Sensual Experience and the "Wild":
Glen Canyon Before "Lake" Powell
Richard A. Rogers, Ph.D.
School of Communication
Box 5619
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011
vox: (928) 523-2530
fax: (928) 523-1505
email: Richard.Rogers@nau.edu
Competitive paper to be presented to the Organization for Research on Women and Communication at the Western States Communication Association convention, Long Beach CA, March 2002.
(c) copyright 2002 Richard A. Rogers
Sensual Experience and the "Wild":
Glen Canyon Before "Lake" Powell
ABSTRACT
This essay examines the literature about the pre-dam Glen Canyon in the context of current debates over decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam. Specifically, this literature evidences a strong focus on the sensual, affective and spiritual qualities of Glen Canyon in contrast to the focus on scientific, economic and other "objective" discourses in more traditional policy-oriented arguments. Understood in the context of ecofeminism and a dialogic understanding of the human-nature relationship, this embracing of eros constitutes an ecological identity. The role of "wild" nature, gendered understandings of human experience, and the celebration of human interdependence with nature are examined in order to uncover the counterhegemonic possibilities in this rhetoric of sensual experience.
Since the waters of "Lake" Powell began to rise behind the newly-completed Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, Powell reservoir, the submerged Glen Canyon and especially the dam itself have served as a rallying point, a densely potent symbolic site, for river runners, canyonland enthusiasts, eco-saboteurs, conservationists, and a wide-range of environmentalists (Farmer). David Brower, who as head of the Sierra Club in the 1950s agreed to a compromise in which Glen Canyon Dam would go largely unopposed in order to save Colorado's Echo Park, came to deeply regret that decision after visiting Glen Canyon just prior to its submersion (Reisner, Farmer). As the dam was being completed, Brower and the Sierra Club began to publicize what was being lost as a result of the dam through lectures, slide shows, and Elliot Porter's book of photographs, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado.
Glen Canyon Dam is perhaps best known among those interested in environmental issues in the southwest U.S. through Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which a gang of "ecoterrorists" plot to blow up the dam. Inspired in part by Abbey's book, in 1981 Earth First! protestors unfurled a three-hundred foot plastic "crack" along the front of Glen Canyon Dam (Gross) in an early instance of what DeLuca terms "environmental image events."
In the 1980s, river runners and others began to call attention to the ways in which the operation of Glen Canyon Dam was destroying the Colorado River ecosystem downstream in the Grand Canyon (Brownridge & Hinchman). Vastly fluctuating water flows (the result of water releases being timed to provide peak power for the desert metropolises of Arizona and California), a steady supply of unnaturally cold water (the result of water releases coming from deep within Powell reservoir), and a lack of silt (most of which is captured behind the dam) were having dramatic effects on the plants, animals and beaches along the stretch of the Colorado River between Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Mead, an area almost entirely encompassed within Grand Canyon National Park (see, for example, Miller). As a result of these concerns, the Bureau of Reclamation oversaw environmental studies of the effect of Glen Canyon Dam operations on the Grand Canyon, resulting in more rigid guidelines governing the fluctuation of water releases for hydroelectric power generation (Williams "Government").
In the last decade, however, support has risen for a new proposal, one that the Bureau of Reclamation refused to consider in its EIS process: the decommissioning of Glen Canyon Dam and the draining of Powell reservoir. Porter's book has been re-issued, along with numerous other books, essays and articles which mourn the loss of Glen Canyon and implicitly or explicitly call for the draining of the reservoir (e.g., Berger, Lee, Nichols). Two organizations have been formed with the specific purpose of advocating for the decommissioning of the dam (Glen Canyon Institute and Glen Canyon Action Network), and the Sierra Club has endorsed a similar proposal. Books, videos, web sites, lectures, slide shows, rallies, music and a host of other media are being used to spread this seemingly unthinkable idea, one generally portrayed by mainstream politicians and editorialists as "bizarre," "astonishingly goofy," "nutty," "certifiable" and "utter sophistry" (Forbes 28, "More at Stake," Sass, Zengerle 20; see also Farmer). However, to the great surprise of many, in the PBS documentary Cadillac Desert (Else), retired U.S. Senator from Arizona Barry F. Goldwater reversed his long-standing support of the dam and called it a mistake (Yozwiak).
