The Dammed - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 153

CHAPTER 16
The Dammed
Beneath this building, beneath every street, there's a desert. Without water the
desert will rise up and cover us as though we'd never existed! … The Alto Vallejo
[dam] can save us from that, and … is a fair price to keep the desert from our
streets, and not on top of them!
—Los Angeles mayor Sam Bagby, Chinatown, 1974
THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE WATER BUFFALOES
The history of the West is that you never kill a dam, you just postpone the debate.
Dams have a way of coming back, like the undead.
—Peter Gleick, the Pacific Institute, 2009
On a Wednesday aternoon in May 2007 , the Association of California Water Agencies
(ACWA), the nation's largest coalition of public water managers, met in the Sacramento
Convention Center. Hundreds of water managers filled the room, some dressed in sharp
suits and glossy shoes, others in dusty hats and cowboy boots. They were responsible for
90 percent of the water used in California, but thanks to an extended drought and a host
of attendant problems, the ACWA men (there were hardly any women in the crowd) were
on edge.
Just before 2:00, a tall, pale, toothy man with a corona of wavy dark hair swirling over
a long face rimmed by a salt-and-pepper beard slipped through the crowd toward the
stage. This was Peter Gleick. Fifty-one years old, Gleick was raised on upper Park Avenue
in New York City. A graduate of Yale, a Berkeley PhD, a MacArthur Fellow, and as the
president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security,
Gleick had become perhaps America's foremost independent water expert.
Since founding the Oakland-based Pacific Institute in 1987 with three friends, Gleick
had carved out a unique career as a high-profile pundit, gadfly, and counterweight to
the pro-dam, pro-agriculture, antifish policies of the ACWA men and politicians such
as former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Gleick had a reputation as a provocative,
at times combative, personality. He usually squared off against his opponents from a