When conservationists chose Dinosaur National Monument over Glen Canyon
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Lodore Canyon, left, in 1871; photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images. Glen Canyon, right, in 1898. Photo: George Wharton James via University of Southern California
In the 1950s, conservationists rejoiced in their successful campaign to stop the federal government from flooding swaths of Dinosaur National Monument with a dam on the Green River.
The intrigue: It turned out to be a pyrrhic victory — one that environmentalists would be ambivalent about for decades.
- This is Old News, our weekly float down the currents of Utah history.
What drove the news: In the Saturday Evening Post 75 years ago this week, celebrated journalist Bernard DeVoto called the nation's attention to a plan to erect dams that would replace Dinosaur's wild Lodore and Whirlpool canyons with reservoirs.
Behind the scenes: The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation quietly developed the plan over several years — without consulting the National Park Service, which manages the canyons.
- NPS officials were infuriated by their exclusion.
Zoom out: If Congress were to allow construction in Dinosaur, it would shift the balance of priorities throughout the nation's protected lands, favoring growth and development over preservation, DeVoto cautioned.
- He cited similar canceled plans that would have flooded parts of Mammoth Cave, Glacier and Grand Canyon national parks — some of which had been repeatedly revived.
- "Even when controversies have been formally settled and projects abandoned apparently for good, the park system and the public trust is always under … threat," he warned.
What happened: DeVoto's warnings worked; the so-called Echo Park and Split Canyon dams in Dinosaur became conservationists' cause célèbre and letters opposing the dams "poured into Washington" that summer, historian Glenn Sandiford wrote.
- Federal officials eventually called off the project.
Why it mattered: By treating the dams as a point of national interest, DeVoto turned the campaign against them into the catalyzing force behind the modern conservation movement.
- That unity produced landmark policies like the 1964 Wilderness Act, Sandiford argued.
Yes, but: DeVoto had argued the Bureau and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers won Utahns' support by falsely claiming that no other site could facilitate the hydropower and irrigation the region needed.
- It turned out another site was being considered — and because it wasn't part of the NPS, it got far less attention than Dinosaur did.
Friction point: The Sierra Club — the driving force of the newly strengthened conservation movement — was focused on protecting existing parks and didn't initially raise much fuss over plans to build a dam in Glen Canyon.
- Its director, David Brower, even suggested making that dam taller to replace some of the water storage that was lost to the defeated Dinosaur dams.
The bottom line: When conservationists turned their attention to Glen Canyon — a remote area that few outside the Four Corners region had seen — the dam there became widely considered one of the movement's biggest losses of the 20th century.
Previously in Old News