Lessons From the Fight for the Grand Canyon

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

22 July 21

We once saved natural landmarks for their beauty—now it’s for survival, too.

o float down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is to meander through geologic time. As you descend, the formations you pass include the Coconino Sandstone, the Redwall Limestone, the Bright Angel Shale—by the time you reach the tortured-looking Vishnu Schist, you’re a couple billion years back in time. But, even amid the towering mesas and buttes, one of the sights that moved me the most was a pile of gravel about twenty feet high and dating back not much more than fifty years. We pulled the raft to the river bank, anchored it to a tree, and climbed up above the tailings, entering the cool, dry hole from where they had come. This tunnel—perhaps seven feet high and five feet wide—had been bored in the nineteen-sixties, when the federal government planned to build a big dam and back the waters of the Colorado up in a reservoir that would have drowned the bottom of the canyon.

That never happened. And the primary reason it never happened is that David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club, decided to fight the plan, and to do it in a way that environmentalists hadn’t managed before. Brower—one of the great conservationists of the second half of the twentieth century—knew that the federal Bureau of Reclamation and its massive dams were immensely popular with politicians in the West. The dams provided the water and the electricity that turned the deserts of the Southwest into powerhouses of suburban growth, including in Las Vegas, where Frank Sinatra was in residence at the Copa Room at the Sands. To Brower’s great regret, the creation of the Glen Canyon Dam, upstream, was already filling Lake Powell; it seemed a reasonable bet that the bottom of the Grand Canyon, too, would soon be underwater.

Instead, Brower waged a remarkable campaign. The coffee-table books that the Sierra Club had been publishing, at his insistence, since 1960, with photos by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and others, had helped muster popular support for wilderness preservation. (“Time and the River Flowing” was many people’s introduction to the splendor of the Grand Canyon.) Brower took out ads in newspapers, with copy by the great public-interest ad man Jerry Mander. Government officials had argued that flooding the Grand Canyon would make it easier for more Americans to access it; in return, Brower and Mander asked, in very large type, “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” As John McPhee memorably recounted in these pages, the public responded in huge numbers; the dam plan became politically toxic; the Colorado still flows. (That there are dams throughout the Colorado River basin doesn’t keep it from being a very wild river—flash floods claimed a rafter’s life just last week.)

Sixty years after Brower’s win, the National Park Service deserves huge credit for carefully managing the canyon-bottom wilderness that the Sierra Club campaign saved. Every party that starts down the river receives orientation sessions that outline strict preservation rules; the campgrounds, without rangers or signs, remain pristine; the past, including the holes from the thwarted dam excavation, are simply left for intrepid travellers to stumble across and explore.

As I sat on a mound of blazing hot sand and stared up at the hole, I thought of the current fights that resemble the Grand Canyon battle. They are many, from the pipeline that crosses under the Straits of Mackinac to the pipeline that will, if built, threaten both local communities and nature reserves that are home to elephants and other wildlife in East Africa. But perhaps none are fiercer right now than the fight over Line 3, a pipeline that will, if finished, carry crude and tar-sands oil from Canada across northern Minnesota. The line will cross the only American river more iconic than the Colorado—the Mississippi, right at its headwaters. And, like the Grand Canyon fight, it has impacts that are both local and global.

In the case of the Grand Canyon, those global impacts were mostly psychological—the sense that an ancient place of inestimable value would be defiled. A very small percentage of Americans ever visit it: only about thirty thousand people a year make it down the river. But, for many millions more, the knowledge that it exists intact is a blessing in itself. In the case of Line 3, much of the fight has rightly focussed on local impacts: the threat to rivers, lakes, and wild-rice harvests in Minnesota, and to the treaty rights of the indigenous people who are leading the fight. But the rest of us have another reason to stop Line 3: the insane temperatures we’ve seen so far this summer across the West and the North will certainly grow higher if we add hundreds of thousands of barrels of carbon-intensive oil to the world’s supply every day. And so the Line 3 battle, like Brower’s campaign for the Grand Canyon, needs to be nationalized.

There are signs that it is happening. When law-enforcement officials in Minnesota began blockading protesters, demonstrators in Massachusetts backed them up by occupying the regional offices of Enbridge, the pipeline’s builder, outside Boston. (In Massachusetts, Enbridge has built the bitterly contested Weymouth gas-compressor station, whose approval, a Boston Globe investigation found, was a “brute lesson in power politics.”) Protesters, meanwhile, are pressuring President Joe Biden. As Alan Weisman, a journalist arrested in Minnesota last month, put it, in the Los Angeles Times, “Biden could still act. He could cancel the pipeline by executive action, as he did when he blocked the Keystone XL permits on his first day in office.”

