Theodore
The Conservation Foundation was willing for me to go.
Clark had been
very much involved in getting the groundwater policy study going before I
came on board, and he took charge of completing the report, which was called
"Groundwater, Saving the Unseen Resource." In the meantime, several other
groundwater studies were made which tended to vitiate the Conservation
Foundation report. The National Water and Power Alliance was making a study
as was the Northeast-Midwest Study Conference, and the National Academy
of Sciences was beginning work on a groundwater study using some of the
same members that we had as staff representatives.
Senator [Dave] Durenberger later introduced legislation to implement the
recommendations of the Conservation Foundation report, and there was a
companion bill in the House, but they foundered on the rock of bureaucracy.
The federal agencies involved in the federal research and monitoring efforts
testified at hearings, but there was no agreement on a division of
responsibilities, so the bill was never reported out of committee, to the best of
my knowledge.
River Basin Planning, Dakar
So in 1986 I went over to Dakar for two or three weeks in the field, then came
back to Washington to complete a report on a plan which should have led to a
basin plan oriented much more toward development of groundwater rather than
building big dams, some of which have turned into disaster areas in Africa.
The original plan that had been proposed by French and British engineering
firms contemplated a large dam in each country except Guinea Bissau, with a
number of smaller dams in the headwaters. It was somewhat like the Corps of
Engineers' original plan for the Potomac River, which foundered because one
of the dams would have flooded some of the Byrd family's apple orchards. And
this was to help people that are barely into the 20th century. A lot of them are
not living in the 20th century yet; they're living in mud huts with dirt floors
and thatched roofs, and they're not ready for Western style irrigation. To make
the irrigation pay, you would have to double crop and farm very intensively.
The dam in the Gambia would have been a tidal barrier that would flood out
and destroy the tidal irrigation on the Gambia River plain. This is rice
irrigation in the upper reaches of the estuary where you still have fresh water
half the year.
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