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Axios
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Axios
When conservationists chose Dinosaur National Monument over Glen Canyon
In the 1950s, conservationists rejoiced in their successful campaign to stop the federal government from flooding swaths of Dinosaur National Monument with a dam on the Green River. The intrigue: It turned out to be a pyrrhic victory — one that environmentalists would be ambivalent about for decades. This is Old News, our weekly float down the currents of Utah history. What drove the news: In the Saturday Evening Post 75 years ago this week, celebrated journalist Bernard DeVoto called the nation's attention to a plan to erect dams that would replace Dinosaur's wild Lodore and Whirlpool canyons with reservoirs. Behind the scenes: The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation quietly developed the plan over several years — without consulting the National Park Service, which manages the canyons. NPS officials were infuriated by their exclusion. Zoom out: If Congress were to allow construction in Dinosaur, it would shift the balance of priorities throughout the nation's protected lands, favoring growth and development over preservation, DeVoto cautioned. He cited similar canceled plans that would have flooded parts of Mammoth Cave, Glacier and Grand Canyon national parks — some of which had been repeatedly revived. "Even when controversies have been formally settled and projects abandoned apparently for good, the park system and the public trust is always under … threat," he warned. What happened: DeVoto's warnings worked; the so-called Echo Park and Split Canyon dams in Dinosaur became conservationists' cause célèbre and letters opposing the dams " poured into Washington" that summer, historian Glenn Sandiford wrote. Federal officials eventually called off the project. Why it mattered: By treating the dams as a point of national interest, DeVoto turned the campaign against them into the catalyzing force behind the modern conservation movement. That unity produced landmark policies like the 1964 Wilderness Act, Sandiford argued. Yes, but: DeVoto had argued the Bureau and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers won Utahns' support by falsely claiming that no other site could facilitate the hydropower and irrigation the region needed. It turned out another site was being considered — and because it wasn't part of the NPS, it got far less attention than Dinosaur did. Friction point: The Sierra Club — the driving force of the newly strengthened conservation movement — was focused on protecting existing parks and didn't initially raise much fuss over plans to build a dam in Glen Canyon. Its director, David Brower, even suggested making that dam taller to replace some of the water storage that was lost to the defeated Dinosaur dams. The bottom line: When conservationists turned their attention to Glen Canyon — a remote area that few outside the Four Corners region had seen — the dam there became widely considered one of the movement's biggest losses of the 20th century.
Boston Globe
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Didion is a guide to understanding American culture and its dysfunction, but she's not the only one
Early in the book, Wilkinson argues that 'the way [Didion] understood the world, marked and inflected by the movies, is a useful lens to explain the reality we live in now. Everything she wrote about, from the feeling of observing reality from the outside — what else are we doing when we watch actors, many times larger than life, blemish-free and beautiful on the flatness of the screen — to the notion that politics and Hollywood are more similar than different, speaks to the great trajectory of her work.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Related : In the forward to Didion's book of travel diaries, ' (2017), Nathaniel Rich argues that the entries recording her 1970 sojourn in New Orleans and travel across the Deep South, capture insights that 'eerily' anticipate the 'Hollywoodized political scene' we are currently living through. Wilkinson unfolds Rich's compact claim and fashions a narrative about California, John Wayne, the Hollywood studio system, Didion's novels, her film reviews, and her personal and political nonfiction, especially the canonical essay, 'The White Album,' whose opening sentence has inspired Wilkinson's title. Advertisement Employing a fragmented, episodic structure, toggling between and sometimes blending reportorial and personal points of view, the titular essay (first published in 1979 in New West, the Pacific Coast sibling magazine to New York Magazine) in Didion's collection ' Wilkinson argues that the essay's famous opening line — 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live' — is not 'the inspirational phrase it's sometimes taken to be.' Rather it's Didion's 'diagnosis of humanity's most reflexive survival tactic. It is Didion's key to making sense of the world. Though the line is often treated as an aphorism, Didion means it more as an opening parry, the rising curtain on her best attempt to make sense of her muddled memories.' Didion first noticed the culture's rent seams in the early 1960s when she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, quit their magazine jobs in New York City and moved to Didion's home state, California, to write screenplays for the movie industry. In Los Angeles, they co-wrote film treatments and 'doctored' other scripts, and even shared a magazine column, to financially underwrite their novel writing. Related : Perhaps in all her writing guises, Didion's male lead and cultural barometer is John Wayne, both the character and the man. Wayne encapsulated 'what postwar white America imagined itself to be: brave, ever on the move, unafraid to punch back when necessary. A beacon of goodness on a choppy horizon,' Wilkinson writes. However, in her 1965 Saturday Evening Post profile, 'John Wayne: A Love Song,' confronted with the man's cancer diagnosis, Didion 'betrays a sense of unease' about the maintenance of his symbolic vitality. Among the essays collected in her first nonfiction book, ' Advertisement Though Wilkinson's insightful and generous study offers a way of reading the overlapping and contradictory desires that inform Didion's writing in her differing modes and across her various career stages, there is a critical absence in 'We Tell Ourselves Stories' that gave me some unease of my own. With the exception of a riff on the differences between Didion's film criticism and Pauline Kael's, Wilkinson fails to put Didion in conversation with her literary contemporaries or agemates. This worrisome choice portrays Didion as though she were alone in critiquing American social mythologies on screen and in politics. Without contextualizing Didion's work within a wide-ranging critical history, Wilkinson, perhaps inadvertently, reifies the Didion myth, as writer and celebrity. Given the political and cultural conditions of the US nation-state in 2025, we ought to eschew those narratives that present white artists existing in an 'unpeopled' cultural landscape. Wilkinson's suggests that we recognize Didion as an American 'everywoman' 'who became a celebrity because she told things as she saw them, but never quite settled on one interpretation, on 'fixed ideas.'' Could Didion have been the only writer to see things as they were? Likely not. Such claims erase, for example, Audre Lorde's powerful cultural criticism and the vision of the West that N. Scott Momaday advances in his prizewinning novel, ' Related : Advertisement Wilkinson could've placed Didion, who titled an early essay 'Notes of a Native Daughter,' in a fruitful exchange with James Baldwin. Debating William F. Buckley (Didion's editor at The National Review) on the American dream and Black American citizenship at the University of Cambridge in 1965, Baldwin argued that Hollywood Westerns express national genocidal desires: 'It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven, to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country . . . has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you [the racialized other].' For his 1971 memoir, ' Advertisement Wilkinson could've tested her analyses against the trenchant cultural criticism in Elaine Castillo's essay collection, ' 'We Tell Ourselves Stories' details how American political culture has become enmeshed with 'reality' television, the new mythology, from televised national political conventions, to C-SPAN to The Apprentice. According to Wilkinson, 'there's no better guide through this era than Didion.' We've entered an era that demands we write, publish, and tell rich, capacious, desegregated, comparative cultural histories and literary studies for general audiences in order to reject those political myths that purposely or inadvertently promote visions of white-only American experience and history. Our lives now depend on creating a mature, inclusive, and visionary national culture and politics that refuses Hollywood game show dreams. 'We Tell Ourselves Stories' will be useful in preparing for that cultural remaking. WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine By Alissa Wilkinson Liveright, 272 pages, $29.99 Walton Muyumba teaches literature at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of ' .'