One hopes that Biden does—and that continued protests can create the national pressure that will give him the political cover that he may feel he needs. The success of the climate fight will determine what our geologic future looks like. If we lose today’s battles to the fossil-fuel industry, observers (assuming that there are any) may be able to see the resulting damage on canyon and cave walls millions of years from now. Instead of looking on with real gratitude—as I did at the pile of tailings that is the only remaining mark of the dam plans which once threatened an incomparable record of our geologic past—they will stare in sad wonder. Why didn’t people follow Brower’s example?

Kyrsten Sinema's Strategy of Refusing to Do Anything About Anything Is Not Impressing Voters, Poll Says

By Ben Mathis-Lilley, Slate

22 July 21

Arizona offers a natural experiment in whether people would rather see a Democrat hold out for Republican cooperation or just pass stuff they like.

he current debate within the Democratic Party is one that our existing political nomenclature can’t quite capture, and yes, this is one of those high-octane posts about “political nomenclature,” so get your finger or cursor ready to click the heck out of that share button! The deal is, a loosely affiliated group of so-called “centrist” or “moderate” members in Congress is blocking action on several fronts:

• Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin are refusing to eliminate or reform the filibuster process, which is preventing the Senate from passing voting-rights legislation—or any other legislation that can’t get through the budget-reconciliation loophole.


• A group of House Democrats who receive substantial contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, HuffPo reports, are trying to kill legislation that would allow the government to use its purchasing power to negotiate down the prices that Medicare recipients pay out-of-pocket for prescription drugs. (Medicare covers some, but not all, drug costs.)


• An anonymous House Democrat told the insider publication Punchbowl News that Senate Democrats’ $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” reconciliation spending plan is “a non-starter for many of us” because it includes “massive new taxes.”

These are the sort of positions—institutionalist, industry-friendly, anti-tax—that self-styled moderate Democrats have traditionally taken to make themselves seem more practical and sensible than their party’s left wing. But the moderates of 2021 are not defying progressives, leftists, liberals, activists, or “the Squad,” or, at least, those are not the primary groups they’re defying. Voting-rights protections, prescription-drug reforms, and reconciliation spending are the top current priorities of President Joe Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, three figures who consider themselves extremely pragmatic and centrist, and who hold their positions in large part because center-inclined voters and members of Congress have long trusted them to protect their interests.

The establishment leaders have a strong argument that their agenda at the moment is what looks truly centrist. The polls say that making it easier to vote, making drugs cheaper, and spending money that you raised by taxing corporations and wealthy people on eldercare and childcare subsidies are all comfortably popular ideas. The thinking goes that if you pass popular legislation that makes voters’ lives easier, you have a better chance of reelection.

There’s another theory of political moderation, though, which is that you get reelected by proving you can “work together with the other side” and by avoiding backlash. There is some grounding for this theory too: Voters always say they support “bipartisan solutions,” Joe Manchin keeps getting reelected in West Virginia despite a heavily Republican electorate, and lots of Democrats lost their seats during the 2010 backlash against the Affordable Care Act. (This theory of politics, incidentally, tends to call for behavior which overlaps with the interests of corporate tax lobbyists.)

The question before the Democratic Party is which centrist theory most correctly describes the current reality, and there happens to be a natural experiment out there which could answer that question. Arizona has two senators who consider themselves centrists, in Sinema and Astronaut Mark Kelly—and where Sinema has emphatically preserved the filibuster and emphatically voted against Biden’s proposal to raise the minimum wage, for example, making herself into one of the president’s most high-profile obstacles, Kelly voted for the minimum wage increase, is reportedly receptive to reforming the filibuster and has, in general, gone along with party leadership fairly quietly since taking office. (A good example of this: Kelly, like Sinema, is a member of the group trying to create a bipartisan physical infrastructure bill, but while he wasn’t captured in photographs of the group announcing their tentative deal at the White House, Sinema led the negotiations and stood in the center of the White House photo op.)

The firm Data for Progress had the smart idea of seeing which, if any, approach to centrism was more popular with Arizona’s tipping-point electorate. The result, released Wednesday: Mark Kelly’s approval-disapproval split among Arizonans is 50-39, or +11, while Sinema’s is 44-42, or +2. The difference is basically the same among independent voters, too: Kelly 46-36, Sinema 38-38. In her effort to appear independent, this poll finds, Sinema is alienating many Democrats but not impressing independents.

A striking feature of the Biden era so far has been that the left side of the Democratic Party, the faction usually blamed for losing voters and undermining the party’s goals because of ideological purism, has reliably cooperated with leadership to help hold its narrow legislative majorities together. And while Bernie Sanders is going to the White House to make deals with the president, the biggest threat to internal discipline and political capital is manifested by figures, like Sinema, who like to think of themselves as mainstream realists. It’s the latest filing in the divorce case known as Centrism v. Bipartisanship— a Centrist Civil War, if you will, whose battlefields are the Twitter feeds of Politico and Washington Post reporters rather than the farms of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. May God help us all.