The Role of Climate on Water Institutions in the Western Americas
For the International Water History Association1
Paris, France, December 1, 2005
By Justice Gregory J. Hobbs, Jr
Colorado Supreme Court
The early 21st Century drought in Colorado and the western United States has
produced a citizenry highly interested in all matters of climate and water supply. This
interest particularly extends to decision-makers at all levels of government, including
local, state, and national legislators, executive officials, and judges. In all cultures of
the western Americas in all ages, drought has shaped communities and their water
institutions.
Because water is so vital to people and the environment, those who live in the
water-scant lands have always been preoccupied with the climate. Securing as firm a
water supply as possible to grow crops, sustain businesses, and provide water to city
residents, has always been an economic necessity for states of the United States
whose territory lies west of the Hundredth Meridian. In these areas, precipitation
averages less than 20 inches per year, and cyclical droughts remind each generation
that water is life.
Summiting at the Great Divide of the continent, my own state of Colorado sits
at the headwaters of four major river systems, the Platte, the Arkansas, the Rio
Grande, and the Colorado. The first three are tributary to the Atlantic Ocean; the
Colorado, to the Pacific. Living as they do at the heart of the continent and
experiencing cyclical drought in every generation, Coloradans are vitally interested in
water matters.
As a Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, I am involved in the decision of
water law cases appealed directly from the seven water courts comprising major
watersheds of Colorado. To each of the seven water divisions is assigned a water
judge and a Division Engineer. Under laws adopted by the Colorado legislature, the
Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court designates one of the local district
judges in each of the seven water divisions to be the water judge. The State Engineer,
who is the executive head of Colorado’s Division of Water Resources, supervises the
seven division engineers. The division engineers and the local water commissioners
distribute, in order of adjudicated priority based on actual beneficial use, the available
surface water and tributary ground water to those who hold water use rights
recognized by a court decree.
Each of the seventeen western states of the United States—north to south from
North and South Dakota to Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, then west to
Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Washington,
Oregon, Nevada, and California—has its own system for establishing and
administering water use rights. The single greatest common characteristic of this vast
area is cyclical water shortage. In many years, there is simply not enough available
water to satisfy all potential uses. As urban areas grow, there is increasing pressure
for conversion of agricultural water to municipal use and increasing need for
conservation measures.
1
See Justice Gregory J. Hobbs, Jr., The Role of Climate in Shaping Western Water
Institutions, 7 Univ. Den. Water L. Rev. 1-46 (2003) for an earlier article regarding
this topic.
1
A stereotypical view of western United States water law is that it was
developed by Utah Mormons and California miners. But, the technology and
practices of water development by Native American and Hispanic communities in the
Americas are far older and demonstrate the impact of recurring drought on the laws
and customs of every people in every generation in the western United States, Central
America, and South America.
Contemporary Setting: Early 2lst Century Drought
The first five years of the Twenty-First century have commenced with an
enormous drought in the western United States. The worst single year was 2002. The
forests of Colorado were on fire. Municipal water suppliers enforced water rationing
by price surcharges and strict regulation of landscape watering. Farmers suffered a
major decline in the water available for growing crops. Television, radio, and the
internet were full of drought and climate change news.
Normally, Colorado produces an annual average of 16 million acre-feet of surface
water and tributary groundwater available for delivery to water users (conversion
factor: acre-ft x 1233.49 = cubic meters).
Of that amount, approximately 10 million acre-feet is delivered on average
annually at the boundaries of the state to satisfy legal obligations imposed by nine
different interstate compacts and three equitable apportionment decrees of the United
States Supreme Court.
In 2002, Colorado rivers totaled a water production of 4 million acre-feet of
water, one fourth of its annual average. Much of that water had to be delivered out of
state to satisfy Colorado’s interstate obligations. Colorado sustained itself in that year
through severe conservation measures and by emptying for use 6 million acre-feet of
its 6.6 million acre-feet of active storage reservoir water.
In the course of this drought experience, Coloradans have learned about the recurring
visitation of drought in the Americas and its influence on native peoples and the early
2
non-native settlers who instituted similar practices of canal and reservoir construction.
Two emerging sciences, climatology and paleohydrology, greatly inform this
learning.
Paleohydrology
Paleohydrology is the study of ancient water works and water use. Coloradans
Ken and Ruth Wright—he is the senior engineer for Wright Water Engineers and she
is a member of the Board of Directors of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy
District—have established a paleo-hydrology institute for research into ancient water
practices.
Teaming with the Peruvian archeologist Alfredo Valencia, the Wrights have
focused on Tipon and Machu Picchu in Peru. They have concentrated their Colorado
work on Mesa Verde National Park in cooperation with the National Park Service and
the Colorado Historical Society. With the Wrights’ reports, books, and drafts of
forthcoming publications in hand, I visited these sites between 2002 and 2005 and
participated in the survey of the fourth Mesa Verde reservoir, Boxelder.2 As Vice
President of the Colorado Foundation for Water Education, I have been privileged to
discuss and write about the cultural and legal history of western water institutions in
citizen and professional venues.
