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The Bureau of Reclamation and the West, 1945-2000
- University of New Mexico Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Visit the Bureau of Reclamation web site and you’ll discover the following: The bureau is the nation’s second-largest wholesale water supplier and the nation’s second-largest producer of hydroelectric power, after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It operates fifty-eight hydroelectric plants, dams and reservoirs, and recreation areas visited by million people each year. It delivers water to more than million municipal, rural, and industrial water users, including one in five western farmers, who cultivate million acres.That’s one-third of the irrigated land in the West.Those farms produce percent of the nation’s vegetables and percent of its fruits and nuts. But there is more.Although the Bureau of Reclamation has not constructed a major dam since the s,it is not just the caretaker of a vast hydraulic museum. In recent years, the web site suggests, the bureau has transformed itself into a champion of the environment, dedicated to preserving wetlands, increasing migratory fish populations, and bringing “competing interests together to find consensus-based approaches in such areas as California’s Sacramento Delta/ San Francisco Bay to improve water quality.” Its objectives now include “water conservation and environmental restoration,”“water reclamation, recycling, and reuse,”and support for the“self-determination efforts of NativeAmerican tribes.” These are ambitious goals.Nevertheless,adjusted for inflation,the bureau’s $million budget for fiscal year is but a small fraction of its construction budgets in the three decades following World War II. The Bureau of Reclamation has reinvented itself many times,particularly during the s,afterWorldWar II,and in the s and s.The best-known history of water in theWest, Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, suggests that following WorldWar II,the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers went on a dambuilding “binge.”The passion to manage nature,the assumption that Congress had a responsibility to subsidize the economic development of theWest,and the desire of federal bureaus to protect their “turf” and expand their budgets all fueled the The Bureau of Reclamation and the West, ‒ Donald J. Pisani dam mania. Neither agency exhibited idealism, let alone vision.Wedded as they were to logrolling and pork barrel politics, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers became a juggernaut beyond democratic control.It mattered little that most Americans found many of the projects they built wasteful and impractical.According to Reisner, the dam builders were stopped not by public opinion but by a simple geological fact:by the s theWest had run out of safe dam sites. There is truth to Reisner’s interpretation, but it is only half the truth. In this essay, I will argue that the major impulse behind dam building in the s and the s was a postwar idealism that sought to revive and expand the New Deal of the s and win the Cold War against the Soviet Union.Whatever the power of the dam builders in Congress,they did not lead the charmed life that Reisner suggests.They faced severe criticism, and not just from those dedicated to protecting parks and wilderness areas.That criticism mounted during the s and s, and eventually the public turned against the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers. Some critics complained about the sheer cost of projects paid for from the general treasury. Some opposed the massive subsidies to agribusiness in the West. Some chastised the bureau for abandoning the goal of turning the West into a land of family farms. Still others deplored the damage that large water projects inflicted on the environment.In ,the great strength of the agency was its idealism. But that idealism proved hard to sustain, particularly in the face of congressional opposition to any form of “social planning.” Furthermore, even though dams were icons of progress in the s and s, by the s they represented an old and inflexible technology. The Bureau of Reclamation–originally the Reclamation Service—was established in to irrigate desert land.Its mission was not just to create new family farms on the public domain but also to provide supplemental water to established farmers on private land.The objectives of the bureau were inconsistent from the start.Was its goal to stimulate regional economic development or to create a new society? Federal reclamation was not a welfare program.Farmers could claim government land within the projects for nothing, but they had to pay their pro-rata cost of constructing dams and canals in ten years,without interest .The...