Zak Podmore’s Life After Dead Pool is a novelty among books about climate change or environmentalism: optimistic, rather than doomsaying or angry. His story, which focuses on the inevitable loss of Lake Powell in coming decades, is not one of time run out or forces beyond our control, but instead of a historic opportunity to rectify past policy errors and deep injustices. As the water level drops, we have a chance to restore both the habitat of Glen Canyon and an earlier approach to public energy provision, when natural resources were shielded from capitalist exploitation and harnessed for the public good.
A Canyon Dammed
Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States, was created by the Glen Canyon Dam starting in the late 1960s and has been a tragic cause célèbre for environmentalists ever since. As the story goes, David Brower, then head of the Sierra Club, “compromised” by acceding to the law that authorized the dam’s construction in exchange for eliminating equivalently destructive dam projects upstream in Dinosaur National Monument and downstream in Grand Canyon National Park. By standing on the principle that protected federal lands should be immune from conversion to economic uses, Brower and the early postwar environmental movement kissed goodbye to one of America’s most unique and wild but unprotected landscapes, which was lost beneath an ultramarine cesspool winding through canyon country and dotted with the heliported houseboats of wealthy western sagebrush revolutionaries. They also tacitly ceded the vast majority of the federal domain to intensive private development and exploitation, rather than trying to forge a coalition to influence the development of federal land in the broader public interest.
In the years since this failure, the only alternative vision for the Glen Canyon Dam has been the fantasies of Edward Abbey, articulated through his characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang: blow up the dam in a spectacular act of environmental terrorism and get one over on the bastards who greedily ruined an uninhabited wilderness. These fantasies assume the environmentalist’s traditional posture: one-against-the-world, standing righteously on a superior belief system that “we” must convince the public to adopt against their base economic interests, by means of moral exhortation, or failing that, terrorism, in order to save themselves from certain destruction.
Podmore tells a very different story: since the “Millenium Drought” began in 2000, much of the canyon country once flooded by the reservoir has been restored to life by subsiding reservoir levels. In that time the native species forced to retreat far up their tributaries have repopulated the recovered canyon bottoms, and newly free-flowing streams have cut through the silt deposits of the retreating reservoir, sending the accumulated 60 years of muck further into the main channel of the Colorado, where it will remain if the reservoir isn’t drained. I saw the recovering canyons myself on the kayak excursion I took with Podmore while he was researching the book in the spring of 2022, after several successive dry winters and consequently declining lake levels.
The “Dead Pool” of the title refers to the lowest level on the Glen Canyon Dam that permits water to pass through and on into the Grand Canyon, located hundreds of feet above the level of the formerly free-flowing river. Consequently, if Lake Powell declines that far, there will be no water flowing into the Grand Canyon, save what comes in from its own tributaries downstream from the dam. Indeed, following our trip, the lake came within a few dozen feet of “Minimum Power Pool,” the lowest level at which the dam’s hydroelectric generators can operate.
This may seem like a disaster, but as Podmore explains, it also represents an opportunity. In the not-to-distant future, the federal government may switch sides and join the longtime wacko demand to drain the reservoir by building a bypass around the dam at the river’s former elevation that would send its captive water downstream to Lake Mead and the rest of the Colorado River system. The plan is predominantly driven by pragmatic concerns: maintaining the viability of Lake Powell already requires the Bureau of Reclamation to release water from reservoirs upstream to keep the Glen Canyon Dam’s hydroelectric turbines moving. Moreover, the federal government has paid billions of dollars to Arizona farmers to fallow their land for a few years at $3000 an acre—a sum that is much more than the farmers would earn by growing and selling alfalfa, but that delivers water savings that are nowhere near enough to maintain the reservoir in the long term. Floyd Dominy, the Reclamation commissioner who presided over the dam’s construction and is consequently the foil of generations of environmental activists, starting with Brower, is also the one who first sketched the dam bypass plan on a napkin, thereby pointing out the path to undoing his own life’s work.
The Legacy of Lake Powell
All this makes for an optimistic climate change story for once. While we undoubtedly face grave environmental threats in the future, those very same threats, in the form of prolonged drought, render the environmental crimes of the past obsolete and therefore dispensable and rectifiable. But in burying Lake Powell, we had better eulogize it properly, because while its creation was undoubtedly an environmental crime, the nature of that crime is not exactly what Brower and his crowd imagined.
Tellingly, as Podmore recounts, the coffee table book the Sierra Club published to espouse the cause of preserving Glen Canyon, The Place No One Knew, consists of beautiful still images bereft of any human presence. But people lived in and used Glen Canyon before the dam was built, and people used Glen Canyon—albeit very, very differently—after it was there. The idea of the pristine, uninhabited wilderness is an environmentalist fantasy that presupposes (while also ignoring) mass dispossession, and the idea of returning to that lost Eden of Glen Canyon’s “natural” state threatens yet another dispossession.
One person who knew Glen Canyon ante diluvium was Barry Goldwater, who explored the area as a young man in 1940. When he later voted for the Colorado River Storage Project Act that authorized the dam, he was the only federal legislator who had actually seen what was going to be destroyed, and environmentalists lambasted him for betraying his principles. In leveling this charge, the critics were half-right: it is true that Goldwater betrayed his principles in authorizing the dam, but it wasn’t because he allowed the magnificent canyon he’d experienced to be inundated—rather, the Reclamation project was a New Deal project symbolizing everything Goldwater opposed, promising water to the relatively impoverished dry land farmers of the upper basin and western slope of the Rockies, paid for by power sales from the hydroelectric generators to rural electricity cooperatives at subsidized prices, all to prevent another Dust Bowl.