Tipon
Tipon is located 13 miles down the Huatanay River Valley from Cusco, Peru.
Located at 12,000 feet in a high ravine, Tipon’s 500-acre enclosure is a paradigm of
careful water planning for food supply and ceremonial purposes. Its aesthetic, highly
functional design holds an ascending stair-step arrangement of 13 skillfully
constructed agricultural terraces for the growing of maize. Up to 500 people may
have lived within the four-mile long perimeter wall that surrounds Tipon. A number
of crop storage, dwelling, and ceremonial structures are still visible.
A comprehensive drainage system underlies the entire site. Points of waterdischarge slot through walls of shapely-fitted stone that contain fertile soil the
workers brought in for cultivating. These people knew that carefully tended earth was
vital to survival, so they created places within the mountain sides built to be
earthquake and erosion resistant. During the cool of the night, these durable walls
gave back absorbed solar heat to the growing plants. The site’s constant flow of water
also helped to moderate against freeze.
Water ritual is vital to Andean way of life. In the ceremonial center of Tipon,
a perennial spring feeds a magnificent fountain. Four jets of singing water fall
gracefully into a splash pool. This water is drinking water pure. The jets are welldesigned for easy filling of water jars. After stilling, the water trails down through a
2
Tipon: Water Engineering Masterpiece of the Inca Empire by Kenneth R. Wright,
P.E. (ASCE Press forthcoming 2005); Kenneth R. Wright and Alfredo Valencia
Zegarra, Machu Picchu, A Civil Engineering Marvel, ASCE Press, Reston, Virginia
(2000); Ruth M. Wright and Alfredo Valencia Zegarra, The Machu Picchu
Guidebook, A Self-Guided Tour, Johnson Books, Boulder, Colorado (2001); Kenneth
R. Wright, Water for the Anasazi: How the Ancients of Mesa Verde Engineered
Public Works (Public Works Historical Society 2003).
3
combination of above ground and below ground conveyances onto the lower
agricultural terraces.
These people early-practiced conjunctive use of ground and surface water.
The upper agricultural terraces receive water through a surface diversion from the Rio
Pukara 0.84 miles away. Three canals and an aqueduct system take this river water
into Tipon for irrigation, supplementing the spring water.
When visiting Tipon, you can ascend the agricultural terraces one-by-one
along a walking path. At your feet a stone channel runs water. You can see and hear
many other conduits conducting water across and through the walls, down wall-faces,
along wall footings. The place resounds with singing and working waters!
Above all looms 13,000 foot Tipon Peak on which the Cruzmoqo is
prominent. This is a revered shrine, signal station, and security outpost site marked
with ancient petroglyphs. You can circumnavigate by foot an entire mountain side,
and feel why the Quechua people have always believed these mountains are sentient.
Ken Wright calls Tipon a "water garden." His forthcoming book contains a
fascinating description of Andean/Peruvian topography, history, culture, climate,
environment, religion, agriculture, government, engineering, and public works
construction spanning 2000 years. The Inca perfected Tipon into a royal estate, but
people of the area grew crops and lived within this challenging montane stronghold
long before that.
The Inca learned their lessons about feeding and governing people by means
of a well-designed system of land and water works from their predecessors, the Wari
and Tiwanaku cultures. An important feature of the Tipon book is Gordon McEwan's
chapter devoted to the history, culture, and archeology of the Lake Titicaca/Cusco
highlands. McEwan, an American archeologist working with Peruvian crews, has
devoted twenty-five years of his life to the study of the nearby Pikillacta and
Chokepukio sites in the Cusco Valley.
Machu Picchu
The Inca were master water handlers. They chose Machu Picchu as a
ceremonial center because the mountains and the river spoke to them of life-giving
power. The Urubamba River far below snakes triangular around the base of Machu
Picchu and Huayna Picchu mountains. A saddle between these peaks cradles the
temples, rock shrines, dwelling places, and agricultural terraces that dance between
the clouds in early morning and emerge to sunlight by Noon.
Water is at the center of all. The paleohydrologic studies of the Wrights and
Valencia reveal how the Inca predicated the design and construction of Machu Picchu
upon the flow of a spring. From high on the side of Machu Picchu Mountain, the
restored canal brings water across an agricultural terrace to the first fountain just
above the Temple of the Sun. From there, sixteen restored fountains splash, spout,
and sing down a staircase to the Temple of the Condor.
The Inca Canal cuts across the drainage moat to bisect the western and eastern
urban sectors. The water supply canal passes right by food storehouses. Inca stones
rise on either side to form the ceremonial and residential edifices; and the cropgrowing terraces on the flanks of the cradle falling away to the Urubamba River.
