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Dams
When Dans Weren't Damned: The Public Power Crusade and Visions of the Good Life in the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s Author(s): Wesley Arden Dick Reviewed work(s): Source: Environmental Review: ER, Vol. 13, No. 3/4, 1989 Conference Papers, Part One (Autumn - Winter, 1989), pp. 113-153 Published by: Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3984393 . Accessed: 05/12/2011 13:41
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Environmental Review: ER.

http://www.jstor.org

"When Dans Weren't Damned: The Public Power Crusade and Visions of the Good Life in the Pacific Northwest in the 1930st*
Wesley Arden Dick
Albion College

Yourpower is turningour darknessto dawn, roll on, Columbia, roll on! -Woody Guthrie, "RollOn Columbia."(1941) In EncountersWith the Archdruid, 1971 biographical account of a environmentalistDavid Brower,writer John McPhee comments that for conservationists, there is something special about dams, "something-as conversation problems go-that is disproportionately and metaphysically sinister." McPhee continues: The outermost circle of the Devil's world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads covered with a million people-and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of

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