In the spring of 2000, an opposing organization called Friends of Lake Powell erected several billboards in the greater Phoenix area (residence of many Powell recreationers) and smaller plastic signs along the roads approaching the reservoir reading "Don't let the Sierra Club drain Lake Powell: water – power – recreation - habitat." At least two of the Phoenix billboards were vandalized with the spray-painted the words "Free H2O" blocking out "Don't let the Sierra Club," leaving "Free H2O drain Lake Powell" (Slivka). Holding onto the idea that a "lake" is a natural body of water and that John Wesley Powell symbolizes human efforts to navigate free and wild rivers, opponents reject the official name and often refer to the reservoir with epithets such as "Res Foul" (Farmer).
This essay examines the literature about Glen Canyon before the dam and reservoir. In the context of the recent debates described above, several "nonfiction" but nonetheless "literary" books and essays pre-exist but are highly relevant to the current debate, have been re-released, or were written recently as an explicit attempt to influence the debate in the "drain it!" direction. These include the commemorative edition of Porter's The Place No One Knew, Bruce Berger's There Was a River, Katie Lee's All My Rivers Are Gone, and a chapter from Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire. This literature, in contrast to the more traditional, policy-oriented rhetoric from groups like the Glen Canyon Institute, does not rely primarily on scientific, economic or other "objective" discourses, but instead is grounded in the subjective, embodied experience of Glen Canyon. This essay sets out to examine the discursive qualities of this literature for what it reveals about the fundamentals of the anti-dam worldview and for the rhetorical possibilities of such an experiential and sensual literary approach.
While the scientific and economic issues involved in decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam are exceptionally complex and highly politicized (Miller), the rhetorical and ideological significance of these debates can be understood in terms of Gramsci's concept of hegemony and the influence of "common sense." Critical theorists have demonstrated that one of the most powerful ways a social order is maintained is through controlling what it is possible to conceive (e.g., Williams Marxism). While members of the power bloc characterize these proposals as outside of the bounds of "common sense," the very existence of these debates can nevertheless be taken to signal a potential shift in our thinking about nature, technology and "progress" (cf. DeLuca). In this essay I will argue that the discursive, argumentative and rhetorical qualities of this discourse advance an alternative "common sense" grounded in sensual, erotic and dialogic experiences. This counterhegemonic sensibility can be understood by approaching the literature from an ecofeminist perspective.
At the core of ecofeminism is an understanding of the interconnections between the oppression of women and the destruction of nature. Through a series of intertwined binary oppositions, the plundering and "development" of nature is justified by its gendering as feminine and the oppression of women is justified by their closer ties to "nature." Both woman and nature become "other" to the "self" of "civilized man." "'Culture' (order) was the male domain, while 'Nature' (chaos) was conceived as female and included women as a caste, slaves, indigenous peoples, nonwhite races, and animals" (Birkeland 443). Without dualism the competitive nature of the Western patriarchal mentality is nonsensical as it is essential for rationalizing a conquering mentality toward nature.
Within this dualistic and hierarchical structure, "there remains a tendency to deny dependency upon, distance oneself from, and control what patriarchy has deemed 'female' (natural) aspects of one's internal and external nature" (Birkeland 443). This denial of dependence is a key factor in "othering" nature; according to Val Plumwood,
The key exclusions and denials of dependency for dominant conceptions of reason in western culture include not only the feminine and nature, but all those human orders treated as nature and subject to denied dependency. Thus it is the identity of the master (rather than a masculine identity pure and simple) defined by these multiple exclusions which lies at the heart of western culture. This identity is expressed most strongly in the dominant conception of reason, and gives rise to a dualised structure of otherness and negation…. (42)
Identifying nature as female articulates the dualistic negatives associated with femininity. Valued aspects of society are thus the anti-feminine and follow the logic of domination inherent in Western thought. For example, the dualisms reason/emotion, human/nature, production/reproduction, rationality/animality, civilized/primitive are all similarly gendered and link nature to what Western culture has termed the feminine.
