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Reviews
PUBLIC POWER, PRIVATE DAMS: THE HELL'S CANYON HIGH DAM CONTROVERSY
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by Karl Boyd Brooks
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| University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006. Photographs, maps, notes, index. 319 pages. $35.00 cloth.
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| This splendid book is a convincing account of the post-World War II, decade-long legal and political struggles to define a hydroelectric future for the Pacific Northwest. The conflict was framed as a great referendum on the question of public or private power, and it was debated in the highest strata of presidential politics while it proceeded through the legal channels (notably the Federal Power Commission) to which it was assigned. In the end, private power (represented by the Idaho Power Company) won permission to build its three "small" dams in Hell's Canyon on the Snake River between Idaho and Oregon (Brownlee, Oxbow, and Hell's Canyon Dam) while the federal government abandoned its plans to build the Hell's Canyon High Dam — the world's highest with a ninety-three-mile reservoir behind it. And in the end of the end, the Snake River salmon would be all but gone and the age of environmentalism would be upon us. |
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Karl Boyd Brooks brings great strengths to the project. He is an attorney with litigation experience on these very topics and a knack for expressing the anxieties and perturbations of the "big case." He is an experienced former Idaho state senator who thoroughly understands the faults, folds, and fractures of law disguised as public policy. Brooks loves his home and geographical region, and he deftly enters the hearts and minds of the people who played out this drama. And he is an indefatigable and honest researcher with a keen sense of the documents (not a few of them commonly overlooked) that will best point the way. The book is also beautifully and carefully written. It will be in all of the Pacific Northwest environmental collections for the foreseeable future. |
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The author needs all his talents to sustain the tale. The environmental hero of the story, Idaho Power, is an unsympathetic David to the Goliath of the federal government. Brooks tries hard: "More modest dams would better mesh human demands, company profits, and fishery imperatives with the Northwest's rhythmic winter snows and spring runoffs" (p. 134). Modest dams or not, Idaho Power would quickly kill the fish — counseled in the process, no doubt, by the "first witness" they would call before the Federal Power Commission, retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers North Pacific Commander Thomas Robins (p. 201). This is the man whose most notable contribution to fish-hydro interactions was his insight that "if you could put a mule through [the turbines] and keep him from drowning he would go through without being hurt" (Lisa Mighetto and Wesley J. Ebel, Saving the Salmon: A History of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Efforts to Protect Anadromous Fish on the Columbia and Snake Rivers, Historical Research Associates, 1994). |
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Brooks also had the unenviable job of bringing suspense and curiosity to the "public interest" decision making of the Federal Power Commission — now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) but still one of the most dreary, unrepentant, and uninspired outposts in the history of administrative law. The author's ability to bring credibility and authenticity to the deliberations of this agency is alone worth the price of the book. |
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The historiographical talents so convincingly displayed by Brooks in this story of the unbuilt great dam make us yearn for the sequels. One is a fuller story of the Nez Perce tribe's resistance to this orgy of dam-building in their homelands. (The author was drawn into this project initially as an attorney for the Nez Perce.) But the tribes do not get full billing here. "By trying to work alone," Brooks writes, "the treaty tribes encountered deep-rooted judicial and administrative racism that inhibited their postwar legal options" (p. 220). That happened, to be sure, but it was not a consequence of the tribes "trying to work alone." |
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Brooks does a splendid job of showing how the Bonneville Power Administration assumed its roles of partner, planner, and promoter of public power in the Pacific Northwest. The sequel would be an account of Bonneville's subsequent turn to nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s, which led to the $7 billion regional debacle known as WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply System). The author could tell this story as few others might. Public Power, Private Dams is a fine tale with room for more. |
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| William H. Rodgers, Jr.
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| University of Washington School of Law |
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