Talking Through Water: Experts, Environmentalists, and Their Publics, 1944 to 1977

In response to the repeated droughts of the early twentieth century in northeastern North Dakota, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation planned a large-scale diversion project called the Garrison Diversion Unit (GDU). The GDU, a multipurpose engineering project, received its first approval in 1944 promising to redirect water from the North Dakota segment of the Missouri River through a system of dams, reservoirs, and canals for the purpose of irrigation, hydroelectricity, industrial and municipal water supply, expansion of recreation areas, and enhancement of fish and wildlife areas. The engineers who planned the GDU failed to consider the environmental impacts or international political implications of the diversion of the project’s irrigation return flows from one watershed to another and across the border into Canada. Although the project itself remains unfinished to this day, the GDU debates that raged between 1940 and 1977 provide invaluable insights into the professionalization of environmental experts, international water diplomacy, and the role of the public in the realization of mega water projects.

From the GDU’s inception, various groups and individuals have contested this project. This dissertation examines how knowledge of water, technology, and public policy was mobilized in various sites of debate during a critical period in the development of environmental policy in America. I analyzed three sites of the debate: the promotion of the project by its leading engineering figurehead, the scientific and environmental organizations and committees that debated the environmental impacts of the project, and the international commission that engaged local users for the first time to determine the project’s future. I found that economic, social, political, and cultural arguments and language, rather than scientific evidence, shaped the dialogue, allowing both experts and non-experts to engage in the debate using various types of knowledge. This dissertation argues that the GDU, the reports it generated, and the talk surrounding it did not only describe the physical engineering edifices being proposed; they also and perhaps more importantly, revealed the GDU as an envirotechnical system that provided experts and non-experts alike with opportunities to communicate, translate, and challenge one another’s ideas about technology and the environment.