When the Government Tried to Flood the Grand Canyon

https://daily.jstor.org/when-the-government-tried-to-flood-the-grand-canyon/

by samclemens • 3 years ago

48 78 3 years ago

daily.jstor.org

speeder• 3 years ago

Not sure the project moving forward with coal power is an environmental win.

pavlov2• 3 years ago

A coal plant can be shut down immediately and dismantled without massive environmental impact.

Undoing a landscape change on the scale of the Grand Canyon is a very different proposition.

krisoft• 3 years ago

A coal plant can be shut down immediately and dismantled without massive environmental impact.

And the CO2 dispersed in the atmosphere can be caught with butterfly nets. Easy breasy.

Propelloni• 3 years ago

I think you are trying to say that landscape engineering is more harmful to the ecosphere than dismantling a single power plant. I guess that is right in a sense. But you happen to neglect that power generation is a process with a long chain of steps.

Coal for example has to come from somewhere. Take the Garzweiler, Inden or Hambach regions in Germany (FYI, these are coal mining areas). Through coincidence while doing some work for RWE I had the pleasure to get the long run-down on the project basics regarding the renaturalisation of these regions and the projects are on a massive scale, even if they are only a fraction of the size of the Grand Canyon. When they started exploiting the coal in the 1970s they planned very far ahead, including the renaturalisation starting in the 2030s (meaning it is all already approved). Garzweiler and Hambach are situated in one of the most densely populated areas in all of Europe. Since the 1970s whole cities and villages had to be resettled, infrastructure dismantled and rebuild, and over 100 square km of area have basically been turned into a desert. Currently Germany is preparing the first stage [1] of the renaturalisation and it is expected that it will be done around the turn of the next century.

So, yes, dams are a massive intrusion in the ecosphere but let's not kid ourselves into thinking the resources we need to run coal, gas, nuclear or oil power plants just fall from the sky. I wonder why it's OK to wreak such massive havoc on our environment for coal, but not for hydropower.

[1] The project page for Hambach https://www.rwe.com/forschung-und-entwicklung/projektvorhabe...

EDIT: I would oppose flooding the Grand Canyon either way ;)

arghwhat3• 3 years ago

... After it had been running for a decade or two and caused significant harm to all life, sure.

This is one of those issues where being visible distorts the perceived damage. Tourism would probably also have adapted to seeing the large lake.

Seems a little silly to focus on preserving the appearance of a hole in the ground over, idk, most life on earth.

justinclift• 3 years ago

It sounds like the dam approach would have increased the amount of fertile land, greenery, etc around.

If that's correct, I wonder how that trade off would then look?

FreshStart• 3 years ago

Except for the invisible heap in the sky.

wiseowise2• 3 years ago

Destroying whole ecosystem is surely more environmentally friendly.

thumbuddy2• 3 years ago

Let me ask you this though, is it more profitable?

Hendrikto• 3 years ago

The article sounds like it was never about that, but rather about “preserving natural wonders”.

bombcar• 3 years ago

If the Grand Canyon wasn’t so interesting to look at (e.g. more like Black Canyon that is now lake Mead) it probably would be flooded today.

And people would be arguing that we need to keep the levels of lake Gread high or something.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

The Sierra Club is a horrible organization founded by a horrible person (Muir).

Their opposition to zero carbon energy projects such as hydroelectric and nuclear have served to increase our dependence on fossil fuels.

azlev• 3 years ago

Not every hydroelectric project is zero carbon. Big lakes inside amazon forests (as an example, I'm brazilian) cause a huge carbon footprint due devastation, rotten submerse wood, and also bring uncertains.

Also, those damns were designed to extract water from a fragile environment.

Those huge projects bring a lot of uncertain too.

cmrdporcupine3• 3 years ago

Mercury build up is also a know and awful issue about hydroelectric dams.

This has become a big issue in the north in Quebec:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/world/canada/clean-energy...

hinkley9• 3 years ago

It's probably more accurate to say that most of the zero carbon hydroelectric that can be built already has been (and some of the not so neutral ones as well). That was the conclusion I came away with years ago when I wanted to know more about the topic of both why we weren't building new and why we were breaching old.

So even looking at the average footprint of existing projects will steer you wrong because most new ones will drag us back to the mean, which is pretty bad.

koheripbal• 3 years ago

There is even some evidence that these organizations have had covert support from the Kremlin for the purposes of domestically sabotaging US/UK/EU energy production.

lake-view• 3 years ago

What did John Muir do for you to label him a "horrible person"?

nasmorn• 3 years ago

He just wishes that those pesky redwoods were all gone

Rebelgecko• 3 years ago

All I can find is that he made a few racist remarks as a young man, although it seems like he was less racist than the average white person in America (eg was not a fan of slavery, and he wrote at length about how regardless of the color of your skin we're all alike in the ways that matter)

hinkley9• 3 years ago

Complete erasure of the role of indigenous peoples in the California ecosystem? He was a racist fuck who wanted First Nations people off their lands to protect it. Lands that were substantially improved by stewardship by those people.

The California ecosystems may be some of the most intensively agrarian lands by putatively nomadic peoples in the world (or at least, the ones we have any documentation on before Europeans destroyed them utterly)

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/sierra-club-calls-out-fo...

