Day 58: New book advocates shrinking Lake Powell

Southwest author Annette McGivney calls the damming and flooding of Glen Canyon to create Lake Powell "the worst environmental crime of the twentieth century." And in a new book, she proposes significantly reducing the lake's size.

A Flagstaff, Arizona journalist and author is proposing the unthinkable: live within our environmental means in the American West.

Sure, sure; it sounds radical. But here’s something even more so: flooding one of the West’s signature canyons — Glen Canyon — to secure a water future for millions of city residents who couldn’t live there without it.

1960s Glen Canyon Dam protest, with the "crack" banner

And that’s exactly what the Bureau of Reclamation did, with the construction of Glen Canyon Dam in 1958. Environmentalists have long decried the dam as an affront to wilderness. A famous photo of Edward Abbey, the iconic wilderness advocate and author from decades past, shows him standing near a plastic banner that, when unfurled in front of the dam, resembled a long, black crack. Subsequent environmentalists have grumbled about the dam for years, and some have wished for its demise. “Drain it” bumper stickers are not uncommon in Flagstaff. 

Now, McGivney has made an authoritative statement on the subject: she says the dam and Lake Powell behind it — now a tourism mecca — should take a back seat to nature.

Annette McGivney. Credit: Rick Wacha/Arizona Daily Sun

McGivney got the idea for her book while on assignment for Backpacker Magazine, where she’s a regional editor. (She also teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University.) 

“When I came on Glen Canyon, it just kept being so compelling to me that it turned into more than a typical assignment,” she told reporter Cyndy Cole, for a book review in the Arizona Daily Sun.

She teamed up with photographer James Kay, who had been chronicling dropping lake levels in recent years, owing to an unprecedented and sustained drought. 

Called “Resurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West,” the book details the dam’s history and the wrangling that has accompanied it all along.

McGivney proposes shrinking Lake Powell, so that the side canyons can return to their natural states — as green oases in the middle of hot, dry desert. 

Drought-caused dropping water levels have left a "bathtub ring" around most of Lake Powell in recent years. Credit: Photograph ©2006 Tigresblanco.

“I’m not saying people should just stop boating on Lake Powell, but Lake Powell is so much bigger than it needs to be,” she told the Daily Sun. McGivney wants to see Glen Canyon’s side canyons resurrected — even as some of them are being exposed because of drought, despite the dam.

I’ll leave you with this excerpt, released from the chapter ”Why Glen Canyon Matters.”

Photo by James Kay

June 2003 — I have returned to the Escalante Arm of Lake Powell eager to see what the drought has wrought. Where I had paddled my kayak across a 100-foot-deep reservoir three years earlier, I am now hiking in an ankle-deep, silt-laden, wonderfully flowing river that is pulsing with life. I fill my water bottle from seeps bubbling out of the canyon walls still weeping with lake water. I watch hummingbirds dart about newly established gardens of maidenhair ferns. I walk barefoot alongside mountain lion tracks pressed in river sand and marvel at cottonwood saplings already 4 feet tall growing out of dead snags. And I cry at the overwhelming realization that at least part of Glen Canyon is still alive.