Some books change our thinking about institutions long taken for granted. Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert explained how Western water flows uphill toward political payoffs. Alston Chase's Playing God in Yellowstone exposed the politics which trump both science and economics in our national parks. They herald fundamental reform by publicizing the gaps between intentions and results. They show how agencies created to promote the public interest become part of an iron triangle of special interests. The beneficiaries become accustomed to the arrangements and view them as entitlements and a way of life.

Blaine Harden's new book, A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia, describes such a situation. The series of dams throttling the Columbia River and its tributaries delivers approximately 2.9 million acre-feet of water each year to 4,000 farmers in the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project. The average Project Farm has received a taxpayer subsidy of at least $2.1 million in the irrigation infrastructure. The government also guarantees electricity to Project farmers at one twenty-seventh the wholesale price.

Cheap power entices farmers to pump water to their crops, sell excess water to their neighbors, generate electricity from the water flowing through their irrigation canals, and then sell that electricity at market rates. Ninety percent of the cost of a profitable farm in the Project is borne by taxpayers and electricity consumers elsewhere in the country.

Of course, Project farmers love this system; "The more water they suck out of the river, the more profits they have."

In the Colmbia Basin, federal hydroelectric and irrigation programs from the New Deal have transformed once-arid farmland into a bountiful region producing alfalfa for Japanese cattle and 80% of America's fast-food french fries.

In Harden's words, the Columbia "was killed more than sixty years ago and was reborn as plumbing." The river where Lewis and Clark encountered "verry bad" whitewater rapids is now operated to mimick a lake sufficiently placid and stagnant for hydroplane races.

Special interests tranformed the Columbia into plumbing. According to historian Donald Worster, the Columbia was killed by dams and reborn as money. Hydroelectric dams mean big money to farmers, utilities, electricity consumers, the federal Bureau of Reclamation, and barge operators between Portland and Lewiston, Ida. New tourist and recreation industries, like windsurfing the Gorge, are inextricably tied to the river.

The federally subsidized conquest of the Columbia had its costs. Indian tribes lost their culture, their land, and their river. Today, 60,000 commercial fishing jobs are in jeopardy. And taxpayers still foot the bill. The last, and perhaps most pivotal, victim is the endangered salmon, for the conquest of the Columbia has decimated the region's wild populations. Over a quarter of the Northwest's salmon stocks are extinct, and half are endangered.

We can learn from Harden's stories: First, to restore the Columbia and its salmon, we must understand the diverse special interests surrounding the river. And second, subsidies and powerful centralized government action create special interests and institutionalize and channel their support. The result is overexploitation of both the environment and the federal budget.

Harden repeatedly demonstrates the effects of the "iron triangles" in the Columbia. An agency embarks on a public works project, private groups organize to collect those benefits, and they in turn support politicians who continue funding the agency's projects.

Harden tells how this political juggernaut brought pressure to bear on dissenters, like Professor Norman Whittlesey of Washington State University, who testified against the inefficiencies and wealth transfers of massive Project subsidies. Bureaucrats routinely suppressed evidence or simply ignored their deleterious effects on indians, salmon, and the environment. Farmers, barge operators, and utilities remain in denial. Harden quotes a teacher at Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake, Brenda Teals, who says, "Farmers think those irrigation ditches fell out of the sky."

The vast majority of worthwhile irrigation projects were built privately and without federal subsidies. Only after the best sites were developed were government subsidies required.

Can taxpayers still afford the iron triangles created by grandiose government schemes? The nation's taxpayers pay for 80% of most major irrigation projects. The farmers are encouraged to draw as much water as they can, the federal agencies are encouraged to "operate" the river like a machine, and the politicians are encouraged to appropriate more funds for their contributors.

This iron triangle polarizes Northwesterners. Harden relates "the most enduring consequence of federal control in my home country was not pollution, but intolerance." In Hanford, it was technocrats and technicians against indians and hayseeds. On the river, it was barge pilots against windsurfers and fish lovers. Inland, it was subsidized farmers against enviros seeking to dismantle the artificial foundation of the Northwest economy. Along the Cascade Mountains, it is becoming "East-siders" versus "West-siders".

The polarization has forest industries blaming dams, fishermen, and farmers. Farmers blame deep-sea gillnets. Fishermen blame dam builders. Barge operators blame bureaucratic meddling. Federal agencies deny responsibility and point to hatcheries. Utilities claim transporting salmon in trucks is better than letting them swim. Consensus seems more distant than Lewis and Clark's past.

Salmon and Northwesterners cannot live in harmony when politics generate benefits. The iron triangles produce toxic byproducts. As President Clinton has proclaimed, the era of Big Government is over. Blaine Harden's book tells why we should be grateful.