1) Barcott, Bruce, 1999, Beyond the valley of the dammed: Outside, reprinted in Utne Reader, May/June 1999, pp. 51-57

If you don’t have time to read Cadillac Desert, read this. This article is a short primer on the environmental effects of big dams, including a good overview of the people and projects influencing the dam removal / dam renewal controversy today.

" One day we looked up and saw 75,000 dams impounding more than half a million miles of river. We looked down and saw rivers scrubbed free of salmon and sturgeon and shad……. And that’s when we stopped talking about dams as instruments of holy progress and started talking about blowing them out of the water" — Bruce Barcott

2) Brown, Lester, 1995, Who will feed China?, W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 164. (particularly chapters 5 and 6)

Mostly a book on population and the food supply, this book also has a great chapter on the China’s changing water resource management practices. This book is particularly interesting from a policy standpoint, since China is (must?) significantly altering its geographic landscape to meet the nutritional needs of its people.

Lester Brown writes from the standpoint that humans are on a course to meet and exceed the carrying capacity for population growth and food production. One of the grim messages in the book is that political stability, both national and international, may soon depend nearly exclusively on food production.

3) Finkhouse, Joseph, and Crawford, Mark, eds., 1991, A river too Far: The past and future of the Arid West: Nevada Humanities Committee and the University of Nevada Press, 176p.

This book is a collection of essays and excerpts encompassing many of the great debates of water resources in the West and is punctuated with great black and white photographs from the Water in the West Project. There isn’t a lot of science in this book, but there is a lot of information on attitudes toward water policy, and the people who shaped water resources policy as we know it today. It also contains a good annotated bibliography of American attitudes on water policy in the West.

4) Gupta, P, and Anabalagan R, 1997, Slope stability of Tehri Dam reservoir area, India, using landslide hazard zonation (LHZ) mapping: Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology, v. 30, p. 27-36.

This article outlines methods used in mapping landslide hazards in the Bhagirathi and Bhillangna valleys (portions of the Ganges River system) in India before a dam is erected. Landslides in a reservoir area not only reduce the useful lifetime of a dam by filling in the reservior, but may also cause catastrophic dam failures. If a major landslide occurs within the reservoir, waves, called seiche, generated by the slope failure may be strong enough to topple the dam. The study utilizes lithology (rock type), structural features (bedding, foliation, and jointing), slope morphometry (shape), land use and cover, hydrogeological conditions, and the relative relief of the area in order to make the landslide hazard assessment. The study mapped on a 1:50,000 level, and its main conclusion was that certain areas with higher risk should be studied in more detail (1:1,000).

5) Lucchitta, Ivo, and Leopold, Luna, B, 1999, Floods and sandbars in the Grand Canyon: GSA Today, v. 9 , n. 1, pp. 1-7.

The Glen Canyon Dam acts as a sediment trap that is so effective that beaches and sandbars downstream, in the Grand Canyon, are eroding. The loss of these permanently mobile geomorphic features also results in the loss of habit, for plants and animals, and recreational space, for humans. Since recognizing the effects of increased downstream erosion on the Grand Canyon, the latter group has attempted to remediate downstream erosion by allowing several "tests", week-long sustained high flow events of 45,000 cfs. These "tests" worked, in a sense that some beaches were rebuilt. However, the tests also failed because the rebuilt beaches also eroded in a very short time period.

This article proposes to synchronize dam releases to the Colorado River with high flow events in the Little Colorado River in order to 1) transport sediments into the canyon from upstream in order to 2) allow sediment to be deposited onto terraces which would not be eroded by "normal" flow. This differs from previous remediation attempts that did not bring significant amounts of new sediment into the canyon, and only redistributed the canyon sands.

6) Middleton, Nick, The Global Casino, Edward Arnold: London, 171-183.

The book outlines the science behind the most major environmental issues along with the economic and social impacts. The chapter entitled "Big Dams" addresses the issue with an approach that I have not seen in other books. One particularly good figure from the chapter compares dams by project and country by listing not only the size of the reservoir and the kilowatts generated per hectacre, but also the number of people relocated.

7) Reisner, Marc, 1993, Cadillac Desert, the American West and its disappearing water: Penguin Books, 582p.

This book is an encyclopedia of the evolution of western water rights and water policy. Reisner’s personal attitudes towards subsidized water and water resource management issues are made very clear through his writing. This book contains an extensive account of the major issues, people, and politics involved in water resource policy and the formation of American attitudes towards water use and abuse.

8) Sintokrot, B., Stefan, H., McCormick, J., and Eaton, J., 1995, Modeling of climate change effects on stream temperatures and fish habitats below dams and near groundwater inputs: Climate Change, v. 30, p. 181 — 200.

Stream reaches downstream from groundwater seeps and from reservoirs are often habitat for game fish. Cold and cool-water species are often found downstream from reservoirs where pre-impoundment conditions would allow only warm-water species to exist. One example of this is effect is the trout population in the Colorado River below the Glen Canyon Dam.

This study is an attempt to quantify the extent of effects of hypolimnic (deep) water discharged into streams below dams and model the changes in these cold-water habitats would be affected by a doubling in atmospheric CO2. As expected, the model predicted that as stream and reservoir temperatures warm in a greenhouse climate, habitat is reduced for species that have a low tolerance for warmer water.

I think that this study is interesting because game-fish habitats were created by human modification on the landscape and may be reduced by other modifications that humans have caused in the atmosphere.

9) West, Michael, 1988, Dams and earthquakes: a shaky relationship: Civil Engineering,

p. 64—67.

This article was written to call attention to the fact that earthquakes can cause catastrophic dam failures, and that there has been a small amount of research and regarding methods of evaluating seismic risk on dam sites. The intent of the article is to call attention to methods, like trenching, which can be a valuable tool in assessing the seismic risk the vicinity of a dam, and to impress upon the audience the necessity of seismotectonic studies of areas near dam-sites.

The author uses the Western U.S. as a case study, and source for examples. Active Quaternary faults have been identified in Wyoming and Utah within the past two decades, and some of these scarps can be traced to points within several kilometers of exsisting dams (one scarp can be traced to within 1.2 km of the Sulphur Creek Dam, and to within 6.5 km and 17.5 km from the proposed upper Bear dam and the existing Meeks Cabin Dam, respectively). Although no historic activity has been recorded on this particular fault, trenching studies have identified that it is capable of producing magnitude 7.5 earthquakes with recurrence times of 500 — 2500 years.

10) Woodard, Richard, C., 1992, The geology of dam spillways: Engineering Geology, v. 32,

p. 243-254.

Basically, this is a how-to-cut-corners article. Building a concrete lining and energy dissipation structures in a dam spillway is expensive, but omitting these structures can be dangerous in certain geological conditions. This article contains a lot more engineering than geology and is a summary of tests to determine what type of spillway should be built, and tips to get around certain problems.