During the first seventy years of this century, investments in water resources were driven largely by a desire to control water flows and ensure their availability for domestic, industrial, and agricultural users. In contrast, water-related investments and legislation during the last quarter-century have been driven largely by a desire to protect and restore the nation's water resources and aquatic environments. The first approach took a heavy toll on the environment and instream water uses; the second is imposing high economic costs, in many instances with little indication that the social benefits exceed those costs. The importance as well as the difficulty of balancing the economic and environmental values associated with water use are evident in the litigation over the implementation of existing environmental legislation—in particular, the Endangered Species Act. This balancing of values is key to the debate over reauthorization of the act.
Philosophies guiding the development and use of water resources in the United States have changed greatly during this century. In the early 1900s, rapid construction of dams, reservoirs, and canals proceeded in line with the utilitarian view that dominated water development and use decisions. In that view, leaving water resources unused would be wasteful if those resources were capable of producing crops, power, and other valued products. By the early 1970s, however, growing concern about the effects of rapid growth in water use and development on water quality, fish and wildlife, and natural habitats began to be reflected in environmental legislation. Today, the conflict between water development and environmental protection is evident in controversies surrounding the implementation of much of that legislation. But that conflict is not merely a product of the greater environmental awareness of the last few decades; it has existed throughout the history of water development projects in this century.
Below I examine that history, paying particular attention to the environment versus development contests that have arisen in the context of the Endangered Species Act. I also examine two specific instances in which the difficulty of balancing the economic and environmental interests associated with water use is perhaps most evident today—the development of the Columbia River basin and the relicensing of hydroelectric power plants.
Transforming the nation's waters
The nation's first major struggle between environmental interests and water development began in 1901, when the city of San Francisco initiated plans to dam the Tuolumne River in the northern part of Yosemite National Park. San Francisco's plans to develop water supplies and hydroelectric power would flood Hetch Hetchy Valley, extolled as one of the nation's most beautiful and inspirational sites. But efforts to preserve the valley eventually proved futile when Congress approved the flooding of Hetch Hetchy in 1913.
Although preservationists were successful in thwarting subsequent proposals to flood sections of national parks and monuments such as Yellowstone, Glacier, Kings Canyon, and Echo Park, builders encountered little opposition to most dam projects for the next half century. Water projects were promoted and often subsidized to encourage development of the U.S. West; to increase employment, first during the Great Depression and then during the economic transition following World War II; to reduce flooding; and to provide cheap power, transportation, and abundant, reliable water supplies for homes, farms, and factories. Large-scale projects in particular were touted as examples of enlightened use and development of the nation's water resources; they represented a triumph of technology and human enterprise over the uncertainties of nature. And as the demands for the outputs provided by water development mounted, ever-larger projects were proposed to reduce conflicts associated with management of a multiple-purpose dam.
The rate of dam construction accelerated to a frenetic pace following World War II. More than 35,000 new dams were completed between 1945 and 1969, nearly four per day over the twenty-five-year period. The United States' water infrastructure now includes about 75,000 dams; 869 million acre-feet of reservoir storage; 25,000 miles of inland and intracoastal navigation channels supported by more than 200 locks and dams; tens of thousands of groundwater pumps; and millions of miles of canals, pipes, and tunnels for transporting water.
Most of the country's power plants that use dams to generate electricity operate under federal licenses. Utilities that manage plants with expiring licenses are being required to balance the plants' potential power benefits with their potential nonpower benefits, such as the provision of fish and wildlife habitat
This hydrologic transformation produced many benefits. Streams that once alternately flooded their banks and dried up were controlled to provide dependable sources of supply. Tens of thousands of recreational reservoirs were created, former wetlands and flood-prone areas were developed for urban and agricultural purposes, and deserts were converted into vast urban areas spotted with green lawns, golf courses, and lakes. Virtually everyone had access to relatively inexpensive water at the turn of a tap. By 1980, water was being withdrawn from the nation's surface and groundwater sources at a daily rate of 440 billion gallons (more than 1,900 gallons per person). Nearly one-third of the value of the nation's crop production was being produced on 50 million irrigated acres, and hydropower provided about 11 percent of the nation's electricity and 4 percent of its total energy.