As Goldwater and other western US Senators tacitly recognized during the heyday of the New Deal Order, federal power and federal action is what made the west—notwithstanding the rah-rah individualism with which it, and later Goldwater, became associated. The New Deal, which instantiated the Progressive dream of putting natural resources to work on behalf of the public interest by shielding them from free market forces that inevitably squander them, rescued the west from the failure, futility, and waste that plagued efforts to harness its natural resources in the 19th century. So despite Goldwater’s “small government” principles, he voted for the dam because it and other projects like it enabled his state to exist.
Environmentalists, by contrast, decided to embrace the anti-New-Deal momentum of the era and frame their opposition to further dam-building as opposing government waste. They took up the cause of Cost-Benefit Analysis with enthusiasm, successfully spearheading methodological critiques of the federal agencies’ analysis that building more dams made money for the taxpayers. In doing so, environmental activists bolstered the interpretation of the New Deal as destroying prosperity rather than creating it, and aligned themselves with anti-New-Deal forces to constrain federal power. Here, again, however, the optimism in Life After Dead Pool is that we can rectify that crime as well.
Life after Neoliberal Energy
Late in the book, Podmore puts forward a plan to blanket the wide, now exposed bays of the former lower reservoir with solar panels. After all, they are near existing generation and transmission capacity in the form of the dam and the now-demolished Navajo coal power plant, and those landscapes, unlike the narrow canyons with flowing streams, are not going to recover ecologically for many years to come. However, the Bureau of Reclamation won’t site new generating capacity there so long as the myth of a refilled reservoir still motivates their decisions.
More worryingly, while federal policy has once again embraced renewable power generation as it did in the Bureau of Reclamation’s heyday, our present approach looks little like the projects of the New Deal era. Policy today is effectuated through tax credits for private developers to build on federal land with low labor standards and sell to monopolistic privatized utilities. In other words, current policy involves taking public resources out of public hands for private enrichment, while telling everyone else they have to swallow economic pain for long-term environmental gain—the signature of neoliberalism, recently rebranded as “A Liberalism That Builds.” Indeed, the fundamental libertarian critique of the Green New Deal—embraced by many self-styled centrist liberals—was that we don’t have to dismantle capitalism to solve climate change, so long as we could convince private actors to adopt shiny new technologies by sweetening the pot. The aim is to build a political constituency for the green energy transition among powerful incumbent producers, who are charging high and rising prices following deregulation of the power supply chain, rather than among their customers.
In assessing this strategy, I am reminded of a talk given to students at my university by a lobbyist for Rocky Mountain Power, the local generating monopoly and part of the multi-state conglomerate Pacificorp. The clean energy transition in Utah (where the retail electricity market remains price-regulated) was going great, she argued, because the private power company, given its multi-state monopoly, was able to stick deregulated California retail customers with the bill. It’s worth noting that under its former name Utah Power and Light, the private utility vied with the Bureau of Reclamation for control over valuable and promising dam sites, which the bureau generally won because at the time it promised cheap power to all, while everyone knew the private utility’s aim was profit extraction. After that lobbyist addressed students at my university, however, the Utah state legislature reversed Rocky Mountain Power’s plans to close two coal-fired power plants, forcing the company to retain capacity in carbon-intensive energy generation for longer than the power company had planned. Meanwhile, the renewable power projects that are underway in Utah’s western desert following the Inflation Reduction Act are drawing low-wage, non-union workers from out of state and offering little to the people who actually live here.
The powers that be in Washington, however, have decided that the problem impeding the energy transition is not the profit imperative of incumbents, but rather that the permitting process by which they gain access to public resources and put them to work for private benefit is too cumbersome. They are thus seeking to enact exceptions to longstanding environmental review processes used by local coalitions to retain control of their communal natural resources. In a replay of when 1970s-era environmentalism joined forces with capitalistic interests to roll back the New Deal, the anti-regulation view has won the day in the Biden administration. So far, however, this approach has done nothing to change the underlying political economy of the clean energy transition, nor has it yet made good on its promise of cheap and abundant clean energy. Both outcomes are unsurprising: despite rhetoric that an “all of the above” energy policy will lead to low prices in the far-distant future, regardless of the distribution of power among stakeholders in the electricity supply chain, sticking consumers (and taxpayers) with the bill is intrinsic to the policy design.
Constructing the Glen Canyon Dam was a crime in the first instance, but it was born of a political economy based on sound, populistic principles ripe for rediscovery. The optimism of Life After Dead Pool extends to imagining a political future where a self-sustaining popular coalition solves the problem of climate change through a Bureau of Renewables that blankets the landscape with publicly-owned solar and wind generating capacity to power public transit, while ceding the recovered canyon bottoms back to the indigenous people swindled out of their land to build the dam and fill the reservoir. But just as the silt in the receding reservoir flows downstream, threatening to choke currently-clear stretches of Glen Canyon, the optimism about resurrecting a more democratic political economy comes with a warning: before it’s too late. It would be yet another historical crime borne of immediate political expediency not to take advantage of the opportunity.