In particular, the ecological principle of interconnectedness becomes central in ecofeminist projects, both as an ontological principle (a claim about the nature of life/existence) and as a means to undermine the concepts of separateness and control upon which the dominant, dualistic paradigms (patriarchal, scientific, technical) are based. Gaard discusses ecofeminism and wilderness, arguing that "while it is an accepted fact that humans shape the identity of nature (through building cities, dams, roads, tunnels, and through logging, mining, pollution, etc.), Western culture has failed to acknowledge that nature shapes human identity beyond the mere process of physical evolution" (15), a stance necessary in order to maintain the illusion of separation and mastery at the center of patriarchal attitudes towards the body, the natural world, and women. This denial of dependency ignores experiences such as those in which "leaving behind a particular special place in nature, severs a relationship with a specific part of nature which had shaped one's physical, cultural, and psychological identity" (Gaard 15). Specifically, Gaard discusses how our sense experiences (both the commonly accepted "five senses" as well as others dismissed by the dominant paradigm) shape our knowledges, ethics and identities.
Importantly, "suggesting that human embeddedness with and relationship to nature can have such a deep and lasting effect on human physical, cultural, and psychological identity is an absurdity only in the context of Western industrialized culture" (Gaard 15). As Abram discusses at great length in The Spell of the Sensuous, indigenous/oral cultures around the world take it as "common sense" that the natural world is alive, imbued with spirit, and capable of communicating with humans. While the "discursive turn" which has dominated rhetorical and communication studies for the past two to three decades tends to dismiss any such experiences as socially and discursively produced (Rogers), the work of ecofeminists (e.g., Gaard, Griffin Eros), as well as other "green" social theorists (e.g., Jagtenberg & McKie), and those who take seriously the worldview of indigenous peoples (e.g., Abram) reject such outright dismissals as both ethnocentric and objectifying.
Embracing the possibility for a subject-to-subject dialogue--an authentic relationship--between humans and nature "offers a context which redefines 'human' identity as 'human animal,' a concept which articulates an ecofeminist ecological self: it names our participation both in culture and in nature, thereby dismantling the human/nature dualism" (Gaard 24). Even more specifically, when nature is turned into an "Other" separate from the human "Self," it is not just human interdependence with nature that is denied. Such a separation necessarily entails the denial of sensual and affective experiences. Insofar as the (masculine) mind is valued over the (feminine) body, (masculine) rationality over (feminine) emotion, then the maintenance of the patriarchal world view requires a denial of eros--sensuality, sexuality and emotion--in favor of cognition (Schott). The embracing and celebration of eros, therefore, offers possibilities for articulating counterhegemonic identities, ways of sense-making, and value systems.
Due to previous work analyzing the rhetoric of other dams and rivers, I entered this project with a predisposition to uncover the use of "the wild" in the rhetoric about the pre-dam Glen Canyon and the section of the Colorado River that ran through it. In the official discourses around Hoover Dam, for example, the river is consistently described as something wild, unpredictable and destructive, and thereby needing to be "tamed": controlled and regulated for "human" benefit. More generally, the rhetoric of many environmentalists constantly refers to the need to protect and preserve our "wild" spaces. There are at least two relatively distinct uses of "wild" operating here: "wild" as something dangerous, needing to be tamed or destroyed, and "wild" as something pure and free, something relatively untouched by modern humans and their technologies. While these two sets of meanings of the "wild" are not entirely inconsistent in their logics and histories, they carry different valences in terms of contemporary environmental debates: nature as something in need of improvement via human regulation/domination and nature as something needing to be preserved. From an ecofeminist point of view (e.g., Gaard, Griffin "Curves"), these are similar to the meanings attached to the feminine in Western culture: something to be feared for its emotional, unpredictable, and chaotic nature and something to be revered, put on a pedestal, and worshipped while it must also be protected due to its inherent weaknesses.
While some of the literature about Glen Canyon certainly plays on these notions of the wild, implicitly or explicitly, as I began to review the literature, I noticed the relative absence of the term "wild" and many of its attendant meanings (with the notable exception of Ed Abbey's chapter on the Glen in Desert Solitude). For example, the first book-length treatment of Glen Canyon I worked my way through was Katie Lee's All My Rivers Are Gone. After my first reading, I could not recall the term "wild" being used once in 260 pages. Upon a second (but admittedly less thorough) reading, I discovered only one instance: a reference to "that wild river smell" (25).
Certainly, the idea of a "free and wild river" is a central part of the anti-dam rhetoric, but initially it seemed to me to occupy a far less crucial place. This may have something to do with the fact that bypassing Glen Canyon Dam in and of itself will in no real way return the Colorado to a "wild" state, with several upstream dams (such as Flaming Gorge) still in place, not to mention the host of dams on the lower Colorado (including Hoover). To better understand the role (or lack thereof) of the "wild" in the rhetoric opposing Glen Canyon Dam, let me now turn to a brief review of the literature listed above.