Construction of dams, reservoirs, canals, and so on, supplemented by research to develop new technologies (such as desalinization and weather modification), were widely accepted as the way to provide for growing water demand. And as water became scarcer, development schemes became more grandiose. The North American Water and Power Alliance, conceived in the 1950s and enthusiastically promoted in the 1960s, proposed transporting 110 million acre-feet of water annually (about eight times the average natural flow of the Colorado River) from Alaska and northern Canada to the western United States and northern Mexico. The Bureau of Reclamation's Pacific Southwest Water Plan, presented to the president in 1964, recommended seventeen projects and programs, including a plan to pump Colorado River water over the mountains into central Arizona for Phoenix and Tucson, two big dams on the Trinity River in northern California, a tunnel to divert water from the Trinity to the Sacramento River, a wider aqueduct to deliver more water from northern California to the central and southern parts of the state, and two large hydropower projects at Bridge and Marble Canyons, which are located at opposite ends of Grand Canyon National Park on the Colorado River.
Introducing environmental values
Threats to the Grand Canyon and other national parks helped galvanize resistance to these and other large water projects and focused attention on the increasing financial and environmental costs associated with the traditional approach to meeting water demands. At the start of this century, large quantities of water could be developed at relatively low cost. In addition, water was sufficiently plentiful relative to demand that extracting it for one use had little effect on the availability of water for other uses. Finally, there was little concern about the loss of free-flowing streams as a consequence of the construction of dams and the diversion of water flows. By the 1960s, however, the financial costs of developing additional water supplies had increased sharply because the best reservoir sites had already been developed, and the quantity of water controlled (or the safe yield produced) by additional increases in reservoir capacity on a river was subject to sharply diminishing returns. Moreover, as water became scarcer, the implied trade-offs among alternative water uses became more stark.
The Clean Water Act has made water quality, rather than water supply, the driving force behind the nation's water-related investments.
The strongest objections to proposed new water supply projects were based on their environmental impacts. By 1970, the legacy of environmental degradation associated with past water developments and uses was extensive, and water projects were less likely to be acclaimed as examples of wise resource use. Such projects were increasingly criticized as expensive proposals to quench the insatiable thirst of farmers, cities, and factories, and to provide hydroelectric power at the expense of instream flows and the fish and wildlife habitat and recreational opportunities they support. Thousands of miles of once free-flowing streams had been lost; Grand Coulee Dam alone eliminated a thousand miles of salmon spawning streams in the Columbia River basin. The quality of many of the nation's rivers and lakes had deteriorated to the point that they were unusable for most purposes. Water projects also contributed to the sharp decline in the nation's wetlands, which store floodwater, control erosion, provide fish and wildlife habitat, improve water quality, and furnish recreational opportunities.
In response to this sad legacy and to the nation's growing desire to protect and restore water quality and aquatic environments, the rules governing the use and development of water resources began shifting against water developers. This shift is evident in federal legislation such as the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA), the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (commonly known as the Clean Water Act), and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). Development activities that would alter significantly an area's natural amenities now are precluded on thousands of miles of rivers and streams that are preserved under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. NEPA requires all federal agencies to give full consideration to environmental effects in planning their programs. As a result, critics of a water project no longer have to prove that the project would have major adverse environmental effects. Instead, project proponents must demonstrate that a water project is environmentally benign, or they must undertake efforts to mitigate the project's adverse effects.
The Clean Water Act affects water development in several important ways. First, together with the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 and other legislation regulating the use and cleanup of toxic materials, it has made water quality rather than water supply the driving force behind the nation's water-related investments. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on water pollution control since 1972. Second, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has used section 404 of the Clean Water Act to veto on environmental grounds more than a dozen water projects. Third, as a result of a May 1994 Supreme Court ruling, the Clean Water Act gives states broad authority to impose minimum stream flow requirements in order to protect water quality.
Development and the Endangered Species Act
Like the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act has become an important factor in many water management decisions. The act's potential influence over water use achieved national attention in 1978, when the Supreme Court issued an injunction halting construction on the Tellico Dam in Tennessee (even though more than $100 million had already been spent on the project, which was 90 percent completed) because the dam threatened the only known habitat of the snail darter. More recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service evoked the ESA in halting the $590 million Animas–La Plata project in the Colorado River basin one day before construction was scheduled to begin, because the project might harm the endangered Colorado squawfish. The ESA has resulted in delays, modifications, and cost increases in scores of other proposed dam projects.
