Even Then, The Evironment

On the chill spring morning of March 21, 1981, 75 people drove into the visitors-center parking lot of Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam. They were not part of the usual crowd of tourists and boat owners come to marvel at the huge waterworks, ponder statistics on metric tons of concrete, or admire the vast power-plant reservoir, inaccurately, if not disingenuously, named Lake Powell by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. On the contrary, they were more interested in what had been here before the dam, what the dam had in fact taken from them. Under 500 feet of reservoir water lay what had once been one of the most beautiful stretches of the Colorado Gorge, the golden heart of the canyonlands, with tamarisk and willow thickets, waterfalls and plunge pools, hanging gardens of orchids and maidenhair ferns that found refuge in the pink sandstone recesses while mastodons still walked the continent during the Ice Age. There had been egrets and ibises wading in the shallows, beaver, deer, and coyotes in the cotton-wood glades. There had been that abundance of life only possible, or perhaps only fully appreciated, along a desert river. It was for the sake of this submerged, half-forgotten natural world under the bone-white monument to progress that these people came to demonstrate their displeasure.MORE from Penthouse