The usual suspects make up the rewilding sponsors: former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Dan Beard and Richard Ingebretsen’s Glen Canyon Institute. There’s also Clark County, Nevada Commissioner Tick Segerblom; Save the Colorado’s Gary Wockner; and nature photographer John Fielder. Great Basin Water Network and Living Rivers are co-sponsors.

“Rewilding” is hardly a new concept. In 1996, draining Lake Powell was ballyhooed by David Brower and the Sierra Club, so much so that Congressional hearings were held, though mostly to denounce the very notion.

“Circus atmosphere” is how one observer described the packed hearings. Colorado Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell went all the way over to the House to say, “This is a certifiably nutty idea,” reported Ed Marston in High Country News.

It was the Glen Canyon Dam’s heyday as cheap and plentiful electrical energy poured out of its eight hydro turbines. The 5-billion-kilowatt hours of power it produced each year was enough to power 650,000 homes. You could say that the Southwest’s building boom was enabled by cheap electricity that made air conditioning routine.

The biggest opponents of plug-pulling 26 years ago were water managers from the Upper Basin states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. They considered Lake Powell their “savings account” to ensure compliance with the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Other opponents were the 3 million annual visitors to the reservoir, appalled at the mere suggestion of losing southern Utah’s flatwater paradise. Houseboat shares, for example, are passed down generationally like heirlooms.

Now, rewilding is back for consideration, and while the contest is fuzzy on details — see www.rewildingcoloradoriver.org — its goal is crystal clear: How do we pop the cork on the 710-foot-tall concrete and steel structure holding back Lake Powell, the artificial 186-mile-long lake rimmed by sandstone cliffs?

As the West faces increasing aridity, rewilding advocates see the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that built and operates the dam, on its heels. Last year, it shifted water in a game of musical chairs, draining upstream reservoirs in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico, to shore up Lake Powell. The water shuffle was barely enough as water levels in the reservoir plunged 50 feet.

Meanwhile, big challenges face the empty-Lake Powell crowd. More than 1,000 dams have been removed throughout the country, and nature seems to start healing the land quickly. But draining Lake Powell with existing water outlets is impossible: The lowest diversions are the so-called “river outlet works” at 3,370 feet of elevation, which is still 237 feet above the canyon floor.

To make a river wild, it has to flow fast, at grade. Yet at grade is where the rebar-reinforced, 300-feet base of the dam shoulders hundreds of millions of tons of fine sediments behind it.

Drilling this beast would require advanced engineering and construction techniques. Then, releasing water through the hole is akin to popping a giant water balloon without getting a face full of sandy water.

Forty years ago, it was a wetter world, says commissioner Tick Segerblom, an ex-river guide and 4^th generation Nevadan. “The dam was nearly overtopped, lost in spring floods, and now it’s nearly drained.” He points to the damage the dam causes as sandbars disappear in Grand Canyon downstream and silt builds up behind the dam.

If there was ever a time to consider this radical rewilding notion, it’s now. A free-flowing Colorado River, says the Glen Canyon Institute, would still be a major tourist attraction, and Segerblom sees Page, Arizona, becoming the gateway to a new place called Glen Canyon National Park.

Restoring a wonder of nature — why not imagine it? A solution would have pleased David Brower, who regretted not fighting the dam. “Glen Canyon died,” he lamented in a Sierra Club book, “and I was partly responsible for its needless death.”

Perhaps this contest cracks the door to rebirth.

Dave Marston is publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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One outcome they pinpointed was the impact of heat and drought on water flows in the Colorado River. For the last 20 years this new climate, combined with booming human population growth, has parched landscapes, drained reservoirs and incited talk of water wars across the region. Lake Powell on the Colorado River, and Glen Canyon Dam which creates the reservoir, have become casualties of this strained environment.

Lake Powell is the second largest reservoir in the United States, but in the last year alone its water level  has dropped 52 feet and the reservoir now sits at 31.4% full.

If you’re a pessimist, that’s over 68% empty. Water managers are already imposing cuts in water deliveries in some states; all their choices are filled with political pitfalls.

A further complication is that the federal government operates a hydroelectric plant at Glen Canyon Dam that provides cheap electricity to parts of the Southwest. The day is coming when the hydroelectric turbines will stop for want of water to spin them.

To save the lake and generate electricity, the government needs water. But where will that water come from?

Upstream of Lake Powell, in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico are millions of acres of irrigated farms and ranches that suck massive amounts of water out of the Colorado River before it reaches Lake Powell. If those farms and ranches quit taking water and instead ran that water downstream, the lake and its electricity could be saved. To ensure that outcome, the federal government has hatched a plan it calls “demand management,” which proposes to buy or lease massive amounts of farm and ranch water to prop up Lake Powell.

On the one hand, the farmers and ranchers would get paid for the water, and likely paid very well. If I were a rancher who owned water, I’d sit comfortably until the offering price for my water made me even more comfortable.

On the other hand, lots of people and businesses believe that irrigated farming, ranching and outdoor recreation are not only central to the region’s economy, but also to its culture. Should that economy — and the soul of the Southwest — be sacrificed to save a manmade reservoir and its hydroelectricity?

I’m torn by this dilemma. If farms and ranches are dried up, more water flows down the river. More water in the river benefits fish and the environment. But there’s another solution: We can save farms and ranches and instead drain Lake Powell, freeing the Colorado River to flow free through 169 miles of a drowned and beautiful place called Glen Canyon.

There’s always the “save hydroelectricity” argument, but it’s a red herring. There are other ways to generate electricity, including wind and solar. In fact, if you’ve ever stood near Glen Canyon Dam and its hydropower plant, you can’t help noticing that it’s surrounded by millions of acres of dry, sun-drenched landscape that would make a great place for a solar electricity farm.

Electricity can be replaced; farms and ranches cannot.

As we grapple with these tradeoffs, it’s important to remember that even lower water flows are projected for the future, plus more severe heat and drought that will become the “new normal” for the Colorado River and the entire region. Lake Oroville, California’s second largest reservoir, now has inactive hydro turbines because there’s not enough water to turn them, its dusty lakebed a harbinger of what’s to come for Lake Powell.

Let’s also remember that Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1963 and it and Lake Powell are only 58 years old. The region lived without them before, and it can live without them again. Now, nature is forcing our hand, telling us that it’s time to breach the dam and let the Colorado River run free.

Gary Wockner is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a river-protection activist based in Colorado and runs the nonprofit Save the Colorado.

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