenance disappeared. Often times any sense of why a dam had been built was lost as small towns and rural fields gave way to suburban tracts and satellite bedroom communities. Pastoral dams of a bygone era became stigmatized as “orphan dams,” structures separated from history and community life. In many ways, a sense of the pastoral migrated from once useful dams to a riparian environment replete with free-flowing streams, native fish stocks, and biodiverse wetlands. The catch phrase became “in-stream use,” and structures designed to alter and control water flow became anathema to this ideal. In large part this new pastoral landscape—in which the “fish versus power” conflicts of the eighteenth century have been brought full circle—evokes a...