By Rebecca Averill and Perla A. Vargas

The history of the Hoover Dam dates back to the 1900’s when Black Canyon and Boulder Canyon Nevada were under review as a potential area to build a dam that would control flooding, provide irrigation, and produce hydroelectric power. In 1928 Congress put out a bid for the project and a group called Six Companies, Inc. took control of this extensive environmental project and began construction in 1930. The Hoover Dam was the highest dam ever built and the most expensive water project of its time. The project in 1930 cost roughly $49 million and claimed 112 lives over the 5 years it took to build.

The Hoover dam is the first dam of the modern era, designed without adornment to emphasize its power, to focus the eye on its smooth, arcing, awe-inspiring bulk.

In seven decades we have learned that if you take away Hoover, you also take away millions of tons of salt that the Colorado once carried to the sea but which have instead been strewn across the irrigated landscape, slowly poisoning the soil. Take away the Colorado River dams, and you return the silt gathering behind them to a free-flowing river, allowing it again to enrich the downstream wetlands and the once fantastically abundant, now often caked, arid, and refuse-fouled Delta.

Take away Hoover and the dams it spawned on the Colorado- Glen Canyon, Davis, Parker, Headgate Rock, Palo Verde, all the way to Morelos across the Mexican border- and you restore much of the American Southwest's landscape, including a portion of its abundant agricultural land, to shrub and cactus desert.

Take away the dams, and the Cocopa Indians, whose ancestors fished and farmed the Delta for more than a millennium, might have a chance of avoiding cultural extinction. Before the construction of the Hoover Dam diabetes was unheard of among native tribes. Originally a hunter-gatherer society, the tribes of the Southwest lived on foods high in fiber, low in fat, and low on the glycemic index (the measure of foods’ effects on blood sugar levels). But with the construction of the Hoover Dam, along with Arizona’s twenty-some other dams, tribal hunter-gather-farming economies — along with the traditional diet and home life — were effectively halted. Without fertile riverbeds or freedom to roam, Native American communities were thrust into poverty, commencing a cycle of forced dependency on U.S. governmental assistance. Surplus commodities like white flour, lard, refined sugars, and processed foods replaced the traditional whole-foods diet. Not only were these provisions alien to Native Americans, but they were rationed, based on a contrived system of merit. Consequently, these changes contributed to manufacture of a disease previously unknown to tribal people.

Although the dam is a great source of natural electricity it comes with environmental impacts for that area. If you take away the Hoover dam four species native to Nevada and the Colorado River may survive: the Bonytail chub, Colorado pikeminnow, Humpback chub, and Razorback sucker. However, major economic forces may prevent this change. Currently the dam provides about 50.37% of power to various areas of California, 18.95% to the State of Arizona and 25.14% to the State of Nevada. The water that spills into the lakes serves 8 million people in Nevada, California and Arizona and irrigates about 1 million acres. Reverting these changes will be difficult and will requiere creativity and committment.