The Grand undammed - proposals to dam Grand Canyon

Sierra, July-August, 1992 by Tom Turner

The nondescript man in the nondescript suit showed up at the Sierra Club's front door on June 10, 1966, bearing a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. The message was simple: Contributions to the Club might no longer be tax-deductible pending IRS review of the organization's lobbying activities.

The agency missive had been sparked by a call from Morris Udall, member of Congress from Arizona, who was miffed at the Club's outspoken opposition to the building of hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon. Specifically, Udall was angered by an advertisement that the Club had run the day before in The New York Times and The Washington Post calling on the public to rise up against the dam proposals ("Now Only You Can Save the Grand Canyon from Being Flooded... for Profit").

Udall badly wanted the dams. So did his most vocal constituents - those promoting quick and lucrative growth for Tucson and Phoenix. The congressman turned to the IRS to see if a treat to revoke the Club's tax-exempt status could get it to back off. It didn't work: The Club responded by running more ads. The tactic "was my biggest mistake," Udall later confessed.

The idea of damming the Grand Canyon, preposterous as it now seems, was hardly new. A senator from Arizona, Ralph Henry Cameron, had tried to dam the canyon in the teens of this century, and the plan had surfaced periodically ever since. By the early 1960s the proposal had been refined to two dams, part of a large scheme known as the Central Arizona Project. One dam would be built at Marble George, upstream from Grand Canyon National Park, and another at Bridge Canyon, downstream from Grand Canyon National Monument. The plan - presented to Congress in 1965 - was to throttle the Colorado River to generate power, which would in turn be used to pump water from the river many miles downstream. Proponents claimed that the reservoirs wouldn't even be visible from the canyon rim; opponents countered that a living river was the lifeblood and principal sculptor of the canyon, and that it hadn't finished its work.

The Sierra Club, having learned a lesson or two upstream at Glen Canyon (see "As It Happened," November/December 1991), planted itself firmly in the path of the dam proposal. In addition to the newspaper ads that did, in fact, cost the Club its tax-deductible status (the IRS eventually found the Club guilty of "substantial" efforts to influence pending legislation and therefore ineligible to receive deductible contributions), the organization produced a book, two films, analyses of government-sponsored scientific studies, and countless pieces of propaganda arguing against the dams.

The publicity over the dam battle and the heavy-handed tactics of the IRS, plus the barrage of newspaper ads, roused the public to the defense of the canyon and the Club. (As then-executive director David Brower quipped later, "People who did not know whether or not they loved the Grand Canyon knew whether they loved the IRS.") Mail poured in to Congress in what California Senator Thomas Kuchel called "one of the largest letter-writing campaigns I have ever seen." The double-dam proposal never got out of committee.

Membership in the Sierra Club leapt from 39,000 to 78,000 in three years. Large donations fell - the Club estimated the loss at half a million dollars - but they were at least partly made up by dues and contributions from new members.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1967 the Johnson administration came back with a scaled-down project offering a single dam. The Club pointed out that one bullet in the heart was as deadly as two. More full-page newspaper ads appeared.

In February, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, brother of dam-booster Mo, announced that the government had changed its mind and would not longer push for any dams in the Grand Canyon. In the fall of 1968 Congress authorized a Central Arizona Project with no concrete in the canyon.

The proposal to dam the Grand Canyon had the enthusiastic backing of the administration and the near-unanimous support of the senators and representatives from the Colorado River states. Yet it was stopped by an outpouring of outrage from the American public, spurred on by conservationists wielding that pungent mix of science and passion.