Dam Environmentalists

...The same activists who campaign for hydrogen-powered cars, for example, rail against the hydroelec-tricity produced by dams...

...In the spring, he said, farmers "awaited with dread the coming of a flood, and at the end of nearly every summer they feared a shortage of water that would destroy their crops...

...Leslie, who was a vietnam war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and has written for magazines such as Harper's and the Washington Monthly, takes on what he calls the "Rooseveltian vision, arising out of the New Deal, built into the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee valley Authority, enthralled with its seeming capacity to foster prosperity by subjugating nature...

...But what the countries spend it on is more important: dams, walls, and gates...

...The same weekend that Salon ran its glowing notice for Jacques Leslie's rants against artificial barriers on natural rivers, it also ran an article about a recent antiwar protest in Washington under the headline "'Make Levees, Not War.'" This was a popular trope at the time, with left-ie antiwar spokesmen charging that money for the war in Iraq could have gone to building levees as well as their favorite social programs...

...But the University of Florida's Canfield says that while wetlands are valuable for marine life, they are vastly overrated for flood protection...

...This resulted in the Corps doing another environmental impact study and holding off some work for two years...

...These were not wetlands destroyed by Katrina, but land that started disappearing, from both natural and manmade causes, in the 1930s...

...About the river he said bluntly that "the Colorado added little of value to the region this dam serves...

...Local voters, grateful to the TvA for providing power and controlling wild rivers, didn't much like Goldwater's argument...

...Yet one of the main obstacles, before Katrina, to building and fortifying levees, as well as creating more innovative flood barriers, was put up by environmentalists...

...Even now, with Katrina a recent memory, efforts to protect New Orleans are being turned into eco-boondoggles, though the media seems not to have noticed...

...It probably would have given [the people of New Orleans] a better shot," says Daniel Canfield, a renowned professor of aquatic sciences at the University of Florida...

...American Rivers, for example, brags about how many dams have been decommissioned and has as its slogan "Rivers Unplugged...

...Leslie and Salon aren't alone...

...If they're already wet, and filled with water, they provide no extra protection," he says...

...Most New Deal programs are considered sacred on the left, as George Bush learned recently when he tried to reform social security...

...And what does a West Coast webzine make of a book that proposes cutting off a major power source for Los Angeles...

...Ask the environmentalists...

...But without humans asserting themselves, nature will leave plenty of its own footprints, like Katrina, as it stomps at will over human beings and wildlife alike...

...Roosevelt also defended public works such as dams on the now-discredited Keynesian ground that they create jobs (the New Deal did not bring down overall unemployment, which only returned to pre-Depression levels with World War II), but he was generally pragmatic about nature in its pristine state...

...He proudly noted that the dam on the Colorado River was "altering the geography of a whole region," calling what had existed before "cactus-covered waste" and "an unpeopled, forbidding desert...

...There has, however, been a good deal of silence about European efforts on flood control, while the few reports that have addressed this subject largely focused on the amount of money Europe spends...

...But to refute the claim that dams are "dinosaurs," all we have to do is look to Western Europe, usually a favorite reference point for liberal activists and the media...

...BY JOHN BERLAU GIVEN THE PASTING President Bush has taken over the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, one might have assumed the president's critics were in agreement about how to prevent such disasters...

...This animus against dams also continues to skew spending and construction priorities to make such disasters more likely in the future...

...London, which sits below the high tide of the Atlantic waterways, has also had severe problems with the flooding of the Thames River...

...Many experts believe the gates could have greatly reduced the impact of Katrina...

...What motivates anti-dam activists is abstract talk about man not interfering in the "ecosystem" or leaving a "footprint" on the planet...

...But for years now, the left has been deeply ambivalent about the most logical and time-tested miti-gator against the threat of city-wide and regional floods: dams...

...In 1964, presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was thought to have committed campaign suicide when he proposed privatizing the Tennessee valley Authority, which had been built with New Deal dollars...

...Support for dam removal and opposition to new dams have become a staple among modern environmentalists, giving rise to organizations whose only agenda is to stop dams...

...So, in the '80s, gates were built that can rise as high as five stories...

...What does the left-wing website Salon, a consistent defender of New Deal programs, have to say about Leslie's savaging of Roosevelt's achievement...

...It's a belief structure," he says...

...Leslie and other dam opponents say land-sinking and the buildup of sediment caused by dams show the futility of attempts to artificially control rivers...