The ESA has also been used to alter the management of existing projects. The operation of dams on the main stem of the Missouri River has been modified, to the detriment of some water users, in order to protect the nesting grounds of the endangered least tern and the threatened piping plover. In California, the Bureau of Reclamation has sent large quantities of water around the power-generating turbines at Shasta Dam, resulting in millions of dollars in forgone power revenues, in order to provide colder water for the spawning of the threatened winter-run chinook salmon.
In March of this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service granted special protection to nearly 2,000 miles of the Colorado River and its tributaries in order to protect four species of endangered fish—the Colorado squawfish, the bonytail chub, the humpback chub, and the razorback sucker. This particular action is likely to require the Bureau of Reclamation to alter the operation of its dams and to make new water projects in the Colorado River basin even more difficult to undertake.
The Delta smelt, found only in California's Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, is under consideration for ESA listing. If the smelt is granted protection, the ability to export water from the Delta to the millions of people who depend on its supply for domestic, agricultural, and industrial uses could be severely limited.
ESA impact on the Columbia River basin
The ESA is having its greatest impact on water use within the Columbia River basin, where dams have produced cheap power and enhanced recreational opportunities, irrigated millions of acres, and provided towns located hundreds of miles inland with ports accessible to the ocean. These achievements, however, have come at the expense of the salmon stocks that once inhabited the region's rivers in great numbers.
The Northwest Power Planning Council has spent more than $1.7 billion in taxpayer and ratepayer money since 1980 to rebuild salmon stocks. Measures include making more water available during critical migration periods (and thereby forfeiting power revenues), retrofitting dams with screens that guide fish away from turbines and into channels that lead them past dams and into water below the dams, barging fish around the dams, and constructing fish ladders. Nevertheless, three stocks of salmon that spawn in the Snake River (the principal tributary of the Columbia River) are listed as threatened or endangered, petitions have been filed for listing several other stocks, and as many as eighty-five salmon stocks throughout the Columbia River basin are so weakened that they could be granted protection under the ESA.
Water development within the Columbia River basin has produced many benefits, but these benefits have come at the expense of the salmon stocks.
While almost everyone agrees that stronger measures are required to protect salmon, no consensus has been reached as to what measures would adequately protect the fish, how much the measures would cost, and who would pay. A review of proposals to facilitate one stage in the life cycle of salmon—smolt migration from the Snake River to the ocean—suggests that the costs and impacts on current water users of restoring the Snake River salmon would be high. The length of time it takes the smolts to migrate downstream is considered critical to the number and health of the juveniles eventually reaching the ocean. Currently, slackwater pools behind the dams can disorient the fish, leave them more exposed to predators, and delay their journey to the ocean. Passage through turbines further reduces their numbers and leaves the survivors weakened.
One proposal for helping the smolts is to increase substantially the rate of water flow and to allow more water to bypass the turbines during the critical migration months. This approach would cost tens of millions of dollars in forgone hydropower revenues and might require irrigators to reduce water withdrawals during low water-flow years. As an emergency measure, in May of this year federal officials opened the spillways on eight dams in the Columbia–Snake river system to push chinook salmon smolts over the tops of the dams. But the experiment was terminated when it appeared that increased nitrogen levels caused by the spills were detrimental to the fish.
Another proposal for helping smolts is to increase streamflow velocity (rather than the volume of flow) by dropping reservoirs to their spillway crest levels during critical downstream migration periods. Preliminary estimates of the costs of modifying the four lower Snake River dams to implement the drawdown strategy range from $600 million to $1.3 billion. In addition, hydropower production, navigation, and reservoir recreation on the Snake River would be adversely affected during the drawdown period.
The most extreme proposal, and perhaps the one that would offer the Snake River salmon the best prospects for recovery, is to remove the dams hindering passage between their spawning grounds and the ocean. All the region's water and energy users would be affected by this strategy.
Dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers are not likely to be removed to protect the salmon, but dam removal for environmental purposes is receiving increased attention. The U.S. Department of Interior, with congressional support, proposes to remove two hydro-electric dams on the Elwha River on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. These dams, which were constructed early in this century, eliminated the river's native fish population. A major obstacle to the proposal will be finding $140–$235 million to remove the dams and restore wild salmon to the river. This estimate does not include the cost of forgone hydropower revenues associated with removal of the dams.
Relicensing of hydroelectric plants
Conflicts over environmental and developmental objectives may be more complicated when hydroelectric power is involved because of hydroelectric power's dual environmental effects. On the one hand, hydroelectric power provides a renewable and clean source of power. Unlike fossil fuels, for instance, it does not pollute the air or contribute to the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. On the other hand, the construction and operation of dams to produce hydroelectricity transforms aquatic environments in ways that adversely affect indigenous fish and wildlife and perhaps other water users. The United States has more than 2,300 hydroelectric power plants with a total capacity of 73,500 megawatts and an annual production of more than 300 billion kilowatt hours. Most of these plants operate under federal licenses issued as many as fifty years ago, when fewer questions were raised about the effects of alternative uses of water resources on fish and wildlife habitat. As the licenses expire (234 lapsed during 1993 alone), the utilities are faced with a complex, costly, and time-consuming relicensing process under the Electric Consumers Protection Act of 1986.
This act requires the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to give power benefits and nonpower benefits (such as the provision of fish and wildlife habitat and recreation) equal consideration in its licensing and relicensing decisions and to award new licenses to the applicant with the plan that is best adapted to the broad public interest. Consequently, an application is likely to require a detailed environmental assessment that includes an evaluation of a power plant's impacts on fish and wildlife habitat, water quality, recreation, land use, local communities, and cultural resources. The relicensing process provides new applicants, as well as environmental interest groups and other parties, an opportunity to voice objections and propose other options.
FERC is considering two new policies that might expand the alternatives to this relicensing process. One policy would identify the circumstances under which a dam should be decommissioned, and the other policy would introduce ways to assess the cumulative effects of several dams in a single river basin. From the perspective of the utilities and power users, the relicensing process itself may result in significant costs, and new licenses (assuming they are eventually granted) may be encumbered with restrictions that diminish the flexibility and productivity of hydro-electric power plants. But the relicensing process might contribute to an improved use of the nation's water resources. Moreover, the environmental and other benefits stemming from any new license restrictions at least might offset the costs associated with any inefficiencies the restrictions introduce in power production.
The remaining challenge
The National Water Commission's final report to the president and Congress in 1973 criticized past failures to incorporate adequately ecological processes and environmental values into decisions affecting water development and use. The commission believed that developmental and environmental values frequently can be accommodated with careful planning. But in instances where these values necessarily conflict, the nation needs to develop procedures for striking a balance that serves the public interest fairly and promptly, thereby avoiding the social, economic, and environmental costs attending delays in reaching decisions.
Since publication of the commission's report, the federal government and most state governments have elevated environmental concerns to a prominent role in decisions affecting the development and allocation of water. Investment in new dams and reservoirs has virtually ground to a halt while hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to improve water quality. Although the ambitious goals of the Clean Water Act have not been fully met, thousands of miles of streams have been protected, and the condition of many of the nation's streams and lakes has improved significantly in spite of increased pressures from an expanding population and economy.
But the nation has not lived up to the National Water Commission's challenge to create procedures that provide for an expeditious balancing of environmental, social, and development values. In some instances, environmental values are introduced preemptively through the Endangered Species Act. In other instances, environmental values are introduced through long and costly judicial or administrative proceedings that may or may not serve the public interest. And in other instances, these values continue to be ignored or shortchanged by institutions rooted in an era when water left in a stream was assumed to have no value. Reauthorization of the Clean Water Act and the ESA provides Congress with another opportunity to address the commission's challenge of introducing environmental values into water use and investment decisions in a balanced and expeditious manner.
Kenneth D. Frederick is a senior fellow in the Energy and Natural Resources Division at Resources for the Future. He is also co-editor, with Roger A. Sedjo, of America's Renewable Resources: Historical Trends and Current Challenges, published by RFF in 1991.
A version of this article appeared in print in the October 1994 issue of Resources magazine.
A version of this article appeared in print in the October 1994 issue of Resources magazine.
