Feller paper on Glen Canyon Dam published
Professor Joe Feller, of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, has proposed a program for management of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River in Arizona that he believes would better conform to the law and be more amenable to adaptation and experimentation than the current model.
Feller advocates these changes in his paper, "Collaborative Management of Glen Canyon Dam: The Elevation of Social Engineering Over Law," which was published July 18 in the Nevada Law Journal. It asserts that the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program has substituted the needs and desires of stakeholders, including state, tribal and federal government officials and representatives of electric power companies, for the hierarchy of laws that should govern the operation of the dam. Its actions have resulted in non-compliance with the Endangered Species Act, he wrote.
"In the broadest sense, all of the American people are stakeholders in the Grand Canyon and in the fish, wildlife, and other natural resources therein," wrote Feller, who is on leave from the College of Law for the 2008-09 academic year while serving as senior counsel to the National Wildlife Federation in its Boulder, Colo., office. "These stakeholders have chosen Congress to represent them, and disobedience to the mandates of Congress disempowers them."
To read a PDF of the rest of the paper, click here.
Janie Magruder, Jane.Magruder@asu.edu
(480) 727-9052
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law