...He concludes by inveighing against dams as "relics of the twentieth century, like stalinism and gasoline-powered cars, symbols of the allure of technology and its transience . . . of the delusion that humans are exempt from nature's dominion...

...The last of these were ultramodern dams built in the 1980s...

...In 1977, the group Save Our Wetlands successfully sued the Army Corps of Engineers to halt the construction of large floodgates intended to prevent Gulf of Mexico storms from overwhelming Lake Pontchar-train and flooding New Orleans...

...The distraction from the Corps's mission continued from the Clinton to the Bush administration and is something Bush can legitimately be blamed for...

...The Dutch and the British are sensitive to the environment, but only to a point...

...At the 1935 dedication of Hoover Dam, FDR hailed the taming of a "turbulent, dangerous river" and the "completion of the greatest dam in the world...

...After a North Sea storm in 1953, the Netherlands, half of which is below sea level, set out to dam every last major body of water...

...As Ron Utt notes in a Heritage Foundation study, the Corps began spending hundreds of millions of dollars on environmentally correct projects like "aquatic ecosystems" instead of flood control...

...As environmental journalist Gregg Easter-brook pointed out in his 1995 book A Moment on the Earth, a dam "burns no fossil fuel and emits no greenhouse gases, smog or toxic or solid wastes...

...This sea change on dams illustrates a larger shift of the left concerning technology and the nature of man...

...Now a position far more radical has become respectable...

...Their campaign against dams has gained influence and stalled, decommissioned, or otherwise limited the construction of many dams and levees, including one project that could have made a significant difference during Katrina's pounding of New Orleans...

...But the anti-dam American Rivers, along with eco-groups such as the Sierra Club and state chapters of the National Wildlife Federation, sued, alleging harm to "bottomland hardwood wetlands...

...The argument is made that the wetlands (which used to be called swamps) can help absorb floodwater before it gets to the city...

...But to Leslie, damming the Colorado River was a damn shame, and he pushes for returning it "to its virgin state: tempestuous, fickle, and in some stretches astonishing...

...Then, in the 1990s, the Army Corps of Engineers tried to upgrade 303 miles of levees along the Mississippi River, telling the Baton Rouge Advocate in 1996 that a levee "failure could wreak catastrophic consequences on Louisiana and Mississippi...

...John Berlau, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is writing a hook on the health risks of environmentalism...

...Take away dams, and folks will have to rely on other energy sources such as coal, which, as we know from the recent tragedy in West Virginia, has its own environmental and safety concerns...

...The Berkeley-based International Rivers Network does similar work in Third World countries, where dams are even more crucial for power and flood control...

...In Deep Wat^^: The Epic S^^uggle o'v^ir Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, a new book receiving rave reviews from the mainstream press, Jacques Leslie assails all dams as "loaded weapons aimed down rivers" and calls for rivers to be allowed to return to their natural flows...

...How could dams, embraced by everyone from beavers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, be a source of contention...

...But liberals conveniently forget Roosevelt's no-nonsense views on dealing with nature...

...The Corps compromised with the anti-dam activists in other ways...

...Until recently, dams were the pride of the left, and for good reason: They provide electricity, irrigation, and, of course, bulwarks against flooding...

...But in exchange for this major subtraction from civilization as we know it, Americans would be able to marvel at a "free-flowing river" and "an unparalleled depository of marine life...

...It's true that engineering isn't perfect, and there are always new challenges that require upkeep...

...The gates, the environmentalists said, would have hurt wetlands and marine life, although the Corps had already done an environmental assessment to the satisfaction of environmental regulators...

...See James R. Stoner Jr., "Love in the Ruins," September 26, 2005...

...Bills from Louisiana senators Mary Landrieu, Democrat, and David Vitter, Republican, couple money to fortify levees with millions of dollars to restore a vast swath of "coastal wetlands...

...He acknowledges that if you took away the dams and the hydroelectric power they provide, you would also "take away modern Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix" as well as the nearby former desert outpost known as Las Vegas...

...But neither country is undertaking massive projects to restore swamps or, in the eco parlance, "wetlands...

...Salon heaps praise on Leslie, stating in a September article that "the modern dam, in short, has come to signify both the majesty and folly of our age's drive to conquer nature...

...The environmentalist crusade against dams is curious for other reasons...

...Citing the Dutch and British experience, Canfield says the anti-dam movement is not mainly about science, but rather philosophy, or even theology...

...In the United States, The Weekly Standard was virtually alone in suggesting that Lake Pontchartrain could be dammed along Dutch lines...

...They try to regulate water levels to accommodate the native fish...