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THE COLORADO RIVER - Background In the 19th century, the river determined settlement patterns in the region, and people accommodated themselves to the water. Then, during the first half of the 20th century, dams and diversions plumbed the river to support economies of extraction, like mining and agriculture. By the end of the century, 30 million people, most living in distant urban centers, have come to rely on the river; and most western issues, whether environmental, agricultural, recreational, political, or more broadly economical and social, can be traced to the Colorado River. Much has been gained and lost as a consequence of the law of the river, the changing demands on it, and changing regard for it. Every community in the Colorado River watershed, whether in different states, countries, or bioregions, shares the river. While all watershed communities are dependent on the river, they are not all aware of their historical connections and current dependence and interreliance.
There is a river, but it is hidden in at least four senses. One, the 1,700-mile river and tributaries water nine states (seven in the U.S. and two in Mexico); the causes and consequences of actions up- and downstream are hidden from each other by huge distances. Two, a complex set of legal rights and technological interventions diverts water from the river hundreds of miles from its banks, via canals and diversion structures, to urban archipelagoes such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, San Diego, and Denver. Millions of people in these remote-from-the-river cities are unaware of their connection to the waters. Three, the plumbing of the Colorado is so efficient and works so well that it is a resource taken for granted, even though it is fundamental to most settlements in the region. And four, the laws and regulations that determine the waiter's allocation and use are, historically, among the most important laws enacted in the West, but seldom understood or even known by the general public. As the noted scientist-novelist Primo Levi said, water is bound to man, indeed to life, by a long-lasting familiarity, by a relationship of multifarious necessity, due to which its uniqueness is hidden beneath the crust of habit. This seven-state project invites westerners to peel back that crust, to reveal aspects of that taken-for-granted relationship, and to see how the Colorado's water historically and currently binds the region together in distinctive ways.
Just as the Colorado River is made of many tributaries, so the story of the Colorado has many contributing elements. The river is a lens through which to see the major regional characteristics that define the West. The campaign to control the river and harvest its yield for agriculture, energy, and even recreation, for example, drowned river canyon contours and replaced nature with artifice, a key defining quality of the modern western landscape. Federal ownership and investment made possible the transformation from seasonal flooding to turn-it-on-with-a-switch plumbing This federal assistance also highlights another pervasive western condition - the sometimes perplexing relationship between westerners and Washington, D.C. On the one hand westerners are eager for Congress's funding, whether for dams, agricultural subsidies, or land management, but at the same time they often appeal to the myth of rugged individualism (the idea that individuals alone tamed the West) to complain about federal interference.
The bill of rights that allocates the river's resources was created, largely, with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, an extremely important but generally unknown piece of legislation (except among water managers and their lawyers). The language and results of the Compact negotiations speak to us today about how society in the 1920s, as represented by seven commissioners (one each from Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), and Herbert Hoover, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, conceived of how to divide the waters. Based on erroneous estimations of total river flow, and of course not taking into account the explosive growth in some of the then less populated states, the Compact allocated water to the Upper and Lower Basins with the dividing point at Lee's Ferry. Although the Compact was designed to remove causes of present and future controversies, it simply set the stage for waging water wars that continue to this day. The negotiations are remarkable for what they did not consider. The commissioners parsed the waters without Native American representation and with only a hint at Mexico's rights, telling us something about the political and social climate in the early 1920s. They could not have foreseen the acts, compacts, treaties, agreements, contracts, and Supreme Court opinions that would follow based on their division of the waters. No one could have anticipated the full impact of the water diversions on the riparian habitat and indigenous fishes found nowhere else on earth. Nor could anyone, at that time, have predicted the tremendous post-World War II population explosions in urban centers far from the river that would require ingenious technological solutions to carry the river to water their gardens.
It is important to note that by 1922, when the Compact was signed, the early conservation movement had already culminated with three imperatives that guided the examination of the relationship of humans to the environment. One, there were scientific and technological concerns accompanied by faith in the human capacity to manage human impact. Two, there were philosophical and ethical values that posed wilderness and the natural world as a moral and spiritual resource for urban, industrial America. And three, there were aesthetic issues that forged a perception that wildlife and the West were recreational resources for Americans. By 1920 the national park system was established, forest management became professionalized and scientific, wildlife refuges were set aside, environmental standards for public health and housing for city life were established, and conservation (Teddy Roosevelt style) was national policy. At the same time, the laws that governed western expansion, dealing primarily with mining, timbering, grazing, and agriculture, trumped the conservation movement and set the stage for the 1922 Compact. The waters of the Colorado were divided and the era of big dam building began.
Looking back 80 years on the ideological climate of the Compact signing and the supplemental agreements, Americans have an opportunity to understand our evolving relation with the river in our own times. Dams and canals along the Colorado River were symbols of a progressive West in the 1920s. Fresh water flowing to the sea was perceived as "wasted," and had to be "captured" and "harnessed"to make the desert bloom. The quest for control peaked with construction of Hoover Dam in 1935 and through the 1960s, when fourteen other main stem dams were built on the river, and dozens of others on its tributaries. At the end of the 20th century, many westerners are adding up the cumulative costs of this thinking and the actions that followed. The sums reflect our vulnerabilities (we can now measure the degraded quality of the water as it is used and reused as it travels downstream), and we are now contemplating and undertaking restoration of portions of the river. As Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt says, Restoration invites us to understand how the natural world functions as a whole. And the best unit to measure that whole, how it is more than the sum of its parts, is the river that runs through us Back to History/Overview | Top of page
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