ABSTRACT

Elwood Mead, Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from 1924-36, once quipped that even if all the rain that fell on the mountains of the West were captured, it still would not slake the thirst of the farmers west of the 98th meridian (Mead 1903/1972:5). In a half-century attempt to capture this water, the United States developed

almost all of the rivers in the 11 western states. Using discourses of imperialistic high modernism to justify their program of damming the western half of the nation, the Bureau created an infrastructure to stimulate the economy and society of the West. As Aldo Leopold noted in the epigram above, this engine of progress was, for fifty years, a Frankenstein’s monster. Some of the intended results were certainly beneficial; other unintentional outcomes were extremely harmful. The engine of progress included a discourse of imperialistic high modernism that justified the domination of nature on a massive scale in the American West. The forces of “blind progress,” as David Brower called them, were finally stopped at the battles over Echo Park and Glen Canyon in the late 1950s. For many observers, this partial shift in the alignment of powers from the state to civil society marked the beginning of a new environmental movement in the U.S.