A different kind of environmentalist

Characters of this sort are no longer around, nor possible, alas.

With a cattleman's regard for water, Floyd Dominy ran some of the federal Bureau of Reclamation's biggest dam projects, including the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. Mr. Dominy, who died April 20 at age 100, was reviled by environmentalists, who criticized his irrigation and power-generating projects for destroying pristine habitats and flooding scenic canyons. But Mr. Dominy, whose personality was as imposing and audacious as his projects, was proud of the dams his agency built.

"I'm a different kind of environmentalist," he told High Country News in 2000. "I believe that nature can be improved upon." Mr. Dominy said his critics, organizations like the Sierra Club, were elitist. At Glen Canyon in Arizona, Mr. Dominy oversaw construction of the second-largest dam on the Colorado. The dam, which opened in 1966, became a major source of power. It also created Lake Powell, a reservoir and tourist destination that attracts millions of boaters and hikers annually.

He called Lake Powell "my crowning jewel" and had the Bureau of Reclamation publish a pamphlet celebrating how it made the wilderness accessible to tourists. "Dear God," he wrote in the pamphlet. "Did you cast down two hundred miles of canyon and mark: 'For poets only?' Multitudes hunger for a lake in the sun."

Raised on a struggling Nebraska cattle farm that lacked electricity and running water, Mr. Dominy left home at age 17. He studied economics at the University of Wyoming, graduating in 1932, and was then appointed the agricultural agent for Campbell County, Wyo. He administered a federal cattle-culling program during the Dust Bowl that involved paying $8 a head for ailing cows and shooting them on the spot. He also worked on his first small-scale water projects, helping ranchers build rolled-earth dams and ponds.

He said he often worked in defiance of regulations requiring that Forest Service rangers inspect sites first. "I took it upon myself to ignore these pettifogging minutiae," he told author John McPhee.

Mr. Dominy's skill at negotiating bureaucracy spurred a quick rise at the Bureau of Reclamation, which he joined in 1946 and where he became commissioner in 1959. Among his most prominent projects were Flaming Gorge Dam and Reservoir on the Green River in Utah, the Navajo Dams on the Colorado River Storage Project in New Mexico, and Trinity Dam in California. A big player on Capitol Hill, Mr. Dominy survived in his post until 1969, when the Nixon administration asked him to leave in a housecleaning. According to Mark Reiser's "Cadillac Desert," the emissary sent to ask for his resignation was none other than James Watt, who in the Reagan administration would become Mr. Dominy's rival as the chief bugaboo of the environmentalists.

Mr. McPhee, in his 1971 book "Encounters with the Archdruid," floated down the Colorado River with Mr. Dominy and with the Sierra Club's David Brower. The two ideological opponents had a jolly time of it in Mr. McPhee's telling, alternating beer and barbs. At one point, Mr. McPhee wrote, Mr. Dominy shot a rough, 300-yard stretch of rapids in the Grand Canyon. "From top to bottom, through it all, Dominy kept his cigar aglow."

REMEMBRANCES APRIL 29, 2010: FLOYD DOMINY 1910-2010

Builder Remapped Rivers Across West - By STEPHEN MILLER

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A7