Dam opponents framed their fight as a clash between engineering and geological sublimity

Evidence

We can ground these differences by contrasting the strategies and circumstances of the Save the Narmada movement (and Roy’s writerly role within it) to those that characterized the mid-1960s movement—in which both Abbey and Brower were prominent—opposing Glen Canyon and other Colorado megadams. The driving spirit behind the loose alliance of monkey wrenchers and desert rats in the American West was anarchist; their strategic vocabulary was drawn from the wilderness sublime, a discourse that enfolded elements of eulogy and elegy. The wilderness sublime became inseparable from a contest over the rhetoric of the monumental: a clash between transcendent engineering and a transcendent geology invested with awe and grandeur. For Brower, “the most beautiful place in all the region of Glen Canyon was a cavernous space, under the vaulting rock walls, that had been named the Cathedral in the Desert.” Brower, like Abbey, became a public relations maestro in the vernacular of the countersublime: “Lake Powell is a drag strip for power boats … The magic of Glen Canon is dead. Putting water in the Cathedral in the Desert was like urinating in the crypt of St. Peter’s.” An anti-dam coalition placed an advertisement in the New York Times that asked, “Should we flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 436

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The mound-builders cathedral rhetoric and the contest over what counts as a sacred place connects to the reader’s trees-as-infrastructure essay on how spaces hold meaning beyond utility.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-dam rhetoric shifted from wilderness ethic to environmental justice with subsistence-farmer populations — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 435; Both sides in fault line wars benefit from redefining local conflict as civilizational — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 750

Broader Connections

• Anti-dam rhetoric shifted from wilderness ethic to environmental justice with subsistence-farmer populations #exemplifies (0.78) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 435
• Both sides in fault line wars benefit from redefining local conflict as civilizational #complicates (0.75) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 750