Central to the architecture of Machu Picchu is a central staircase featuring
sixteen fountains. Underneath the entire site is the invisible sixty-percent of Machu
Picchu. The Inca edifices and agricultural terraces stand the test of time because of
careful drainage and methodical trenchwork. The visible forty-percent of Machu
4
Picchu rests on mountain bedrock and the skill of people who learned through
ancestral experience how to counter earthquake and erosion’s despoiling effect.
Apparently, the Inca did not irrigate the agricultural terraces at Machu Picchu,
although they did so at Tipon. The rainy season and supplemental importation of
agricultural products met the needs of the small resident population and the influx of
those attending rituals. The Inca ruler Pachacuti began Machu Picchu as a ceremonial
retreat in A.D. 1450. It likely ceased normal operation by A.D. 1540 due to the
collapse of the Inca Empire under Spanish invasion.
Dr. Gordon McEwan explains in a June 2002 National Geographic Magazine
article how the Inca culture built upon the Wari culture (A.D. 600-1000). At
Pikillacta, the Wari relied on an aqueduct whose portals also served as gateways and
guard ways to the Cusco Valley.
Mesa Verde
William H. Jackson, photographer and artist, accompanied the mapmakers.
As a member of Ferdinand V. Hayden's Survey of Colorado in 1874-75, Jackson
described the Pueblo ruins of the Puebloans (Anasazi) in the Mesa Verde region. High
up on the side of a southeast-facing cliff, he spotted ruins of ancient homes up a series
of weathered steps perched—almost impossibly—on sheer vertical space ledges.
Opposite one of the rooms was "a large reservoir, or cistern, the upper walls of which
came nearly to the top of the window." 3
In 1893, the archaeologist G. Nordenskiold found what he called "conclusive
evidence that the cliff-dwellers had to contend with the same dry climate and the same
scarcity of water as now obtain in these regions."4 He described an ancient
reservoir—enclosed by a circular wall, with a ditch running into it—he found on
Chapin Mesa. Nearby were the ruins of a considerable village. Referring to the ruins
of ancient Native American irrigation works discovered in Arizona (the Hohokam
built and operated hundreds of miles of canal in the Gila and Salt River Valleys5),
Nordenskiold conjectured, "It is not at all improbable that irrigation by artificial
means was in use even among the prehistoric inhabitants of the Mesa Verde."
Recent survey, engineering, and archeological work by teams of the Wright
Paleohydrological Institute—in cooperation with the National Park Service and the
Colorado Historical Society—have confirmed the existence of four ancient Mesa
Verde reservoirs. Examination of sedimentation samples, soil and pollen testing, and
broken pottery and other cultural artifacts, have produced estimates of the operational
life of these reservoirs:
• Morefield Reservoir in Morefield Canyon (AD 750-1100)
• Far View Reservoir (also known as Mummy Lake) on Chapin Mesa (AD 950-1180)
• Sagebrush Reservoir on an unnamed mesa west of Chapin Mesa (AD 950-1100)
• Box Elder Reservoir in Prater Canyon (AD 800-950).
3
Jackson may have been mistaken in this assumption. The Wrights are working with
the Ute Mountain Ute tribe to determine whether the structure Jackson described as a
cistern was or was not a water storage vessel.
4
G. Nordenskiold, The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde 73-74 (Mesa Verde Museum
Association, Inc. 1990) (1893).
5
John E. Thorson, Ramsey Laursoo Kropf, Dar Crammond & Andrea Gerlak,
Dividing Western Waters: A Century of Adjudicating Rivers and Streams, 8 U. DENV.
WATER L. REV. 355, 391 (2005).
5
The Morefield reservoir mound is 220 feet in diameter, rises 16 feet above the
valley floor, is 21 feet deep, and has a long berm-looking structure extending north
from the reservoir up the valley floor to intercept the intermittent stream channel. The
entire structure looks like an inverted frying pan. Sediment samples showed that clay
and sand were carried into the reservoir from the stream channel; the clay helped to
seal the reservoir from leaking. The Puebloans mucked out the sediment as best they
could, throwing the material onto a growing embankment. The mound rose over the
centuries from sedimentation. What probably began as a hole dug into the channel to
intercept shallow groundwater became an off-channel reservoir as the intermittent
stream routed itself around a rising embankment.
Potsherds in the Morefield Reservoir trench are evidence that the people
dipped water out of the reservoir and carried it away in water jars. They used deer
antlers, sticks, and baskets to muck out the reservoir. The Puebloans used a feeder
ditch or canal to divert water into the reservoir. There are numerous large stones
lying at the surface of the dike that extends from the reservoir north. The rocks are
aligned and clearly appear to have been placed there, not washed in. This evidence
shows a 1400 foot long diversion canal that intercepted the stream for conveyance
into the reservoir.
