Glen Canyon Dam

Darin Barney

“There was literally nothing here before the dam.” So said the genial guide during our visit to the Glen Canyon Dam in the spring of 2019. Tucked away in a corridor leading to the restrooms in the Visitors Centre, a reproduction of the Normal Rockwell painting, Glen Canyon Dam, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation in 1969, suggests otherwise. There stands a Navajo man named John Lane and his family, whose presence and postures belie any claim that the canyons of the Colorado River were empty prior to their infrastructural “reclamation” by the American settler-state.

In her account of land reclamation by dredging in the port cities of the Arabian Peninsula, Laleh Khalili writes: “The authourity to magically create land out of the sea is also a form of accumulation by dispossession, an enclosure of a space held in common—the sea—for the purpose of speculation and sales.” The same goes for the Colorado River valley, only here land was magically created out of the desert, not the sea, irrigated, not dredged.    

The Glen Canyon Dam is one of a series of hydrological facilities built in the mid-twentieth century that radically transformed the geography and ecology of the Colorado River basin and its inhabitants. They have been sites of environmental and political controversy ever since. Some might recall that the Glen Canyon Dam figures centrally Edward Abbey’s The Money Wrench Gang (1975), the urtext of environmental sabotage in the US. 

Visiting the dam, I was struck by its formal designation as part of the Colorado River Storage Project, a series of four units across as many states traversed by the Upper Colorado. As a British Columbian and Quebecer, I am conditioned to think of dams simply as electricity generators but, of course, they can only be that because they are first and definitively storage technologies. The dams of the Upper Colorado primarily store water for irrigation and flood control and are only secondarily for power. They are storage media: an infrastructure for converting flow into stock, reversing the relationship between being subject to the river and its properties and subjecting it to our control. Their first product is the reservoir, the river enframed as standing–reserve. Or, as our guide put it, “Before the dam, all that water was just wasted.”        

Storage is, finally, a conceit. The world always exceeds our capacity to contain it. Water levels on the Colorado are declining due to decreasing snow-pack associated with global warming. Below the surface, silt carried to the dam by the river accumulates. One day, the works that take in water from the reservoir will be dry, or plugged, and the stock will be recuperated by the flow.  

Text and photos by Darin Barney