Pearson maintains that historians have given the lion’s share of the credit in the defeat of the Grand Canyon dams to the environmental movement, especially the Sierra Club and David Brower. He argues that while this narrative has grown to mythical status, his study seeks to correct this misconception, claiming that despite preservationists’ efforts legislation authorizing the dams would never have passed after August of 1966. He argues that other factors beyond the preservationists’ protests had an even greater impact. Pearson claims that Washington senator Henry Jackson’s powerful position as chairman of the Senate Interior Committee and his adamant opposition to proposals diverting Columbia River water to the American Southwest foreordained that any CAP legislation containing this provision would never leave his committee. In addition, political forces in California held sway over any CAP
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With such a complicated story as this one, Pearson focuses primarily on federal efforts to construct dams in the Grand Canyon, and he sets his sights on the roles of the federal government’s legislative and executive branches. For Pearson, the federal legislative process was byzantine, characterized by powerful committee chairmen who dictated how and when Congress acted on legislation. That power allowed them to exert inordinate control in Congress and thus constrain public involvement. The executive branch is represented by the actions of the Bureau of Reclamation, who apparently was running amok constructing projects throughout the American West by overwhelming an unsuspecting Congress with tedious engineering reports and a well-oiled publicity apparatus. This theory is problematic, because it implies that a lone federal agency could run roughshod over the entire legislative process. Moreover, it refutes Pearson’s narrative wherein he demonstrates the ability of local water interests to use their political clout to influence water policy. Federal policymaking has always worked with legislative and executive branches responding to the needs of a vocal and determined constituency. Pearson is also handicapped by a loose rendition of Bureau of Reclamation activities during the first half of the twentieth century to demonstrate its myopic view of constructing projects in the American West to serve its self-interests. According to Pearson, this rampage was finally halted with passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969, which allowed greater public scrutiny on resource development projects.
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Byron E. Pearson’s Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth examines the heroic narrative that arose after the defeat of federal proposals to build two dams on the Colorado River within Grand Canyon to provide power for the Central Arizona Project (CAP). Pearson’s study explores water resources development along the Colorado River from the beginning of the twentieth century to passage of the Colorado River Basin Project Act in 1968, which authorized CAP construction. His discussion investigates the multiple interests—federal, state, private capital, and environmental—that directly influenced policymaking regarding Colorado River development. Pearson’s study exposes the complex nature of water resources development in the American West, while also revealing holes in the constructed legend of the environmental movement’s supposed elevated role in stopping dam construction in Grand Canyon.
V O L .
Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2019. ix + 349 pp. Cloth, $39.95
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By Byron E. Pearson
legislation unless assured their water needs were secured. Finally, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall gave up the Grand Canyon dams in 1967 to gain Jackson’s support for CAP before he and Senator Carl Hayden left office in 1968. Thus, according to Pearson, regionalism, self-interest, and desires to secure a legacy had a greater effect in removing the Grand Canyon dams from CAP legislation.
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Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth
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These discrepancies, although significant, do not take away from Pearson’s purpose of
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