Apparently, the Puebloans used the four reservoirs for a drinking water
supply. At Mesa Verde, they were dry land farmers on upland areas using check dams
and growing maize and storing it in nearby granaries they built of rock. They had a
generational knowledge of droughts; they tried to keep up to two years of maize in
storage.
There's a great kiva near the Morefield Reservoir. House ruins in the vicinity
show a population of nearly 500 people. The Boxelder Reservoir, in Prater Canyon
only a 45-minute walk over the ridge, was also a canyon bottom reservoir depending
upon intermittent storm runoff. It too was fed by an upstream canal whose alignment
and diversion point shifted as the stream channel shifted. The surrounding area
abounds in pottery and tool artifacts of the Pueblo I and Pueblo II cultures.
Located on Mesa tops where stream channels did not exist, Far View and
Sagebrush reservoirs intercepted runoff from side slopes.
Paleoclimatology, Peru and Colorado
Working with ice and soil cores, seashells, tree rings and other physical
evidence, climatologists are making great contributions to the understanding of
cyclical floods and droughts in the Americas and their effect on people and the
environment. Because stream gauging data typically is available only for the 20th
Century, reconstruction of pre-record climate variations is contributing greatly to
public understanding about how climate has shaped and continues to shape water
institutions.
For more than 2,000 years, the Andean people of Peru—Pucara, Tiwanku,
Wari, and Inca—depended on irrigated agriculture to feed themselves. To a
significant degree, they structured community organization around the construction,
operation, and maintenance of water facilities.
A 1500-year climatic record compiled through core analysis of the Quelcayya
Ice Cap, halfway between Tipon and Lake Titicaca, illustrates that they faced cyclical
droughts of similar, if not greater intensity, than those that shape contemporary water
laws and management institutions. The evidence shows that prolonged and severe
6
drought occurred from 563 to 594 A.D., followed by well above-average precipitation
from 740 to 950 A.D., followed by 350 years of progressively drier weather.6
The 6th Century drought apparently prompted the Tiwanku people to institute a
raised field system that allowed them to prosper another 400 years. Ditch water
surrounded raised agricultural mounds. Warmed during the day, the water helped to
keep the crops from freezing during the cold Andean nights. Then a dry period
commenced 950 A.D. and culminated in a major drought from 1240 to 1300 A.D.7
Quelcayya Ice Cap Reconstruction Data, Peru8
Irrigated terraces enabled the Wari in the Ayachuco area to survive the 30-year
6th Century drought, but their period of decline around 1000 A.D. paralleled that of
the Tiwanku. The people who had lived in the larger centers dispersed into numerous
smaller villages.9 About 1400 A.D., the Inca commenced an incredible
organizational effort that spanned 3,400 miles. They mastered public works
construction of canals, roads, buildings, monuments, temples, irrigated terraces and
stone wood food storage warehouses.10 While the Inca perfected the fine water
engineering workmanship of Tipon in the 15th Century as an estate for the nobility,
the Andean people had already been practicing at the site their inherited irrigation,
6
Wright, Tipon at 32-35.
Id. at 36-37, 42.
8
Id, fig. 03-02. .
9
Margaret Young Sanchez, Tiwanaku, Ancestors of the Incas 21 (Denver Art
Museum 2004).
10
Id. at 39.
7
7
domestic, and ceremonial water technology for at least three centuries before. A
perennial spring helped the people of Tipon weather water-scarce times.11
During the time of the four ancient Puebloan Mesa Verde reservoirs in
Colorado—750 to 1180 A.D.—four significant drought cycles occurred. Population
declined during these periods, but the people hung on until southwestern Colorado
emptied by 1300. The drought cycles were 805-825 A.D., 880-890 A.D., 1130-1180
A.D., and the “great drought” of 1276-1299 A.D.12 Maize was the staple of these
people, and climate was likely a contributing cause to their migrations south to the
established Rio Grande communities in New Mexico.13
Powell’s Observations of Native American and Mormon Water Practices
Following his audacious 1869 and 1871 river running explorations of the
Colorado River, John Wesley Powell became one of the foremost articulators of
western United States water policy in the face of scarcity.
During his survey of the Colorado Plateau in the early 1870s, Powell
encountered Native Americans. Fascinated with them, he undertook to study their
ways and became Director of the Bureau of Ethnology, the first effort of the United
States Government, to record and preserve the Nation’s rich anthropological heritage.
With colleagues he commissioned and trusted, he pursued these studies and issued
numerous reports at the same time he was directing the U.S. Geologic Survey, the
first scientific agency dedicated to the study of the country’s land and water.
In 1870, Powell traveled with Mormon missionary Jacob Hamblin across the
Colorado Plateau from Kanab to the Hopi mesas. He learned close up how Mormon
and Native Americans in this part of the arid country operated community water
systems. These communities sharply contrasted from the Shivwits and Southern
Paiutes who lived a harsh existence, depending on the harvest of wild fruits, native
grains, yucca, small game, and grasshoppers.14
The Mormon communities spread themselves by sending out missionaries
whose job it was select a town site that would be the center of neighboring farms.
