Quotes About Bureau of Reclamation

To some conservationists, the Colorado River is the preeminent symbol of everything mankind has done wrong—a harbinger of a squalid and deserved fate. To its preeminent impounder, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, it is the perfection of an ideal. The

Brower had said that he wouldn't mind dams in the Grand Canyon as long as the Bureau built a comparable canyon somewhere else. He received a standing ovation—in Denver.

In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse.

The lone exception was the Bureau of Reclamation, which had one enormous project already mapped out, with years of engineering and architectural studies behind it, all tied up neatly with the ribbon of congressional approval and bow of a presidential signature. This was, of course, the Boulder Canyon Project.