Due, at least in part, to the nature of the stretch of the Colorado River than ran through Glen Canyon, the predominant descriptions of the river and its canyons include terms such as "serene," "intimate," "calm," "congenial," "unhurried," "quiet," "peace[ful]," "comfort[able]," "subdued," "pristine," "tranquil," "still," "pure," "clean," "harmon[ious]," "untouched," "holy," and "erotic" (Abbey; Lee; Porter). While admittedly human interpretations and descriptions of an extralinguistic reality, these terms can be ascribed, at least in part, to the qualities of the Glen itself.
Katie Lee describes differences in both the rock formations and the quality of the river in Glen as opposed to Grand Canyon. In the Grand, the "rocks were sharp and dramatic, and in a way, cruel; hard for me to relate to," while the Glen's Navajo sandstone possessed "soothing, lounging shapes…I could press myself into and feel a part of" (90). She writes that "in Glen Canyon the river rested, seemed almost in a coma," "while on the Grand Canyon run adrenaline had rushed like a waterfall, making it tough to comprehend what I saw" (50). As Wallace Stegner expressed it, "Here the earth has had a slow, regular pulse" (qtd. in Porter 52). There were almost no significant rapids in Glen Canyon except in low water (Abbey).
However, Lee describes sporadic events on and around the river in Glen Canyon as more powerful, forceful, even destructive. For example, one night Lee and her party awoke to a river filled with a "racing log jam":
It heaved and writhed--a prehistoric amphibian, beating and sloshing the banks, obliterating the natural sounds of the river with an ominous hissing and growling. Now and then a tree trunk would catch on a submerged rock, flip up, and crash into another part of the log jam like a sea monster rearing out of the deep. Logs clanged against the end of the canoe, sounding like far-off voodoo drums.
I don't know how long I stood there watching that awesome sight, shivering, feeling the earth vibrate under my bare feet and up through my spine, tingling. I grabbed my solar plexus, breathed in rhythm with the surge and rush of the river's violent force. (158)
Certainly this description contains many references to the "wild" in the sense of chaotic, destructive and unpredictable. The river was a dangerous, violent monster (an "ominous" sounding "prehistoric amphibian"), unpredictable ("now and then…"), mysterious and primitive ("like far-off voodoo drums"). However, Lee does not report finding these experiences frightening, but instead revels in the power being expressed and its future possibilities. She concludes her discussion of the night-time log jam with this: "Power! Power! Go…go, Life Force, I prayed. One day you'll do it, Big Boy, and this is how!" (158). For Lee, the river's violent and powerful possibilities are not to be feared, but offer a glimmer of hope that the dam (at that point planned, but not yet built) would not last. The fear response which our dominant "common sense" calls for only makes sense when one understands nature to be an "Other"; once the denial of dependency is overcome, there is as much cause for celebration of natural forces as there is for a fear of them.
While the use of the specific term "wild" is relatively rare in writings about Glen Canyon, many of the terms listed above articulate with various meanings of "wild." In addition to the periodic references to the river's awesome power (usually in the context of post-rain drainage and flooding), many of these terms point to a set of meanings for "wild" that do not require violence, unpredictability and destruction. In short, to be wild is to be free--a term that rises to the surface again and again in the writings about Glen Canyon. Free from civilization, industrialization, population, clock-time, wage labor. "Freedom" as used here is a negative description--that is, a description by contrast, to what it is not. The Glen, the Colorado, and its pre-dam Euro-American visitors were (relatively) free from the outside world--human cultivation, culture, economics, politics, and morality.
Of particular prominence in these discussion of freedom is time. Various authors describe the Glen as having a sense of "timelessness" (Porter), as consisting of "light and space without time" (Abbey Desert 243). Katie Lee makes repeated references to the silliness of wearing a watch in the Glen; the Glen's value lies in part in its ability to facilitate an escape from the constraints placed upon us by what counts for "time" in an industrialized world. In Gaard's terms, this leads to a questioning of our habitual temporal structures and is one way not only "to jam the mechanism of linear time" (23), but to articulate an "ecofeminist ecological self" (24) which embraces the interdependence of self and other, culture and nature.
