One-sided dam?

There was a piece yesterday with an interesting (though a bit one-sided) history of the Auburn Dam and Peripheral Canal in Rocklin and Roseville Today written by Dan Walters:

Elvis Presley was a young man when bureaucrats and politicians began talking about two large projects to control and use the water that in seasonal rain and snow storms dump on Northern California.

Building a high dam on the American River near Auburn, water engineers reasoned, would hold more of the seasonal flows for later use while protecting the Sacramento area from flooding. A "Peripheral Canal," meanwhile, was touted to divert water from the Sacramento River around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for delivery to San Joaquin Valley farmers and Southern California homes and industries.

Construction actually began on both. Site clearance and foundation work for the Auburn Dam began in 1967 while the chunks of the 42-mile Peripheral Canal route were dug out in the 1970s to supply materials for constructing Interstate 5 south of Sacramento.

Both projects, however, fell victim to the rapidly expanding power of environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The Jimmy Carter administration halted work on Auburn Dam, ostensibly to study its ability to withstand an earthquake, and while the Peripheral Canal project was pushed through the Legislature by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a referendum sponsored by an odd-bedfellows alliance of environmentalists and San Joaquin Valley farmers led to voter rejection in 1982.

"fell victim to the rapidly expanding power of environmentalism"? Come on, Dan, tell us what you really think! It's sad to me that the author didn't attempt to represent more of the reasons for why the Auburn Dam, for instance, may not be a good idea.

Walters has Auburn axed by Carter decades ago "ostensibly to study its ability to withstand an earthquake". The equally one-sided story told by Friends of the River, for instance, puts it this way:

A multi-purpose Auburn Dam on the American River near Auburn would cost more than two billion dollars, be constructed on several earthquake faults, and flood nearly 50 miles of river canyon visited by more than a half million people a year for outdoor recreation.

In any case, these issues are never simple one-sided things, and it is incredibly frustrating that writers continue to paint them as such. It seems inevitable to lead to the "us versus them" mentality, instead of promoting cooperation between the different factions that instead continue to war over California's water.