Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Floyd Dominy

Today's episode of Bastard Blogging discusses Floyd Dominy. Dominy, the most obscure person on the 2007 Death List, is quite the bastard, let me tell you.

Floyd Dominy was the head of the United States Bureau of Reclamation from 1958 until 1969. He had one major goal: to dam every river in the nation regardless of the consequences. Dominy believed that all of nature should be harnessed to serve humanity. Dominy was born in central Nebraska in 1909. The need for water in this parched land led to an interest in dams and the use of nature for human good. He got his start in the Campbell County rangelands of northeastern Wyoming where he pushed forward an irrigation program over National Forest regulations. His success put him on the national map for such issues. For years after that, he rose through the ranks of the Bureau of Reclamation by pushing ahead projects, ignoring environmental regulations, and using his significant charisma to charm anyone who stood in his way.

For Dominy, nature itself has no value; its value only comes when humans can use it. His most famous action was pushing for Glen Canyon Dam. Glen Canyon was a remote part of the Utah-Arizona deserts before the dam. Navajos, Utes, and other native peoples had long used the area, but white presence in the region remained minimal. However, Dominy changed that. The Glen Canyon Dam closed its gates in 1963. The desert aesthetic that has become so prominent in American environmentalism was still in its formative stages and the place had just been discovered by people like Edward Abbey and David Brower. Brower particularly worked to publicize the beauty of the place and the need to preserve it, but to no avail. In fact, Brower had basically sold away any options to stop the dam when he made a deal to stop the dam at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument. He agreed to not challenge most of the Colorado River Project, including the proposed Glen Canyon Dam in order to save this national monument. At the time, no doubt it seemed a sensible bargain, but Brower regretted it for the rest of his life, especially after he was able to visit Glen Canyon.

To make it worse, Dominy co-opted the ideal of wild nature to justify his creation, calling the lake a great place to get to know nature: "If you're tired in mind and soul, in need of restful serenity, I don't know a better place. If you want to be alone, you can be alone. You just can't crowd Lake Powell's 1,860 miles of shoreline...You have a front-row seat in an amphitheater of infinity. The bright blue sky deepens slowly to a velvet purple and the stars are brilliant--glittering in that vast immensity above. Orange sandstone cliffs fade to dusky red--then to blackest black. The fire burns low--reflected in the placid lake.

There is peace. And a oneness with the world and God.

I know. I was there."

For Dominy, it's all about access. Unless people can access the land, it is being wasted and has no value. Thus, he actually believed he did the world good by flooding Glen Canyon. Now, people can visit the Natural Bridge for instance. As for the Navajo who held the land sacred, well, they were Indians and no one cared at the time, which he admitted to a friend of mine in an interview last year. On this particular point, he's probably not any more guilty than the rest of America during a period where Congress was actively terminating Indian rights. But still, the "people" using the land meant white people.

Dominy did not get to see all of his projects completed though. He really wanted the Grand Canyon to be dammed as well. Figuring that people didn't care about the river and only wanted to see the canyon walls, he couldn't understand the outrage this caused. David Brower and other environmental activists in these early years of environmentalism created a national outrage over the proposed Grand Canyon Dam.

Dominy also had something of an ego. He once said of his time in office, "I have no apologies. I was a crusader for the development of water. I was the Messiah. I was the evangelist who went out and argued persuasively for the harness of water for the benefit of people." Well, then. He was also notorious for his womanizing for decades. For a man who would call himself the Messiah, this is perhaps not surprising. Marc Reisner describes him as, "a two-fisted drinker; he had a scabrous vocabulary and a prodigious sex drive." One description of him reads, "All the wives were disgusted with him. Some of them refused to come to parties when he was going to be there, because he'd start propositioning them all."

Dominy was just part of a larger structure of dam building in the United States in the twentieth century. By 1980, only 2 major western rivers remained undammed--the Yellowstone and the Klamath. These dams caused massive declines in the populations of salmon and other fish. He and his employees introduced non-native species into these ecosystems such as trout, further denigrating the natural state of the rivers. They facilitated reckless agriculture and urban growth in the western deserts that is increasingly proving unsustainable. It destroyed hundreds of riparian ecosystems. No one holds greater responsibility for this than Floyd Dominy.

Oddly, Dominy was fired in 1969 by an even greater bastard--James Watt. Nixon had Watt fire Dominy because of his sexual improprieties. Dominy once confessed to Marc Reisner, "The FBI knows every woman I've ever fucked."

Today, the American West is dealing with the consequences of Dominy and the American government's obsession with dam-building. Siltation, salinization of land, water shortages, degraded ecosystems, unsustainable growth--all of this rests at least in part at the feet of Floyd Dominy.

The best readings on Dominy are Marc Reisner's classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water and John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, which includes a section on McPhee, Dominy, and Sierra Club president David Brower floating down the Grand Canyon. For Dominy's own words, see The Glen Canyon Reader, edited by Matthew Barrett Gross.