How You Say It
by Hugh Rogers
Floyd Dominy died last month at the age of 100. He had been commissioner of the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation longer than anyone else. During his career at the Rec Bureau, he got the Glen Canyon, Flaming Gorge, and Navajo Dams built along the Colorado River, and if he’d had his way there would be two dams in the Grand Canyon. He once said, “I’ve seen all the wild rivers I ever want to see.”
This unapologetic manipulator of Nature was not an engineer but a skilful manipulator of our political system. He knew how to roll the pork barrel. The population boom of the past forty years in the desert Southwest was largely due to air conditioning and Floyd Dominy—and they wouldn’t have the air conditioning without the hydroelectric power that Dominy’s dams provided.
Dominy was a main figure in Marc Reisner’s book, Cadillac Desert (1986), but I first heard of him in Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), in which John McPhee set David Brower, former executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, against three antagonists: a mining geologist, a resort developer, and Dominy. The Brower vs. Dominy chapter can be found in The John McPhee Reader. It was the most spirited of the three arguments, conducted during a raft trip down the Grand Canyon. The Colorado still flowed free over monster rapids, but all its water had been processed through the “ten million ton plug” in Glen Canyon, just upstream from the National Park.
While Brower blamed himself for the dam that had turned Glen Canyon into Lake Powell, everyone else gave him the credit for saving the Grand Canyon. His campaign was the model for all other dam fights. Its icon was the full-page ad he placed in major newspapers with the headline, “Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”
Dominy’s comment: “People ignore facts and play on emotions.”
By the end of his career, Dominy had decided not to ignore this fact. To counter the Sierra Club’s elegiac film about Glen Canyon, “The Place No One Knew,” he had commissioned “Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado.” Sweeping shots of the big blue lake in the midst of red desert. Water skiers cutting wakes. Families camping beside half-filled lateral canyons. The Rec Bureau film turned the Sierra Club’s message on its head: no one had known Glen Canyon, but now everyone could use it.
Some years ago, I went to Washington to talk to a congressional staff person about another proposal to put a slab of concrete where it would do a lot of harm. I was urgent. He just shrugged. “On every issue like this,” he told me, “ten percent are for, ten percent are opposed, and eighty percent are either undecided or don’t care.”
As long as the numbers didn’t move, the congressperson could do as he or she wished—other factors, including money, would control. Ten percent wouldn’t change the outcome until they moved at least some of the eighty percent.
How do you move people who are undecided or don’t care? Floyd Dominy was only half right when he said, “ignore facts . . . play on emotions.” His Lake Powell-as-jewel movie showed he knew instinctively that facts were inseparable from emotions. Mere facts or refutations were unpersuasive because they lacked emotional meaning.
Maybe everyone has heard this now, but it bears repeating: if you want to persuade people, you have to link your cause with their dearly held, though often unconscious, values and metaphors. Brower associated the Grand Canyon with a monument of Western civilization. The Canyon, he implied, was a secular chapel, sacred to our national religion. Dominy fought back by associating Glen Canyon with access for everyone, not just the elite; with family recreation; and with other can-do national projects that made Nature serve human purposes.
Neither allowed the other to define his cause. Beware using your opponents’ language, even to refute misstatements. Otherwise, you’ll simply reinforce their metaphors about what’s at stake.
This came up in a recent email from one of our own. He complained: “It disturbs me that ‘we’ environmentalists are against about everything.”
Julian Martin, a passionate rapid responder, wrote:
We environmentalists are not against about everything. That is a line used most often by folks who would destroy all that I hold dear. Being against mountain top removal means we are for the mountains and streams and critters. Being against massive blocks of concrete and huge windmills in the Mon Forest means we are for the wonder and beauty and the birds and bats. And I don’t have to go to a place to want it protected and preserved. I have been to Alaska only once and then not to the Arctic but I sure don’t want them drilling there.
To be “against:” that’s negative, backward, obstructionist, inflexible; to be “for” is positive, forward-looking, adaptable. “Against” is a frown, “for” is a smile. It’s all in how you say it.
I’ll close with a prediction. At the end of April, the electric power producer FPL Group (which owns the wind turbines on Backbone Mountain) signaled its tentative support for the climate-change legislation being considered in the Senate. It wasn’t alone. Whoa! Major utilities come out for a green initiative! How green can it be?
One of its advantages for them is that it would establish a predictable price for carbon emissions. Predictability would be good for the utility business. Perhaps more important, the utilities want a renewable energy standard to create a solid market for carbon-free energy, i.e., their wind and solar investments. But look closer: the companies also say that the new law would encourage them to invest in nuclear power.
Proponents, opponents, and agnostics alike know that if nuclear power can be defined in enough minds as “clean energy” it will outstrip solar and wind combined.
Information for Those Attending the Spruce No. 1 Mine Public Hearing on May 18 in Charleston, West Virginia 