Humanature's River

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Throughout history people have altered the earth's air, water, and soil in order to survive and thrive as a species. The consequences are pervasive. In the United States, many meandering rivers and their oxbows are dredged into channelized, straight lines; remote mountain ranges, seen from 30,000 feet above, are crisscrossed with spider webs that must be roads (Devall 1993; Shankman 1996). Yellow-brown haze blurs many a horizon, burns the lungs, and can kill trees downwind with acidic precision. Rivers and aquifers become oversubscribed, and large cities such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Tucson negotiate allocations for water flow that may never materialize or be equitably distributed. Grass lawns, deciduous trees, and agricultural fields turn desert communities into replicas of other well-watered places and times. Domestic populations of dogs, cats, cows, and horses continue to replace the splendid variety of native wildlife. Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, and other once unsullied scenic areas suffer heavy burdens of tourist traffic, and campfire pollution and backpacker gridlock are common problems. High-technology logging and frequent high-fuel forest fires reduce national forests to scarred landscapes, and many national parks have become landscape zoos. Nature, if it exists in pure form at all, is under siege.

Considering the exponential population growth worldwide during the past half-century, the extensive use of fossil fuels and hydroelectric power, the development of science, technology, and agriculture, the creation of new weaponry, and the complexity and scale of global pollution, intensive management of the "global village" has become both inevitable and nearly universal. Clearly, one of the most evident and inescapable human efforts to control nature is the manipulation of water. In the United States, almost all rivers and lakes are under some form of local, regional, or federal control. The most obvious examples of managed rivers …