Working under a bishop, the new arrivals would fence the farms and “make the canals
and minor water-ways necessary to the irrigation of the land. The water-ditch and
fence of the farm are common property.”15 Mormon irrigation commenced in Utah in
1847.16 By 1865, there were 277 canals in Utah, with an average length of 3.7 miles
11
Id. at 43.
Carla R. Van West, Reconstructing Prehistoric Climatic Variability and
Agricultural Production in Southwestern Colorado, A.D. 901-1300: A GIS Approach
at 29, and Eric Blinman, Adjusting the Pueblo I Chronology: Implications for Culture
Change at Dolores and in the Mesa Verde Region at Large, at 55-56, in Art
Hutchinson & Jack E. Smith, Proceedings of the Anasazi Symposium (Mesa Verde
Museum Association Inc. 1991); Wright, Water For the Anasazi at 72-73.
13
Id. at 16-17
14
William deBuys, Ed., Seeing Things Whole, The Essential John Wesley Powell 100102 (2001) quoted from An Overland Trip to the Grand Canon, Scribner’s Monthly
10/13 (October 1875): 659-78.
15
deBuys at 109, The Ancient Province of Tusayan, Scribner’s Monthly 11 (1896):
193-213.
16
Leonard J. Arrington and Dean May, A Different Mode Of Life: Irrigation and
Society in Nineteenth-Century Utah, in James H. Shideler, Editor, Agriculture in the
Development of the Far West 7 (1975).
12
8
each, the farms being relatively close to the water source. In comparison, the 1870
Union Colony canals in Colorado were 16 and 36 miles long.17
A Navajo boy guided Powell and Hamblin onto the Hopi mesa at Oraibi. Here
is Powell’s description of the Oraibi gardens:
After dinner, we descended from the table-land on which we had been riding,
into a deep valley, and having crossed this, commenced to ascend a steep
rocky mesa slope by a well-worn trail, and were surprised, on approaching the
summit, to find the slope terraced by rude masonry, which had evidently been
made with great labor. Theses terraces, two or three acres in all, were laid out
in nice little gardens, carefully irrigated by training water from a great spring
in little channels along the garden plats Here we found a number of men,
women and children from the town of Oraibi gathering their vegetables. They
received us with a hearty welcome and feasted us on melons.18
Powell visited seven Hopi “towns,” as he called them, staying a total of two
months studying their language, customs, and religion. He described the careful way
they grew corn of different colors and made a marvelous sheet of paper-like bread we
recognize as tortillas. He also described kiva ceremonies he was privileged to
witness.
Powell himself became fluent in most of the region’s native tongues. He and
his colleagues compiled 200 vocabularies, and in 1877, he published one of his most
significant works, the Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages.19 In keeping
with his belief in the value of irrigated agriculture, he thought the Indian reservations
should be irrigated, and expert farmers sent to help them.20
Powell’s Arid Lands Report
In his 1879 arid lands report to Congress,21 Powell identified principles of
climate, necessity, law, and beneficial use remarkably similar to those the Colorado
Territorial Supreme Court had announced in its 1872 Yunker v. Nichols22 opinion and
embodied in the provisions of the state’s 1876 Constitution:23
The ancient principles of common law applying to the use of
natural streams, so wise and equitable in a humid region, would, if
applied to the Arid Region, practically prohibit the growth of its most
important industries.
....
If there be any doubt of the ultimate legality of the practices of
the people in the arid country relating to water and land rights, all such
17
Id. at 8.
deBuys at 120.
19
William H. Goetzmann, Exploration & Empire, The Explorer and the Scientist in
the Winning of the American West 569 (1966).
20
Id. at 570.
21
John Wesley Powell, Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1983 Facsimile
of the 1879 Edition); Strickler v. City of Colorado Springs, 26 P. 313, 316 (Colo.
1891).
22
1 Colo. 551 (1872)
23
Colo. Const. Art. XVI, sections 5, 6 & 7.
18
9
doubts should be speedily quieted through the enactment of
appropriate laws by the national legislature. Perhaps an amplification
by the courts of what has been designated as the natural right to the
use of water may be made to cover the practices now obtaining; but it
hardly seems wise to imperil interests so great by intrusting them to the
possibility of some future court made law.24
Powell emphasized that priority of utilization, based on seniority of rights,
should apply in times of short supply based on the “necessities of the country.”25 He
would limit the water anyone could appropriate to water actually needed for use; his
caveat was that water ought to be tied to the land permanently, a position he
reasserted when serving as a member of the Public Lands Commission but which
Colorado departed from in allowing the transfer of agricultural water use rights to
other uses at other locations.26
Like the Native Americans, who animated his ethnology work,27 Powell saw
spiritual meaning in working water in the arid regions. “It may be anticipated that all
the lands redeemed by irrigation in the Arid Region will be highly cultivated and
abundantly productive, and agriculture will be but slightly subject to the vicissitudes
of scant and excessive rainfall.”28 Climate, flood and drought, the power of divinelyinspired human labor teamed with natural cosmic forces to make a settling place
through science, engineering, law, individual and community enterprise, and
enlightened public policy—Powell harnessed Stephen Long’s desert view and
William Gilpin’s garden view29 into a vision of government in service to the cause of
western settlement.
