Desecration Row: Grand Canyon Under Siege

BY KEVIN FEDARKO

Late last year, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Martin Litton died at his home in California at the age of 97. Although Litton wasn’t especially well known to the general public, his passing drew more attention than those who knew him might have anticipated. The Los Angeles Times placed his obituary on their front page. National Geographic ran a eulogy that described him as “dogged, fiery, and impossibly effective.” And the New York Times called him the Jeremiah of the environmental movement: an “unrelenting scout in the battle to preserve what was left of the wilderness in the American West.”

All of those tributes made a point of highlighting Litton’s signature achievement, which was his decision to partner with David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club, to engage in a toe-to-toe battle with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation against a pair of hydroelectric dams that were designed to drown the unearthly paradise at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and to silence the river that runs through it.

The victory those two men spearheaded in the autumn of 1968 was a watershed moment in the history of landscape preservation. It signaled a coming-of-age for the environmental movement as a social and political force to be reckoned with, and the consequences of what they pulled off continue to shape our world today. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act all flowed directly from the firestorm that these men, along with dozens of their allies, created in the Grand Canyon.

That fight achieved something else, too. By the time it was over, most Americans were convinced that the canyon should not be spoiled or harmed in any way.

People from places as diverse as New Jersey and Alabama and North Dakota, people who might never set foot in the Southwest, much less see the canyon with their own eyes, came to perceive the place as a kind of national cathedral.

A living monument to the magnificence of geology and the pageantry of morning light. A wonder of nature that, foremost of all the country’s treasures, was and should remain sacrosanct.

And yet, less than 72 hours after Litton’s passing, the New York Times published a front-page piece by Adam Nagourney, their Los Angeles bureau chief, and shot a giant hole in the notion that the Grand Canyon is inviolable and cannot be messed with.

Nagourney's story focused primarily on two threats: the Tusayan development on the South Rim and the tramway that is proposed for Marble Canyon. But there are a host of others. In fact, from every direction, the canyon and the river are now under siege. And unlike in the past, the adversary is not a single, monolithic force like the Bureau of Reclamation. Instead, a host of separate outfits are launching smaller attacks that, in many ways, are more insidious and far-reaching.

From the north and south, the uranium-mining industry has dramatically ramped up efforts to revive a series of “zombie” mines that irradiate the soil and pollute groundwater within the canyon’s watershed. From the west, thousands of unregulated helicopter flights below the rim and the Skywalk development, a glass-floored observation platform that overlooks the canyon from the Hualapai reservation, have triggered a flood of new tourists from Las Vegas and inspired talk of a second tramway. Off to the northeast, the Navajo Generating Station, one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the U.S., continues to foul the air and impair visibility. And from the sky above, swarms of air tours are systematically destroying one of the canyon’s greatest treasures: its silence. 

All of this gives rise to an odd and disturbing duality inside the crown jewel of America’s national park system. A place that once served as a crucible and a key battleground for landmark advances in conservation now sits at a kind of ground zero for efforts to roll back many of those gains.

And make no mistake about the ramifications of what is unfolding. Although it is not the first, nor the largest, nor the most popular of the nation’s parks, the Grand Canyon is regarded as the touchstone and the centerpiece of the entire system. What happens here—good or bad, wise or foolish, short-sighted or long-range—has the potential to trigger changes that will reverberate not only throughout the rest of the nation’s parks, but across the entire landscape of this country. 

In short, this place matters.

The Grand Canyon now stands at a unique juncture, a crossroads of competing interests  and visions that merit special attention, if only because the essence of this place is so much more complex, provocative, and relevant to the larger world than most of us realize. An essence that is recognized by pretty much everyone, but truly understood by almost nobody—a mystery that hides in plain sight of us all.

If that last statement sounds far-fetched, consider that the canyon’s interior, which is roughly the size of Delaware, harbors so many untrammeled mesas and untouched buttes that, were they not buried below the horizon line, the topography would qualify as one of the world’s most poorly explored mountain ranges.

There are dozens of areas where human beings have never set foot, and many of these sectors shelter secrets that the outside world is just beginning to discover. Just a few months ago, the Journal of Arachnology confirmed that a pair of tiny creatures, each a separate species of pseudo-scorpion that was discovered in a cave on the canyon’s north rim, fail to match anything in the arthropodal literature, and are therefore entirely new to science. 

Moreover, the canyon’s secrets extend far beyond a pair of arachnids no larger than a human fingernail. In fact, some of those mysteries involve the grandest and most sweeping questions one can possibly ask about this place. Odd as it may sound, after more than 150 years of research, we still don’t fully understand how this landmark was originally formed, or when that process took place. At the moment, geologists cannot even agree on something as basic as which direction the ancestral Colorado River was flowing when it carved the canyon. 

As one example (among many) of how misunderstood and how underreported this landscape is, consider the eleven Indian tribes whose ancestral lands lie either next to or inside the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park. Against great odds, many of these Native Americans have preserved a connection to the land that extends back to the Pleistocene. Indeed, when it comes to the land—what it reveals, what it conceals, what a delicate thing it is for humans to achieve a lasting balance and harmony with it—there is much that we can learn from tribal people. And yet, in a reflection of the larger mainstream society to which we all belong, some are simply keen to get rich, even if it means destroying the things that imbue their land with such inestimable beauty and value.

All of which, perhaps, underscores the larger truth that while the forces that have sculpted this landscape over countless millennia are primarily tectonics and river hydrology, the main forces that shape the canyon today are no less eternal for being so supremely human. Aesthetics and greed. Tradition and modernity. Celebrating individual freedom versus honoring a responsibility to the collective. 

And so, in addition to being many other things, the canyon offers up a kind of mirror.

It casts back a reflection of our triumphs and our failures; what we have been willing to sacrifice and what we have chosen to preserve; the price we have paid for progress, along with the lessons that have been levied by those transactions. Odd as it may sound, the Grand Canyon today has important things to say about who we are, who we are not, and the truths that we must embrace if we are to grapple successfully with the challenges of a changing climate, an endlessly expanding population, and the abiding allure of human avarice. 

There is nothing, anywhere, even remotely like this place.

Preserving its wonders—and defending them—is a covenant that we are called to keep with three constituencies. Those, like Martin Litton, who came before us and showed the way. The generations of Americans who will follow in our wake. And perhaps most importantly, with what may well be the finest parts of ourselves.