Fuck John Muir. [edit to add] At absolute best he was a pastoralist, which is now a dirty word. At worst he is everything people are claiming and more. He should sit at the same table we've put H P Lovecraft at.

larusso2• 3 years ago

I don‘t know how to think about the other comments concentrating more about coal vs hydroelectric but I went to the grant canyon with my family just this summer (I‘m from Europe) and it is not just a hole in the ground. My kids did the Junior Ranger badges for the south rim and one learns a lot about the ecosystem throughout the canyon. But maybe I‘m indoctrinated now…

I know a similar plan existed for Yosemite which sounds even more crazy to me.

I think the human behavior to put its need above all other is the problem. Not withstanding the fact that we understand little about the consequences of these kind of changes.

biggc2• 3 years ago

Do you know about Hetch Hetchy? It's a valley near Yosemite that John Muir described as being equally beautiful. They flooded it to create a water supply for San Francisco.

larusso2• 3 years ago

No I did not. I learned from Yosemite flooding from a tourguide the first time I’ve been to the park.

godzillabrennus• 3 years ago

Amazing. I can’t believe I learned about this just now.

zoklet-enjoyer• 3 years ago

Here's a page about towns that have been permanently flooded in the US. Elbowoods, ND is pretty messed up. Native people were displaced and lost their good farmland so that people down river would benefit.

https://clui.org/newsletter/spring-2005/immersed-remains-tow...

bradleyjg• 3 years ago

the ecosystem throughout the canyon

Everything has an ecosystem. Even deep ocean volcanic vents. We can either build nothing anywhere, or we have to pick and choose.

The Grand Canyon itself is a major tourist attraction and should be left alone but in my opinion the not-quite-as-grand canyon should be higher on the chopping block than yet another chunk of Appalachian hardwood forest. Sand fly and rattlesnake notwithstanding.

ghaff2• 3 years ago

Opinion in the US has probably generally turned against dams. A fair number of smaller dams that needed maintenance anyway have been dismantled, a lot of people are probably of the opinion that it's good we didn't go ahead with projects like this one and the Tocks Island Dam, or that some currently-existing big dams like Glen Canyon were maybe bad ideas.

jpm_sd• 3 years ago

At this point it looks like turning the Grand Canyon into the largest reservoir in the western US would've been a smart move. Water is the limiting factor for millions of people and important food sources.

biggc2• 3 years ago

Lake Mead and Lake Powell are already drying out because there's not enough water coming down the Colorado river, I'm not sure how another reservoir between the two would help

atourgates• 3 years ago

People aren’t dying of thirst, or hunger in the American Southwest.

All damming the Grand Canyon would have done is destroyed an amazing natural area, and made it so we didn’t have to worry quite so much about watering our lawns and golf courses in places where they don’t belong.

hinkley9• 3 years ago

It just would have brought more people to the region faster. In the end we'd be where we are now, but with bigger stakes if the whole system collapses.

sizzzzlerz2• 3 years ago

If you take a rafting trip down the Colorado River through Marble Canyon, which would have been flooded had the dam been built, you will pass by a spot where there are a couple holes dug into the side of the canyon. These holes were test holes whose purpose was to determine whether the rock was structurally sound enough to support the dam. It is an eerie feeling to slowly float by them realizing these would have been flooded under hundreds of feet of water had the Army Corps of Engineers been successful. The salvation of Grand Canyon was one of the greatest environmental victories of the 20th century.

vidanay• 3 years ago

In 2001 I took a 5 day cruise on the Yangtze river with the express reason of seeing the Three Gorges region before the dam was completed and everything was submerged. It was (and is) very eerie.

sizzzzlerz2• 3 years ago

A cultural, environmental, historical, and scientific disaster. The ramifications of it will be around for hundreds of years.

ecoffey• 3 years ago

There is a great book called The Emerald Mile that touches on some of this history, and other Grand Canyon history, using the story of the fastest traversal as the narrative device. Highly recommend. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803144-the-emerald-mil...

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

niagara falls: “At any given moment the water diverted upstream from the falls, to run the various power plants, is anywhere from 60 to 75%. That’s an average of 1,200,000 gallons (4,542,500 liters) of water per second with only 600,000 gal/sec (2,271,250 liters/sec) left to run over the Horseshoe Falls and a mere 150,000 gal/sec (567,811 liters/sec) for the American Falls. Although it may seem as though the Falls are being deprived of their natural flow, the water that remains to cover the falls is still an impressive sight. Many waterfall enthusiasts agree that reduced flow makes for waterfalls with more “character.”” https://nyfalls.com/niagara-falls/faq-4/#diverted

euroderf• 3 years ago

Footnote: at one point they did shut off the American Falls entirely.

Shawnj2• 3 years ago

They also shut off the other ones periodically for maintenance which is where all the photos of the Niagara Falls but off come from

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

“The Grand Canyon today is so immense that if you poured all the river water on earth into the Grand Canyon, it would still only be half full. The Grand Canyon is about 1,218.37 acres or 1904 square miles in size.“

When the Government Tried to Flood the Grand Canyon

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