Powell saw the necessity of invoking the power of the national government to
aid the farmer; otherwise, corporate monopolies—not animated by the public
interest—would control the scarce water resource. His vision started with cooperative
efforts, like those of the Mormons in Utah and the Union Colony in Colorado, to
construct ditches from the streams to the land.30 Inevitably, however, the settlers
could not—within the limits of their own labor and finances—construct the reservoirs
that would be needed to compensate for nature’s yearly watershed rhythm of a flood
24
Powell, Arid Lands at 42-43.
Id. at 43.
26
Donald Worster, A River Running West, The Life of John Wesley Powell 378
(2001).
, at 378.
27
Id. at 371.
28
Powell, Arid Lands at 10.
29
In 1820, U.S. Major Stephen Long surveying what is now eastern Colorado
proclaimed it to be part of a great desert that would never be cultivated. In contrast,
William Gilpin, Colorado’s first Territorial Governor, promoted western settlement
during a cycle of wet weather, exclaiming that “rain follows the plow.” After
President Lincoln removed Gilpin as Territorial Governor after one year in office, he
became a land speculator and a railroad and irrigation proponent. In numerous
speeches and writings that received nationwide attention, he argued, “Colorado’s
dryness was an advantage, for irrigated farming was the most efficient form of
agriculture . . . .” Thomas L. Karnes, William Gilpin: Western Nationalist 318
(1970).
30
Powell, Arid Lands at 11.
25
10
of water off the mountains from spring snowmelt, then a relative drought when the
heat of mid-summer requires crop water but the streams ebb low.31
Powell advocated the organization of irrigation and land use districts, and
supported laws that would institutionalize the ability of western settlers to survive and
enjoy living on the land.32
A series of alternate droughts and flash floods during the late 1880’s
and early 1890’s brought [western farmers to] the belated realization
that they could not maintain their farms unless they stabilized their
water supplies by building larger reservoirs and stronger dams and
canals than those they had attained so far through private effort.33
With congressional funding, the U.S. Geological Survey produced a survey of
potential reservoir sites and a short-lived piece of Powell-proposed legislation to
withdraw reservoir sites from settlement under the Homestead laws,34 so they would
be available for use as needed in the future.35
Powell envisioned segmenting major rivers into a series of “natural districts”
or “hydrographic basins” for the resolution of land and water problems; each district
would own the water within its boundaries, and each landowner in the district would
share in the water and water decision making.36
Powell’s Truncated Reservoir Survey
From his field work, Powell realized that the standard survey grid and the 160
acre Homestead Act tract plunked down on mountain or plains terrain in the dry
country made no sense. He advocated 2560-acre pasturage farms and 80-acre
irrigation tracts; he wanted the Geological Survey to parcel out tracts based on a
sensible view of the available resource. For grazing he advocated community
common range as the Spanish villages in New Mexico had practiced since the 17th
Century; for water sharing he also favored a community approach.37 Representative
Patterson of Colorado called Powell a “charlatan in science and intermeddler in affairs
of which he has no proper conception.”38
When “Big Bill Stewart” of Nevada returned to the Senate in 1887 on a
platform of free silver and irrigation, he thought Powell to be an irrigation advocate.
Of course Powell was more than that, he believed in sensible land use, taking into
account the limited nature of the West’s resources, particularly its water.
In 1888 Representative George Symes of Colorado, sensitive to the anger of
his constituents against land speculators, inserted an amendment that withdrew from
settlement “all lands made susceptible of irrigation” by the reservoirs and canals
which the Geologic Survey would locate. This withdrawal would aid better
development and water use, but its effect was to suspend all existing land laws for the
31
Id. at 12–14.
Powell, Arid Lands at 40–45; Worster at 479–86.
33
David Lavender, Colorado River Country 173 (1982).
34
De Buys at 214–15.
35
Worster at 356-58.
36
Id. at 494–95.
37
Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundreth Meridian, John Wesley Powell and the
Second Opening of the West 227-28 (1954).
38
Id. at 239.
32
11
irrigable lands.39 At first Stewart went along, but when it became clear Powell would
release no lands for irrigation until the entire reservoir and canal survey was complete,
Stewart exploded and successfully got the survey extinguished.
