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30: Policy Implications
- University Press of Colorado
- Chapter
- Additional Information
397 In the West, when you touch water, you touch everything. —Wayne n. aspinall inscribed on Town park Memorial, palisade, Colorado The Platte River system once provided paths for the great Platte River Road—the convergence of the Oregon, Mormon, California, and Overland trails through the high plains east of the Rocky Mountains (Mattes 1969). From the mid-1840s through the early 1860s, over 350,000 people of European descent traveled west on that road—one of the greatest human migrations in world history. For them, it was mostly a path to someplace else by following a river that would water them and their livestock. There was little thought of paying allegiance to that river or its encompassing prairie. Over the past 100–160 years, at least some citizens have learned to pay closer attention to a river system around which people have since settled and staked their futures (see Appendix G). Now the peoples of the basin have set about to modify the Platte River Road by launching a modest river preservation and restoration program. Their representatives have inserted new rules and tools into their relationships with each other and with the river. They have broken a new piece of trail that holds new possibilities, new allegiances , and new self-governance of their water commonwealth. Designer river The story of water management has always been one of mobilizing individually self-interested people into organized collective action so they could be empowC h a p T e r 3 0 Policy implications pol iC y iMpl iC aT ion s 398 ered to do things together not possible through individual effort. To reconfigure the rivers of the Platte Basin, people had to organizationally reconfigure themselves . It has been an uncomfortable trial for those who underwent the ordeal. Each ditch, each river segment, each shared aquifer, each trans-mountain water import project has its tale of organizational, legal, and technical struggles as people sought to transcend their individual self-interests to reshape their water commons , on which their welfare ultimately depended. Asking people to set aside some measure of immediate advantage on the promise of an as yet unknown, organizationally coordinated and proportionate effort for the commonweal has never been easy or quick. Now water leaders, as river re-designers on the Platte, have been at it again (see Appendix H). This time they have inserted an ecosystem agenda—modest to be sure—into the pattern of things. In a preliminary way, this new design element promises to implement a habitat recovery program for target species listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). This effort is to be accomplished on a basin-wide collaborative basis rather than permit by permit, enterprise by enterprise, water use by use. It will proceed not in cordoned-off parks, forests, or national monuments but rather across landscapes on which people conduct their regular rural and urban commerce, their personal and civic lives amid complex and rapidly evolving biotic webs. In the middle of the utilitarian quest to satisfy human preferences, an explicit but undetermined value has been placed on the worth of non-human species, a value not reflected in marketplace exchange, a value sufficiently important under the law that human agendas will reconfigure in the pursuit of it. value of the recovery Program By whatever measure, will the Platte River Habitat Recovery Program be any good? One may as well ask, what is the worth of a newborn baby? The worth of babies and newly born habitat recovery programs is found in their unfolding potentials . Those become apparent only as they are nurtured by the assets of enveloping communities. What is clear, however, is that the Platte River Habitat Recovery Program has constructed a new Platte River Road for water providers to move forward with their fundamental objective—to serve their mandate as enablers of economic growth. The meaning and ultimate value of the recovery program will depend largely on how the peoples of the basin transcend immediate self-seeking rationality to guide the uses of water the program has made available. economic growth Debate The Platte River Habitat Recovery Program has been designed to permit future human uses of basin waters while simultaneously restoring and sustaining habi- [3.235.22.225] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:37 GMT) pol iC y iM pl iCa Tion s 399 tats for target species. The economic growth agenda has never been far from the surface of the talks. Each state and its respective water providers...