Author urges appreciation, preservation of outdoors

Written for The Utah Statesman on November 16th, 2007

People should be more appreciative of the outdoors and actively preserve their surroundings, author Roy Dale Webb said Thursday.

"I hope people take away an appreciation for things that are gone," Webb said of his presentation at the Friends of the Merrill Cazier fall lecture.

The presentation featured slides of photographs from the Green River before the Colorado River Storage Project began building dams in the '60s.

"The Colorado was viewed in those days as having no beneficial use," Webb said. "The water went to waste. It just went down the canyon, so you couldn't use it to irrigate. The idea was to build these dams and store the water."

The construction of the dams were "also really tied up in the politics of the Colorado River Compact," Webb said.

The Colorado River Compact was signed in Santa Fe in 1923 "and still affects us to this day," Webb said, "because it allocated 7.5 of its 15 million acre feet a year of river to the lower basin states: Colorado, Arizona and Nevada, and the rest went to the upper basin states: Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming."

The Hoover Dam was the first to be built, after which Webb said the upper basin states wanted dams stored for them as well, "so it wouldn't all go down to California."

Fourteen dam sites were selected in Green River in 1922, with "the mouth of Cart Creek chosen for the site of the Flaming Gorge Dam," Webb said.

"It was a beautiful, unique area," Webb said of the lost canyons. "It's just one of those choices you make when you build those kind of projects, you lose that type of thing."

Webb said he is an advocate of preserving natural beauty and that the loss of these things could continue.

"The Bear River, it's at risk. People are still talking of building the Cutler Dam. Or the idea of building a nuclear power plant down by Green River, that is going to put us all at risk," he said.

Webb said students wishing to get involved with these and other environmental issues could join the Sierra Club or write letters to their congressmen. "Say,'I want to see these things preserved,'" he said. "The more they get those kinds of things, the more they are going to listen to constituents.

"There are younger generations to come. I want them to see these things too. It's nice to save what we have."