Powell was not cowed; addressing the Irrigation Congress in the early 1890s,
he warned there was not enough water to irrigate all the lands the dreamers had in
mind. Nevertheless, his vision of local water districts in charge of water rights and
decision making—aided by national legislative and administrative policy—has been
followed throughout the West, at least in part, through local district sponsorship and
operation of reclamation projects.
Like President Thomas Jefferson before him, Powell foresaw the West’s
future in terms of an enduring agrarian democracy; instead over 87% of the people of
the western United States now live in urban/suburban areas. Colorado’s population
has grown from 2 million in the year 1970 to 4.6 million today; an additional 2.5
million people are expected by 2030.
Colorado and Western Water Law Deriving From Water Scarcity
As tree-ring and archeological evidence shows, extended droughts frequently
visit the western region. Drought’s lasting legacy is written in the history of
Colorado’s water laws and institutions.
The years from 1865 to 1872 were dry.40 In 1872, the Colorado Territorial
Supreme Court issued its first water decision, Yunker v. Nichols.41 The reality of
settling into the arid lands, long known to the Native and Hispanic Americans42 by
hard experience—that water is a scarce and precious community resource—produced
a radical break from the pre-existing English and American common law, which the
Territorial Supreme Court encapsulated as the ruling principle of Colorado water law:
[R]ules respecting the tenure of property must yield to the
physical laws of nature, whenever such laws exert a controlling
influence.
In a dry and thirsty land it is necessary to divert the waters of
streams from their natural channels, in order to obtain the fruits of the
soil, and this necessity is so universal and imperious that it claims
recognition of the law.43
39
Id. at 303.
Carl Abbott et al., Colorado: A History of the Centennial State 157 (3d ed. 1994).
41
1 Colo. 551 (1872).
42
Three hundred or more acequias, direct flow water ditches, were operating in New
Mexico by the 1800s. New Mexico State Engineer's Office, Acequias (July 1997),
available at http://www.seo.state.nm.us/water-info/acequias/acequias-ditches.html
(last modified Oct. 29, 1998). The oldest continuous water right in Colorado is the
San Luis Peoples Ditch constructed by Hispanic settlers on the Sangre de Cristo Grant
in 1852, 9 years before the establishment of Colorado Territory. Benjamin Eaton,
later a member of the Colorado Territory Legislature, a framer of the Colorado
Constitution’s water provisions, and Governor, learned to construct ditches and work
water in the early 1860s on Maxwell Land Grant acequias in Northern New Mexico.
He helped lay out the 1870 Union Colony ditches and other water canals along
Colorado’s Front Range. Jane E. Norris & Lee G. Norris, Written In Water: The Life
of Benjamin Harrison Eaton 32, 220-22 (1990).
43
Yunker, 1 Colo. at 553.
40
12
The law of water scarcity and need—so the court declared—imposed a
servitude across private and public lands for the building of ditches to divert and carry
water to its place of beneficial use for irrigation, wherever that might be.44 The preexisting English and American common law assigned the right to use the waters of the
stream only to those who held land adjoining the stream, limited the amount to de
minimus consumption, and required the landowner’s consent for any crossing of
property or the construction of facilities on the lands of another.45 Yunker v. Nichols
abrogated all three of these pre-existing property right formulations in favor of public
water ownership and the establishment of use rights therein by private individuals and
public agencies.46
Although the court based its decision in part on a statute of the first territorial
legislature in 1861,47 it baldly proclaimed that the necessity of water use in the arid
climes prevented the legislature from repealing the fundamental right of the people to
access and use the scarce public water supply:
I conceive that, with us, the right of every proprietor to have a
way over the lands intervening between his possessions and the
neighboring stream for the passage of water for the irrigation of so
much of his land as may be actually cultivated, is well sustained by
force of the necessity arising from local peculiarities of climate . . . .
It seems to me, therefore, that the right springs out of the
necessity, and existed before the statute was enacted, and would still
survive though the statute were repealed.
If we say that the statute confers the right, then the statute may
take it away, which cannot be admitted.48
The 1876 Colorado Constitution ratified the principles of Yunker v. Nichols,
establishing prior appropriation for beneficial use as the governing precept for the
waters of the natural stream, and providing for a right of private condemnation across
the lands of another to build the necessary water works for beneficial use.49 In 2002,
the Colorado Supreme Court, citing the court’s 1872 decision, reiterated the Colorado
Doctrine as follows:
Advancing the national agenda of settling the public domain
required abandonment of the pre-existing common-law rules of
property ownership in regard to water and water use rights. Reducing
the public land and water to possession and ownership was a
preoccupation of territorial and state law from the outset. A new law
44
Colorado law initially focused exclusively on irrigation, despite the stereotypical
belief that mining produced the water law. Not until 1903 did Colorado adopt an
adjudication act that provided for decreeing the priority dates of all beneficial uses,
not just irrigation. See Gregory J. Hobbs, Jr., Colorado’s 1969 Adjudication and
Administration Act: Settling In, 3 U. DENV. WATER L. REV. 1, 9 (1999).
