by George Sibley
Last month in this column, I began an exploration of “hydraulic societies” – societies whose existence depends on their ability to move water around. I quickly got in too deeply to get out in one column, and am picking it up again this month. The purpose of the columns is to serve as background for consideration of Colorado’s 2005 “Water for the Future Act,” now entering its fifth year – an interesting “experiment in democracy,” although it is seldom portrayed or perceived as that.
Summarizing last month’s discussion; I pointed out that historically hydraulic societies – most “ancient civilizations” – were seldom run democratically, and this remains generally true today, even in America. Large-scale hydraulic societies have always been run by “knowledge elites,” out of necessity – elites with the knowledge to build and run huge complex systems for irrigation and water supply.
But, I noted – the Central Colorado perspective – that the West is not all big “city-states” like Colorado’s Front Range. In the non-urbanized parts of the West, where everything except the scenery is more modestly scaled, there are smaller “hydraulic societies” that are actually quite democratic in organization and administration. The “ditch companies” that began as collaborations among settlers who quickly learned that – even for a bunch of rugged American individualists – working together worked for getting land under irrigation.
Because most post-Civil War settlers came west in retreat from the “plutocracy” dominating the Industrial Revolution back East, the main tenets of the “appropriations doctrine” they established for accessing water resources – which equated to accessing opportunity in the drylands – at least tried to maximize democratic access by limiting the amount of water claimed to the amount one could actually use “beneficially.” Allowing settlers access across each other’s land to get to the water encouraged collaboration among neighbors to create efficient irrigation systems. Communities that grew up around watershed-level irrigation were much more grounded in the democratic process than America’s urban-industrial mainstream.
The cliffhanger question at the end of last month’s exciting episode was – what happens when the urban technocracies, continually in search for more water for their great and growing cities, come up against the little watershed democracies that actually control the majority of the state’s water?
For most of the 20th century, as cities throughout the West reached out to water their growth, the urban “hydro-technocrats” tended to simply ignore the ditch companies and their communities. Maybe not consciously, but because that kind of community lay outside of the technocrats’ experience and, more importantly, outside of the problem they were addressing. To the managers and engineers and lawyers of the hydraulic technocracies, water supply was a problem to be solved by appropriating unappropriated water or buying it from willing sellers. They went straight to the farmers who were worn out, in trouble, or just ready to escape the tyranny of the milk cow, and were willing to sell the ranch that their kids didn’t want. In their world, we are all free economic entities for whom, like Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no community.”
Water law prevented changes of use (such as trans-basin diversions) injurious to any individual water-right holder, but there was no legal protection for the “hydraulic democracies” that the farmers had created around their ditches. Lawrence MacDonnell articulated this situation in his book, From Reclamation to Sustainability. He said, “What would it mean to have more than half [the irrigated lands] permanently removed from irrigated agriculture … for the businesses in adjacent communities closely tied to irrigated agriculture (seed companies, farm-equipment suppliers, processors, shippers)? For the businesses that benefit more indirectly (hardware stores, clothes stores, supermarkets)? For the schools, roads, and other county services supported by property-tax assessments?”
The technocrats from Denver Water or Aurora or Colorado Springs (unlike the plutocrats everywhere) are not evil people; they are just “can-do” problem solvers, often more than a little blindered by their specializations, and such considerations are not a conscious factor in the water-supply problem they were hired (not elected) to solve. And water law, which protected the people against the plutocratic speculator, gave the rural communities no protection against the legitimate juggernaut of the great and growing city. So, through the middle third of the 20th century, Colorado’s big urban water technocracies inadvertently attacked democratic communities by ignoring them and going for their weak spots. The Eagle, Blue and upper Colorado Rivers on the West Slope, and the Arkansas River on the East Slope have suffered from these thoroughly legal but culturally destructive “water raids.”
This was not addressed, or even acknowledged, until the decade of the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. what we hippies called “the dawning of the age of Aquarius,” although that eventually proved to be a false dawn in most ways. Still, that decade was quite possibly the most amazing outbreak of relatively peaceful, society-transforming democratization that the species has ever seen – especially in Colorado.
