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xix P r e F a C e Water is a social organizational phenomenon, and thereby invites sociological analysis, because people need to control water in ways that simply cannot be produced by individual action. When water diverted from a river to a canal hits a crop root zone at the right time, place, amount, and quality to grow our food and fiber, it is because people have organized to make it so. They mobilized themselves to construct river and ditch organizations essential to growing corn, dry beans, and the many other products we enjoy at the dinner table. Likewise, when river flows have shifted away from the natural cycles of spring flood peaks and summer rain pulses that inundate wetlands and nourish a great diversity of life forms in uncounted ecological niches, it was because people organized to make that so. Around the world, water users go into marketplaces and are promptly provided—given sufficient capacity to pay—with desired agricultural implements , seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and all the other necessary items that directly benefit both buyer and seller. However, in no water culture have people been able to order up in those same private transactions a unit of ditchwater control, a “fair share” allocation of stream flow, a solution to the problem of the conjunctive use of well water with surface supplies by neighbors and others more remote, or an increment of improved ecosystem diversity. Such challenges require coordinated action by social organizations beyond the capacity of marketplaces alone to provide. The account of a river’s degradation and restoration must therefore in critical respects be a social organizational story. Pr eFa Ce xx In their historical struggles with each other and with the arid high plains environment, people of the Platte River Basin have evolved a rich organizational capacity to do things collectively that could not be accomplished through private exchange in marketplaces. They organized to divert water into ditches, to share the “shrink” among parties on those leaky canals, and they employed their collectively owned and managed water systems as a foundation upon which to construct their communities. Then, to protect those communities from the depredations of newcomers upstream, they organized to allocate scarce water among ditch headgates along extensive stream systems. When surface water sources no longer sufficed, many people sought relief in the use of groundwater; this, in turn—at least in many places in the basin—has compelled additional organization to integrate generally newer groundwater exploitation with older surface water uses. Now, this organizational tradition has been put to a more recent test in the Platte River Basin. Could the tradition that grew up on a heavy dose of utilitarian water use—largely blind to environmental consequence and forged around boundaries that divided the federal government from the states, the three basin states from each other, user from user, and environmentalist from environmentalist—foster a successful basin-wide program of collective cooperative action for integrating habitat needs of three birds and a fish within the water management agenda? The purposes of this book are to (1) document the way organizational interests representing three states—Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming—and the federal Department of the Interior came to collaboratively seek remedies for degraded habitats under the terms and conditions established by the Endangered Species Act of 1973; (2) describe how these entities have mobilized to address the problems of habitat restoration; and (3) advance sociological propositions regarding conditions under which organizations of water providers were mobilized to transcend their narrower self-interests and produce a collective environmental good from which they can capture no greater benefit than any entity that was not involved in the negotiations or in developing the resulting habitat recovery program. The method has centered on capturing the essential shape of multiple sets of negotiations that were ongoing from the mid-1970s to late 2006 in the Platte River Basin. Negotiations entailed an ambitious set of talks between water users and environmentalists, between rival water users within and among states, between water users and state authorities, and between states and the federal Department of the Interior. The research intent has been to be attentive to positions and processes , to the exertions of leaders and their organizations as they have collectively approached the creation of something new under the high plains sun—a set of agreements that will re-time Platte River Basin water flows to provide improved river and terrestrial habitat for threatened and endangered species. [18.188.40.207] Project...

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