Perhaps the most important theme expressed in these writings, especially Katie Lee's, has to do with sensation, sensuality, intimacy and eroticism, and these too are connected to the "wild." Two of many definitions of "wild" listed in Webster's include "emotionally overcome" (as in "wild with grief") and "indicative of strong passion, desire, or emotion" (1330). Historically, in Western culture feeling, both sensual and emotional, is closely linked to the "wild"--that is, to the uncontrollable, the dangerous, the threatening (Schott). But for Katie Lee, the sensuality of the Glen is perhaps its central value, not a reason for its control and destruction. Throughout her writings, she tries to express the importance of not only the sights in the Glen--something emphasized in much of the other literature, much of it written by photographers or to accompany photographs--but of the smells, textures, temperatures, tastes and sounds. From Lee's self-proclaimed "pagan" perspective, this embracing of the sensual meant that the Glen's occasional bursts of powerful and, in a sense, destructive forces were not things to be feared.
More than once in my ten glorious years there, I've watched the soft rain's gentle penetration of sandstone--a thing almost sensual judging by the sighs of bliss, the murmurs and sucking sounds it offers in response. Watched too, the other mood--the passionate power of Thor's wild sex with the Glen. One night in particular illuminates my memory screen--a fervent, orgiastic night of lightning, thunder, lashing winds, and torrents of rain….
On our right an airborne river of frothing water dove from the top of a three-hundred-foot sheer wall and plunged unobstructed to the sand, hitting more than fifty feet from the cliff's base. Within minutes the beach was washed away, exposing boulders the size of cars….
Of course they all thought I was crazy, but I had to get into it--join the orgy, feel the passion, not just see it. Impossible to get beneath the fall--now and then rocks came shooting over the rim--but I could dash through and under a spraying wing until I choked on the spume and had to dash out again. I worked my way back against the slightly undercut wall, where the beach was still intact and where missiles wouldn't find me. The ground vibrated; the wall wheezed and shook. From beneath, through a series of flashes--my adrenaline whipped to a froth--I watched the torrent shoot, tumble and tear the ground apart in a fit of madness!
Great Zeus, what raw, wild power! Nature on a rampage--the miracle of angry, violent water. (213-214)
This embracing of sensual experience is more, however, than merely "getting out of our heads" and "into our bodies" through a wilderness experience. Sense experience shifts into sensuality as a way of being; sensuality bleeds inevitably into that which our neo-platonic and judeo-christian traditions fear perhaps the most: eroticism. As Lee put it, "there never was, or will be, a landscape as erotic as Glen Canyon's" (197).
For these dominant western traditions, what is so dangerous about sensuality--about eros as opposed to cognition--is not just its link to sexuality and its supposed contamination of rational thought or religious contemplation (Schott). The danger is that it begins to erode the boundaries between self and other, human and nature, thereby making our interdependencies undeniable (Gaard). In the following passage, Lee recounts her experience in one of the Glen's side canyons:
Thought dissolved and was replaced by sensation. I breathed the sandstone, saw it as my flesh, tasted it, felt it move through my veins, a red-orange life-giving energy. The tiny window on the rim became my eye… rocks called a greeting…the stream moved in circles around me, sang and then threw up misty veils. My body disappeared, and I became an iridescent bubble on the water's surface, floating down, kissing the stones as I passed. Dropping over a cataract, I burst, then formed again beside other bubbles. Everything in the canyon sang to me, touched me, loved me. I returned it all--the touches, the love, the songs.
I became the canyon. (190-191)
As Kenneth Burke argued, identification--or here, perhaps more appropriate as a literal description, not merely metaphor, consubstantiation, the sharing of substance--undermines objectification and its attendant symbolic and material violations.
This focus on eros--sensuality and emotion--has important implications for the warranting of arguments in the anti-dam rhetoric. As David Brower wrote, "intuition will tell you, at no cost, the reasons for getting Glen Canyon restored with no further delay" (Porter 9). Or, as Porter put it, the Glen held "opportunities that I could not emotionally ignore" (7). While organizations such as the Glen Canyon Institute ground their arguments in largely scientific terms--focusing on the rate of sedimentation, the pollution caused by two-stroke engines, and the loss of habitat downstream in Grand Canyon (see, for example, Miller)--Lee, Abbey, Porter and others warrant their arguments in terms that the dominant paradigm easily dismisses as so much sentimental hogwash.
