A New Tool for Assessing Environmental Impacts of Altering Short-Term Flow and Water Level Regimes

The computational tool InSTHAn (indicators of short-term hydrological alteration) was developed to summarize data on subdaily stream flows or water levels into manageable, comprehensive and ecologically meaningful metrics, and to qualify and quantify their deviation from unaltered states. The pronunciation of the acronym refers to the recording interval of input data (i.e., instant). We compared InSTHAn with the tool COSH-Tool in a characterization of the subdaily flow variability of the Colorado River downstream from the Glen Canyon dam, and in an evaluation of the effects of the dam on this variability. Both tools captured the hydropeaking caused by a dam operation, but only InSTHAn quantified the alteration of key flow attributes, highlighting significant increases in the range of within-day flow variations and in their rates of change. This information is vital to evaluate the potential ecological consequences of the hydrological alteration, and whether they may be irreversible, making InSTHAn a key tool for river flow management.

Benefit-Cost Analysis, Policy Impacts, and Congressional Hearings

Methods for identifying relevant policy impacts for valuation in benefit-cost analyses (BCAs) have received relatively little attention in academic research, applied policy analyses, and guidance documents. In this paper, we develop a systematic, transparent, and replicable process that draws upon information contained in records of Congressional hearings to identify relevant policy impacts for valuation in a BCA. Our approach involves classifying – and subsequently analyzing – statements from witnesses testifying in Congressional hearings on the topic of the BCA. By using Congressional hearings as the basis for our approach, we are identifying potential policy impacts from information provided during the very process the BCA is intended to inform. However, because this approach is quite resource-intensive and would be somewhat burdensome for agencies to implement, it may be best applied in the academic realm, with identified impacts resulting from such applications then made available to agency personnel for potential inclusion in BCAs. Using the case of the Glen Canyon Dam, we demonstrate the approach and its resulting improvements in the quality and transparency of the BCA it was intended to inform.

The poetics of restoring Glen Canyon: the ‘desert imagination’ of Ellen Meloy and Terry Tempest Williams

There has been a literary tradition supporting the restoration of Glen Canyon in southern Utah ever since construction began on Glen Canyon Dam in the late 1950s, and the canyons began to disappear behind the rising waters of Lake Powell. While some of Glen Canyon’s literary protagonists put forward a strong political and anarchical refrain for a ‘Glen Canyon restored’, this article considers those writers and texts that instead look to the power of appeals to emotion in defense of the desert. In particular, this article considers the evocative capacity of environmental writing to convey emotional and affective landscapes. This article examines the desert writings of Ellen Meloy and Terry Tempest Williams, and the ways in which they employ rhetoric, myth, story, motifs, metaphor, symbolism, and allegory to speak back to the environmental condition, and the ongoing call to restore Glen Canyon. Meloy’s and Williams’ works present individual testimonies molded by personal engagement, experience, and investigation in the desert – but also contribute to ecological and political discourse in the Glen.