Column by George Sibley
Water – July 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
I SHOULD PROBABLY consider myself lucky. As the coördinator of Western State College’s summer Water Workshop (July 23-25 this year), I get paid a big chunk of my income to think about water. That probably puts me in the lucky 25 percent of the state’s population; the other 75 percent of you have to think about water on your own time.
Well, that’s an exaggeration, of course. The ratio of Coloradans paid to think about water is probably a little less than 25 percent. But given the number of irrigation companies, public utilities, water user districts, water conservancies, water conservation districts, water authorities, water engineers, state and federal water quality officials, and the like, not to mention the army of water lawyers operating in a state that relies on the courts to adjudicate water use — the actual percentage of people whose working lives are consumed with thinking about water is undoubtedly higher in Colorado than it is almost anywhere else.
And given the fact that most of the state is semi-arid or arid (with less than 20 inches of natural precipitation a year, much of it at the wrong time), this may be appropriate; without water, after all, life as we know it is not possible.
What’s interesting about this is trying to figure out the underlying “mythologies” that subtly — or not always subtly — shape the way the unpaid masses are encouraged to think about water.
For the first two-thirds or three-fourths of the 20th century, for example, we were all encouraged to think that a wealthy and technologically advanced society had nothing to worry about — that the application of technology and money could move enough water anywhere the people needed it, for whatever purpose. Even if we had to alter the weather through massive cloud-seeding, even if we had to move rivers of water all the way from sparsely settled Canada to urban centers in the U.S. A powerful mythology.
This mythology was probably most crassly overstated in an overquoted misstatement that is probably the only thing former Colorado governor John Love will be remembered for. He supposedly said: “In Colorado water doesn’t flow downhill; it flows toward money.”
But from a 21st-century perspective, that is just the kind of myth that money liked to nurture about money — that money sat regally at the center, and the rest of the world came to it. You don’t have to look very closely at some of the water projects nurturing that myth — the Roberts Tunnel project, for example, which takes water from the Upper Blue River via Dillon Reservoir to the Denver area — to realize the truth. In relatively waterless places where people (and money) “pool up,” like the Denver metropolitan area, water doesn’t just flow in; instead, large quantities of money have to go out in trade for water.
And, as the ongoing discourse about the Union Park/Central Colorado Project, which would take water out of the Upper Gunnison watershed, indicates, ever larger quantities of money are going out in search of ever smaller quantities of water.
NOW THE STATE is investing half a million dollars just to study the “Big Straw” project, which would bring water back uphill, nearly to the Continental Divide from the Utah border. This project would cost billions if undertaken. And we are also being asked to vote in November on a referendum for two billion dollars for unspecified water projects.
For Colorado, the beginning of the end of that mythology of water came in 1977, when the Carter Administration said, fairly abruptly, that the federal government was no longer in the water development business in the West.
But a competing mythology had already begun to circulate circa 1970 with the passage of the National Environmental Protection Act. The new mythology received its most evocative Colorado expression in 1973 with the passage of the first state-level “in-stream flow” legislation, reforming (if not revolutionizing) the appropriations doctrine by permitting the state to appropriate water to be used “beneficially” in the stream for environmental purposes, rather than requiring appropriated water to be diverted out of the stream for uses beneficial only to humans.
This “environmental era” has now pushed the envelope in all manner of creative ways to keep water in the streams and rivers. The current challenge to the first-era dam-and-diversion mythology involves in-stream recreational uses — placing big rocks in the river to create “whitewater parks” that are sort of the riverine version of go-kart speedways, but which (at this point) can be used to obtain water rights through “in-stream diversions.”
THROUGH MOST OF THE 1990s, the underlying mythology was still based on the general American perception of abundance. It’s a mythology generated by the natural abundance of the most favored continent and the technological ingenuity of Americans who once seemed able to make more out of less where less is a factor.
Yes, there was enough water to have our lawns and endangered fish too; nature and culture could both be maximized; we could (if careful) have it all.
But the ongoing drought of recent years has started to gnaw away at our perception of fundamental, God-blessed American abundance. Either we have managed our reservoirs badly, or the cushion we thought storage provides is a lot thinner than we’d thought, and all sorts of ugly questions are rising out of the mudflats.
Can we continue to live like white folk and still pretend to be taking care of the environment? Is there really any unstored excess water that isn’t already being (over)used? And if there is, is Colorado really the best place to be trying to store and use it — at an escalating price that would horrify John Love? Are we going to have to choose between lawns and the pikeminnow?
These are interesting times. Full of challenges, although not necessarily the kind of challenges we like best, the kind that can be solved by big bold strokes with whizbang technology. The message that emerges from the coming mythology of limits is that, rather than being the changers, we may have to become the changed.
If you enjoy such odious contemplations, join us (Ed Quillen will be a speaker) in Gunnison at the Colorado Water Workshop July 23-25. Check out the program on the web at www.western.edu/water.
George Sibley teaches, writes, and organizes in Gunnison.