Put another way, the focus of Lee and others on the sensuality of Glen Canyon denies the possibility of objective analysis and argumentation. For example, as I have worked to make some sense out of this rhetoric, I have struggled with separating descriptions of the Glen from the writers' experiences of the Glen. But ultimately, when the foundation is sensual, emotional and erotic, there is no means by which one can create even the illusion of separation and distance necessary for "rational" argument. And in this sense, "wild" functions as more than a metaphor or even an ideograph (McGee); it functions to divide two fundamentally distinct epistemologies and ethical systems, each grounded in a distinctly different understanding of the ontology of the wild--both out there ("nature") and in us ("eros": affect, sensuality and sexuality).
Several distinct sets of metaphors are used in describing Glen Canyon. Unsurprisingly, the river itself is fairly consistently gendered as female (as is the case in the rhetoric of Hoover Dam), with the important exception, again, of Katie Lee. While many writers reference the river as "she," few perhaps take it so far as Ed Abbey, who wrote that upon starting his journey down the river,
My anxieties have vanished and I feel instead a kind of cradlelike security, of achievement and joy, a pleasure almost equivalent to that first entrance--from the outside--into the neck of the womb…. I am fulfilling at last a dream of childhood and one as powerful as the erotic dreams of adolescence--floating down the river. Mark Twain, Major Powell, every man that has ever put forth on flowing water knows what I mean…. Cutting the bloody cord, that's what we feel, the delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty, into freedom in the most simple, literal, primitive meaning of the word, the only meaning that really counts. (Desert 191-193)
In contrast, Katie Lee openly challenges the fixed gendering of the river. The canyon and its formations she more often describes as female, implicitly or explicitly (e.g., "this sensual canyon's aperture resembles the intricate, smooth, pinkish folds of a vulva" [126]). But for Lee, the river was male even if, ultimately, "the gender of places we love is personal" (126)--a comment which demonstrates an understanding that the essence of things are relational, not intrinsic to objects. Aside from her consistent use of the male pronoun and endearments such as "big boy," she recalls a specific instance in which she (rather literally it seems) made love to the river, complete with sandstone erection and orgasm. Whether gendered male or female, however, the river appears to have sexual potency for these two writers, whether through Lee's seeming literalness or Abbey's overtly psychoanalytic imagery.
When looking at a map or reading accounts, one of the most obvious aspects of Glen Canyon, and one called upon by supporters of the "drain it!" proposal, is that its placenames repeatedly call upon the sacred: Music Temple, Cathedral Canyon and Lost Eden, not to mention the (authentic and commodified) religiosity surrounding Rainbow Bridge. Almost all authors make reference to the sacred and the spiritual nature of the place and/or their experience of it (see also Farmer). Katie Lee embraces paganism in realizing that the sacred is to be found in places like the Glen, not in buildings with other people. She recognizes certain places in particular as being "holy." In her lyrics "They Crucified My River," an adaptation of the spiritual "They Crucified My Lord," Christ on the cross becomes her drowned river. This sense of the Glen as sacred fits very closely with the challenge that eros--that is, sensual knowledge--poses to an objectifying paradigm. In a paradigm without the dualistic boundaries of mind/body, reason/emotion, culture/nature, subject/object and self/other, the sensual, cognitive and spiritual can and often must cohabitate (Griffin Eros).
My comments so far lead me to identify a number of rhetorical implications for the opponents of the dam and reservoir in Glen Canyon. Most obviously, one challenge facing the "drain it!" proponents is that "Lake" Powell, its beauty and its benefits are evident (in the literal sense of being visible) for all to see via direct experience and visual media such as film, video and photography. At the same time, Glen Canyon is submerged and inaccessible. While many photographs and some limited film footage of Glen Canyon exist, for the vast majority of people the Glen only exists through verbal and photographic representations (and it is also difficult to refute the argument that even after decades or centuries of restoration efforts, the Glen will never again be the place it was before). Only a few people, such as Katie Lee and Bruce Berger, carry living memories of the place. In contrast to the handful of people still alive who experienced Glen Canyon, millions of people from the U.S. and abroad have visited Lake Powell.
