The Dammed - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 154

distance—in speeches, newspaper opinion pieces, e-mails, blog postings, and through a
steady stream of reports issued by the Paciic Institute . This would be the first time he
had attended the ACWA conference in person.
Gleick had come to debate Lester Snow, the director at the California Department of
Water Resources (DWR), on the question “Does California Need More Buckets?” To the
uninitiated, this topic might sound trivial, or like a good sleeping aid. But the ACWA
men knew better. They knew Gleick and Snow were longtime, if cordial, antagonists,
and they were looking forward to a good old-fashioned water fight.
In the argot of Western water managers, bucketsmeans “wet water,” or the actual wa-
ter stored in a reservoir, like money in a bank. This is distinct from paperwater,or water
rights,a legal concept about who-gets-how-much-water-when, written into a deed. Sur-
facestorage,meanwhile, is another way of saying “reservoirs.” Reservoirsis another way
of saying “dams.” And damis the D-word: an engineer's dream and an environmental-
ist's dystopian nightmare.
The debate over dams, and all they stand for, had stretched over most of the previous
century.
A dam is a structure designed to impound (retain) water. Of the nation's eighty-five
thousand dams, about six hundred of them were built in the West in the twentieth cen-
tury. Dams—Western dams in particular—are an emotionally charged subject.
A well-considered, well-built dam is a great accomplishment. Dams capture rain and
snowmelt that would otherwise be “wasted” as runoff. They protect against flooding
and store water for future use. They provide hydroelectric power and beautiful lakes
for swimming, fishing, and water-skiing. They offer proof of man's capacity to control
nature. The water stored by Western dams is cheap because it is subsidized by the gov-
ernment. Dams in the West allowed cities to grow, vegetables and cattle to be raised,
and people to thrive. Without vast reservoirs created by dams—such as Lake Powell and
Lake Mead—Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego would not have become flourishing
cities; California would not be the nation's leading dairy state or the fifth-largest suppli-
er of food and agriculture in the world.
But to some, dams are a blight on the landscape, constipators of natural water-
courses, destroyers of salmon runs and killers of endangered species, dislocators of
communities, eroders of wetlands and riverbanks, triggers for mudslides, behemoths
that impair water quality through the buildup of salts and other dissolved solids, white
elephants that cost too much to build and maintain and occasionally fail catastrophic-
ally. To critics of dams, it made no sense to build farms and cities in the desert; people
should work and live where water is plentiful. By storing millions of gallons of water
in reservoirs and aqueducts, dam builders lost thousands of gallons to evaporation and