Most of the transformations of that decade were focused on environmental issues. But, at a fundamental political level, that was really a popular uprising against the plutocracy and its hired technocrats, a revolt against their management and control over our air, water, animal life, and remaining natural resources. A beautiful continent was being trashed and “we weren’t going to take it anymore.” This revolt resulted in such a deluge of environmental legislation that the plutocrats have still not been able to undo it all, although they still chip away diligently at that task.
In Colorado, we had some leadership that actually perceived – if only “as through a glass darkly” – the tension between the technocracy and the democracy as what it was, and they set about trying to restore some balance, or at least a dialogue, between what amounted by then to two alienated cultures. Dick Lamm, who was elected governor of Colorado at the end of that decade (terminated by the “First Oil Crisis”), was a legislator in the early 70s. He called the early 70s “a magic time in Colorado public policy” that “shows what a bipartisan group of legislators are capable of.” A Democrat himself, he gave the Republicans a lot of credit. He said, “Colorado was changing and most of us recognized that it was changing … But even I was shocked at how far the public had come, in terms of demanding new rules that protected environment and quality of life.”
Along with some important water legislation – most notably the nation’s first instream flow law in 1973 – those legislators also passed two laws that basically forced the technocrats of the great and growing cities to negotiate directly with the ditch democracies and their communities. These were two 1974 House Bills: the “Local Government Enabling Act” (HB 74-1034) and the “Areas and Activities of State Interest Act” (HB 74-1041). Together they empowered local governments to pass land use regulations that could, among other things, require substantial mitigation (beyond individual injury) for out-of-basin water diversions. The local will had to exist to pass and implement such regulations, but in the late 80s, Eagle County used its “1041 powers” – backed by the state Supreme Court – to make mitigation demands that caused Colorado Springs and Aurora to back away from their “Homestake II” expansion of an earlier transbasin diversion.
That “grassroots” victory for the hydraulic democracies, coupled with the EPA’s “top-down” environmental rejection of Denver’s Two Forks project, woke the technocrats and their employers up to the fact that they were going to have to talk to the democrats if they were going to solve their water-supply problems with additional water. The Two Forks rejection also made them realize that, instead of the old engineer’s “can-do” approach of just enlarging the water supply, demand-side measures – conservation and efficiency – would also have to become part of their solutions.
Forums began in the upper reaches of the Colorado River in the early 1990s, and continue there today. I happened onto a meeting in Leadville a couple years ago, where representatives from Lake and Chaffee Counties were in discussion with representatives from Aurora Water about some Upper Arkansas water Aurora owned – a mutually respectful meeting in which all parties were trying to figure out a no-losers resolution.
Formalizing the process that was happening informally gave it some status and structure with the 2005 passage of the previously mentioned “Colorado Water for the Future Act” (HB 05-1177). It established “Roundtables” in each of the eight major river basins that originate in Colorado, and a ninth for the “Metro Sink,” with participation legislatively mandated to include municipalities, counties, and environmental organizations as well as large water-right holders – the full hydraulic democracy. The Roundtables are charged with preparing thorough water needs assessments for both consumptive and non-consumptive water uses in their basins, and developing plans for addressing anticipated future needs.
HB 1177 also established an “Interbasin Compact Committee” (IBCC), made up of two representatives from each of the Basin Roundtables and some “state interest” appointments by the governor. This organization is charged with hosting open non-binding discussions between basins when trans-basin diversions are contemplated.
That is basically where we are today. Can the big technocracies that need more water and the little democracies that own the water rights work together constructively? Can they comprehend each other’s challenges and concerns, and work toward non-destructive solutions?
With “1177” moving into its fifth year, and all the basin Roundtables struggling with their needs assessments, the city-state technocrats confronting “The Gap” of a 100,000 acre-feet or so that the Front Range may need in the relatively near future, and the energy industry nosing around the state again, the State of Colorado may be in the position frustrated engineers speak of: “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you set out to drain the swamp.”
We need to try to remember, here in Central Colorado, that in a nation controlled by plutocrats, surrounded by city-states run by technocrats, it’s hard to keep a fragile democracy alive. But we may have better tools for it here than they have most other places, if we can just be patient, smart, and creative in using them well.
George Sibley was born is Western Pennsylvania, but was conceived in Colorado, by Colorado natives, and thus considers himself to be a native Coloradan.