This lack of access is closely linked to the sense of loss which pervades the rhetoric of the dam's opponents. Perhaps the best known book memorializing Glen Canyon is The Place No One Knew. While the title strikes some as disingenuous (thousands of Euro-Americans, not to mention Native Americans, knew the Glen as miners, explorers, professional river runners and recreationists), it serves several important rhetorical functions. First, it reminds us of the relatively "untouched" status of Glen Canyon, and hence its status as "wilderness." Second, it calls out to those of us who wish we could have known the Glen; that is, it plays upon our sense of nostalgia for a time and a place wherein we could explore places that perhaps no one else ever had (a theme touched on repeatedly by Lee and others).
Farmer identifies nostalgia as the central appeal of the "drain it!" rhetoric. While the lack of access to the Glen poses barriers for this rhetoric (different than, for example, the rhetoric over Lake Tahoe or Mono Lake), this also enhances the appeal of a nostalgic ideal. That is, there is no "real" Glen Canyon to anchor or constrain our contemporary visions of the Glen. In a sense, it can be whatever we want it to be. The appeal here is not to save something that exists, but to re-create something that--in a sense that is quite different from many other endangered ecosystems--only exists in symbols (for humans, at least). While the appeal of the Glen may be centered around the sensual experiences reported by Lee, Abbey, Porter, Brower and others, those sensual experiences are inaccessible--which is, of course, at the heart of the desire to restore the Glen. The paradox this poses takes us back again to the "wild," for all we have here is a symbolic representation, the ideal, of the "wild Glen." But the notion of the "wild" drawn upon by Lee and others is precisely about direct, unmediated, non-idealized, non-symbolized experience. These authors repeatedly reference the inability of words--a key medium for the ideal--to communicate about the Glen. Ed Abbey, for example, engages in an almost Nietzschean critique when he writes (before the construction of the dam),
That particular painted fantasy of a realm beyond time and space which Aristotle and the Church Fathers tried to palm off on us has met, in modern times, only neglect and indifference, passing on into the oblivion it so richly deserved, while the Paradise of which I write is with us yet, the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand. (Desert 209)
That paradise is no longer tangibly accessible, forcing us into a verbal and photographic ideal. This ideal may well be rhetorically effective, but the very use of an ideal is counter to the radical implications of much of this rhetoric (for more on the importance of Nietzschean thought in environmental rhetoric, see Rogers).
These binds are ever-present in any rhetoric based on nostalgia. It is too easy for the longed-for ideal to be uncovered as just that--an ideal, not "reality." Abbey acknowledged the role of nostalgia in the rhetoric of wilderness, taking the time to call it "a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia" (Desert 208), but that line can be hard to draw. Is the nostalgia justified on the basis that we are hearkening back to something that did indeed exist? Can it be "justified" on non-empirical grounds--on rhetorical grounds--as a necessary or effective appeal, when it, in a sense, runs counter to the liberatory foundations of that very rhetoric?[1]
This rhetorical bind aside, the literature describing Glen Canyon before the dam consistently emphasizes the sensual, affective and spiritual over the rational and quantifiable. This literature--especially, but not solely, Katie Lee's--does not merely describe the Glen and argue for its restoration. These writings are acts of mourning, expressions of the deep pain, loss and empowerment that comes from opening oneself to the dialogue which the natural world offers us.
Works
Cited
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Ballantine, 1968.
---. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Avon, 1975.
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage, 1996.
Berger, Bruce. There Was a River: Essays on the Southwest. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1994.
Birkeland, Janice. (1995). Neutralizing gender. Environmental Ethics, 17, 443-444.
Brownridge, Dennis and Steve Hinchman. "The Grand Canyon Is Just Another Turbine." Water in the West: A High Country News Reader, Ed. Char Miller. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000. 93-99.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, U of California P, 1950.
DeLuca, Kevin Michael. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. New York: Guilford, 1999.
Else, Jon, dir. and prod. Cadillac Desert. Based on the book by Marc Reisner. San Jose, CA: KTEH, 1997.
Farmer, Jared. Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell & the Canyon Country. Tucson, U of Arizona P, 1999.
Forbes, Steve. Not a bathtub. Forbes, 23 March 1998: 28.
Gaard, Greta. "Ecofeminism and Wilderness." Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 5-24.
Griffin, Susan. “Curves Along the Road.” Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. Ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990. 87-99.
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