Customer Reviews

A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics)

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Thankfully, the days are long gone when anyone could seriously propose to build huge dams in a national park or a wilderness area, but as recently as 40 years ago this actually happened -- twice! In this book Professor Mark Harvey tells the story of the US Bureau of Reclamation's proposal in 1949 to build Echo Park Dam in the magnificent canyons of Dinosaur National Monument (Utah), and how concerned citizens got organized and persuaded the US Congress to say No. (There was a repeat ten years later with proposed dams in the Grand Canyon.)

Professor Harvey analyzes the diverse political forces that clashed in this first big campaign of the wilderness movement. He traces how citizens' groups unaccustomed to controversy got their act together and seized the attention of the national public, at a time when few people had even heard of the wilderness idea. He shows how eloquent citizen leaders such as Howard Zahniser and David Brower collaborated, and how a few courageous legislators took up the cause on Capitol Hill.

There were many legislative battles like this one in the years that followed, but this was the first big one, and Mark Harvey tells the story well.

This appeared at about the same time as Cosco's _Echo Park: Struggle for Conservation_, and covers much of the same ground. The differences flow mostly from length - - Cosco's book is half as long as this one.

With more space, Harvey can cover events with much greater richness. For example, he places the controversy in a larger context and spends more time talking about non-environmental opposition to the dam. Those opponents include not only California (covered in Cosco) but small-government conservatives, even in the West; the Army Corps of Engineers; Midwestern states worried about the effects on farm surpluses; and some divided states such as New Mexico.

Harvey also spends more time talking about the members of the conservationist coalition, instead of telling the story from David Brower's perspective. His early chapters also ground the story of the monument more fully, explaining how and why Ickes enlarged the monument instead of simply describing the events.

Some of the extra detail is more than we really need, and there's a little backtracking and repetition. Still, the narrative is well-written and moves along nicely. It can't be easy to write a book that makes water policy interesting, but Harvey has succeeded here. It's a shame that this book is not for sale in the park alongside Cosco's (which is). The choice depends on the level of detail you want.