‘The Desert Empire’ is a long essay Sibley wrote for Harper’s magazine in 1977, a drought year throughout the American West, and one of the five driest years in the recorded history of Colorado River flows. It is part celebration of the accomplishments that enabled the Colorado River Basin to survive that year on close to a ‘business as usual’ status, part a reflection on the history that led to those achievements, and part a rumination on how more of the same in a heavy growth environment could undermine the whole river enterprise.
In its desperate search for water, the American West meets the limits of the technological ideal.
~ George Sibley
Anyone interested, for whatever reason, in the :study of water in ‘the West will in the end concen-trate on the Colbrado, wildest of rivers, foaming, raging, rushing southward-erratic, headlong, in-congruous in the desert.
~ John McPhee · Encounters with the Archdruid
“THIS IS A STORY about a river, but it is also about the desert. I should begin by admitting that I am no lover of the desert. I find a certain fascination in its strange, disturbing beau-ty; but I am ultimately repelled by the heat, by the dead stillness when it’s still and the spinning dust sentinels when it’s not, but most of all by the dryness…. ”
To read the essay, click here.
Recent Posts
- Romancing the River: The Era of Conquest 3
A bad year in the Colorado River Basin – barring a truly miraculous spring, probably the worst in recorded history. It is bad enough so the Bureau may have to stop creating power from the Glen Canyon powerplant by this coming fall. At that point, the only way to get water downriver from Glen Canyon ... Read More - Romancing the River: The Era of Conquest Part 2
The hard news about the Colorado River since my last post here is not good; we had a storm that dropped around two feet of snow above the 8,000-foot elevation – well, maybe the 9,000-foot elevation. But that was followed by a couple weeks of ridiculously warm weather for February and early March, with more ... Read More - Romancing the River – The Romance of Conquest, Part 1
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. – Senior advisor to Pres. G. W. Bush, 2004 You’ve seen that quote here before – and you’ll probably see it again; if this were a Wagnerian opera, that line would be a lietmotif, a recurring musical thread associated with a particular ... Read More - Romancing the River: The Romantic Scientist
There continues to be no new information from the ongoing negotiations among the protagonists for the seven states trying to work out a new two-basin management plan for the Colorado River. The Bureau of Reclamation, however, is pressing ahead; it recently went public with its ‘Draft Environmental Impact Statement’ (DEIS) for ‘Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and ... Read More