Contested Waters: An Environmental History of the Colorado River

Conclusion

233 Conclusion The story of the Colorado River is as convoluted as it is long, and defining its many rivulets is a complicated process. To fully understand this river and its past, one must examine many separate pieces of history scattered throughout two nations, in seven US and two Mexican states, and sort through large amounts of scientific data. One needs to be part hydrologist, geologist, economist, sociologist, and anthropologist, as well as a historian, to fully understand the entire story. Considering its narrow size and meager flow, this river’s tale is very large indeed. One of the world’s most important rivers, the Colorado ranks first in litigation and regulation. To the American Southwest, it means everything. What will happen to the Colorado River in the future is hard to predict and foreboding, but we have a clue from past human consumption and research that predicts longterm climate change. New players have entered the western water struggle and shifted the entire environment from one of power contests between elites to efforts to achieve conclusion 234 equity in the midst of increasing demands and decreasing resources. There are no easy formulas for success in efforts to both use the river and preserve its ecosystems. Likewise, there are no easy solutions to the disconnect between increasing demands and declining flows, between prior appropriation law and region-wide planning needs. Managing the future will require real sacrifices and serious conservation efforts from everyone. Present and Future Challenges Two overriding concerns dominated the river’s past and persist in the present: quality and quantity. Both exigencies still challenge users and planners looking toward the future of the Colorado River. Each issue impacts the other, creating a maze of possible answers to any single problem. While the challenge of quantity in shares of the river is perhaps the oldest issue, water quality has become perhaps the most poignant. In the longue durée of the earliest recorded years of human interaction with the river, its water went first to those who used it first, and smaller shares went to everyone who came later. Since the introduction of water law, the western water doctrine of prior appropriation might seem outdated today, but it remains very much alive in spite of agreements that set it aside. The 1922 Colorado River Compact, the first attempt to establish a fair distribution of the river’s water among the basin states, has only partially readjusted that distribution or clarified its meaning. In 1944 the United States finally recognized Mexico’s right to a fair share of the river’s flow. The problem of water quality first received serious consideration when Mexico protested increasingly high levels of salinity from agricultural runoff in the early 1960s. As a solution, the 1973 Salinity Control Act set levels of acceptable salinity at three points along the stream: below Hoover Dam, below Parker Dam, and at Imperial Dam on the border. Today, these target levels remain the same, but efforts to keep salinity at or below those standards require more and more direct intervention. Wastewater treatment plants up and down the river remove tons of salt every year, and regulating effluent is an ongoing project throughout the basin. Water quantity remains a difficult challenge, and the 1,450-mile river dictates its own terms here. Earlier experiments with weather modification failed to bring more rain to the basin, and augmentation plans collapsed because other river basin consumers were unwilling to risk their own resources. To address increasing population pressures, Colorado River basin states have over-tapped and diverted so much of the flow that there is no more surplus to bank against future shortfalls. Cyclical drought has always been a reality in the Southwest, but short human memory led users to assume that temporary abundance was the norm. Seeing shortages on the conclusion 235 horizon, states claimed and diverted as much water as possible before others took it all. Today, climate change threatens to decrease the river’s flow, perhaps by as much as 20 percent, making any previous divisions of its water obsolete. To answer this and all other challenges, approaches vary widely. Wrapped up within these two issues are ongoing contests between agricultural and urban users, state governments and Indian communities, the United States and Mexico, environmentalists and water districts . Clearly, there is no simple binary conflict between two sides in this insolvable contest over water. Basin States and...