Column by George Sibley
Water – September 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
MY MOST DAUNTING TASK as Western State College’s “Coordinator of Special Projects” is pulling together the college’s annual summer Water Workshop, a cat-herding exercise that chases me all over the state to make deals with really busy people who are very serious about what is arguably the most important nexus of issues in the state, or the West. The world, for that matter.
Sometimes the circumstances of meeting with these people verge on the surreal — like the night in late June when I finally caught up with Doug Kemper, Director of Water Resources for the City of Aurora Utilities, at a public meeting up in Leadville.
An Aurora water official in Leadville? By the mythology of the West, that should have been an ugly meeting, maybe concluding with the guy hanging from a lamppost. We work pretty hard over here in the Upper Gunnison Valley at maintaining that old mythology, with a lot of feisty rhetoric about “water grabs,” “water export raids,” “stealing our water,” “drying up agriculture,” et cetera. “Whiskey’s for drinking; water’s for fighting,” we say. By that mythology, over here in the Upper Gunnison, the Union Park Project proposal for a big high-altitude pumped-storage reservoir for diversion of Upper Gunnison water to the Front Range was defeated because We the People of the Upper Gunnison fought off the water-raiding cities at the pass under the “Not One Drop” banner. The more tedious truth is that our lawyers proved to the judges that most of the water in question was in fact, by decree, truly our water and there just wasn’t enough left over for Union P
But the situation in Leadville that night in June didn’t adhere to the mythological script at all. Kemper and the Aurora team weren’t there trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, and whatever “Not One Drop” huffing and puffing the people of the Upper Arkansas might have wanted to do, had apparently been expended in the previous four “Water Aware!” meetings convened between the representatives of the people of Aurora and the representatives of the people of the Upper Ark. The meeting (moderated by Lake County Commissioner Bill Hollenback) was about Aurora getting more water out of the Upper Arkansas — water that was no longer “our” water but their water by purchase and decree, from Upper Ark people who chose to sell it. An unfortunate fact, undermining the mythology, is that most of “our” water in any given mountain valley is owned by Republican ranchers in what is basically a free market situation.
IN LEADVILLE, a roomful of people engaged in a careful but positive discussion about how Aurora could get its water out of the Arkansas River and into the South Platte in a way that would be not just least damaging, but most beneficial, to the people of the Upper Ark. And it revealed what is probably a central fact about water in the West in the 21st century: the metropolitan areas — regions, really — are going to grow and grow until we as a species figure out how to control (stop) our population growth globally.
Our cities will grow, not because people prefer living in cities to living in the country, but because — for the past 6,000 years or so — urbanization has been the only way to handle the global swarming of the human species. Unlike other swarming animal species in the past, who have experienced pretty quick population crashes, we have displayed the organizational and technological capability for increasing the earth’s carrying capacity for us, first through agriculture, then through urbanization (both, interestingly, attributed to the Bible’s first bad guy, Cain). The greatest human delusion of all is thinking that an anti-abortion, anti-birth-control, anti-disease species can somehow “control growth” (although the species does still give tacit approval to war and famine).
So we are going to continue to be an exploding population, striving for the organizational and technological structures that afford some degree of accommodation to that exploding population, and that means that immense cities are going to grow ever more immense, and reach out for the resources — especially water — to keep life liveable for their ever-growing masses. What realistic alternative is there, in a world that persists in the caveman theology of “go forth and multiply”?
So we should be glad when the cities try to come out politely, to those of us lucky enough to have spread out ahead of the sprawl, and say, how can we make the inevitable as painless as possible?
Two of the most interesting presentations, for me, at this year’s Water Workshop, were from Peter Binney, Aurora’s Director of Utilities, and Don Magnuson, manager of the Cache La Poudre Irrigating Company between Fort Collins and Greeley.
Binney is a direct kind of guy who begins by noting that he has to find water for a projected 200,000 new Aurorans by 2025, then says he believes that cooperation between the agricultural interests who control 70 percent of the state’s water, and the cities that have 20 percent of it, is what has to happen. And he is initiating a lot of creative ideas for that cooperation — like the idea of farmers fallowing a fraction of their land, which helps the land, at a price as good as growing crops on it would bring, and letting the cities use that water which isn’t spread out to dry on the farmland. The cities can afford the dollars; the farmland can stand the rest; and the old alarum about “cities drying up the farmland” is exposed as an unenlightened oversimplification.
The cities, of course, need some kind of long-term assurance, and if the farmers are unwilling to provide that — well, then, their farmland is probably just going to get dried up when they decide to retire or resign from a marginal business and sell out for whatever retirement package they can get. Most of the farmers in Eastern Colorado would probably benefit from fallowing as much of their land as Aurora is willing to pay them to fallow, rather than trying to raise crops on it in a market dominated in less generous ways by immense cities reaching out for food.
Magnuson, up in the Cache La Poudre valley, works for the farmers, but he is looking at that urban growth as an opportunity rather than (or at least as well as) a challenge. Suburban development involves a lot of what amounts to irrigation for that crop known as landscaping. So his company is investing in an efficient pressurized irrigation system that uses untreated irrigation water to serve both new suburban developments (at urban prices) and agricultural users (at agricultural prices) with modern efficient irrigation technologies. (The suburban users also get a treated water system for in-house uses.)
Magnuson concluded his presentation with this question: “Is urbanization a catalyst for beneficial change?”
Let’s just conclude this column with this thought: “If we can’t make urbanization a catalyst for positive change, then we are surely in for a dark, contentious and stupid future of negative change.” Because urbanization — the concentration of humans in ever more efficient socioeconomic systems — is now our only strategy, as a species, for dealing with our blighting success as a species.
George Sibley won’t have time to recover from the Water Workshop because now he’s organizing the Headwaers Conference in November at Western State College in Gunnison.