45
Yunker, 1 Colo. at 552–53.
46
Id. at 556, 559.
47
Act of Nov. 5, 1861, §1–6, 1861 Colo. Sess. Laws 67–68 (protecting and regulating
the irrigation of lands).
48
Yunker, 1 Colo. at 570 (Wells, J., concurring).
49
COLO. CONST. art. XVI (1876).
13
of custom and usage in regard to water use rights and land ownership
rights, the “Colorado Doctrine,” arose from “imperative necessity” in
the western region. This new doctrine established that: (1) water is a
public resource, dedicated to the beneficial use of public agencies and
private persons wherever they might make beneficial use of the water
under use rights established as prescribed by law; (2) the right of water
use includes the right to cross the lands of others to place water into,
occupy and convey water through, and withdraw water from the
natural water bearing formations within the state in the exercise of a
water use right; and (3) the natural water bearing formations may be
used for the transport and retention of appropriated water. This new
common law established a property-rights-based allocation and
administration system which promotes multiple use of a finite resource
for beneficial purposes.50
The water provisions of Colorado’s 1876 Constitution and its Adjudication
Act of 1879 were prompted in part by upstream/downstream junior/senior disputes
caused by water scarcity.51 The Union Colony—downstream at the confluence of the
Cache la Poudre and South Platte Rivers—built and began to operate their irrigation
canals, only to find in 1874 that diversions by a new upstream ditch near present day
Fort Collins had reduced the Cache la Poudre’s flow to a trickle.52 Clearly, the
priority system and its enforcement—prior reliance on turning the water to beneficial
use and protecting that use—had to be institutionalized within the three branches of
Colorado government for the benefit of the citizens. Therefore, the Colorado General
Assembly assigned the state’s judiciary to decree water rights priorities, and the state
and division engineers and the local water commissioners to enforce them.53
The roots of Colorado water law reside in the agrarian, populist efforts of
miners and farmers to resist corporate capitalism and speculative investment that
would corner the water resource to the exclusion of actual users settling into the
territory and state. In this context, Colorado’s adoption of the principle that the public
owns the water, its abolition of riparianism (the ownership of water by reason of
private land ownership along the banks of streams), its constitutional limitations on
maximum rates that individuals or corporate suppliers can charge for water, the actual
beneficial use limitation restricting the amount of water that can be appropriated from
the public’s water resource, and the right to obtain a right-of-way to construct water
facilities across the private lands of another, all reflect the anti-monopolistic, antispeculation under girth of this state’s water law.54
During the latter half of the 19th and early part of the 20th Century, the state
courts and legislatures evolved the following fundamental principles of western
United States water law still applicable today:
Bd. of County Comm’rs v. Park County Sportsmen’s Ranch, 45 P.3d 693, 706
(Colo. 2002).
51
COLO. CONST. art. XVI (1876); Act of Feb. 19, 1879, 1879 Colo. Sess. Laws 94.
52
ROBERT G. DUNBAR, FORGING NEW RIGHTS IN WESTERN WATERS 88–89 (1983).
53
Gregory J. Hobbs, Jr., Colorado Water Law: An Historical Overview, 1 U. DENV.
WATER L. REV. 9, 10 (1997).
54
David B. Schorr, Appropriation as Agrarianism: Distributive Justice in the
Creation of Property Rights, 32 Ecol. L. Q. 3, 33, 41, 55-56 (2005).
50
14
--An appropriation of the public’s natural stream water resource is only for
actual beneficial use;
--Actual beneficial use is the basis, measure, and limit of every appropriation;
--The “natural stream” governed by the doctrine of prior appropriation
includes ground water that is tributary to a surface stream (this is recognized
by the vast majority but not all of the western states);
--To be recognized, water rights to use of natural stream supply must be
adjudicated to ascertain their priority and extent;
--Every decree recognizing a water right to waters of the natural stream
contains an implied limitation restricting diversions to those needed for actual
beneficial use, regardless of the diversion rate stated on the face of the decree;
--Every appropriator is entitled to maintenance of the stream conditions,
subject to natural fluctuations, as they existed at the time of the appropriation;
--Appropriators must employ an efficient means of diversion and conveyance
to the place of use;
--In times of short supply, the water officials must administer water rights in
the order of their decreed priority;
--Junior water rights, including rights to use ground water that is tributary to a
natural stream, must be curtailed to the call of seniors, unless out-of-priority
diversions are accompanied by adequate replacement water under a courtapproved augmentation plan or state engineer-approved substitute supply plan;
--New water rights (also called “conditional rights”) cannot be decreed in the
absence of available un-appropriated water, taking into account the historic
exercise of senior water rights;
--Changes of water rights, whose purpose is to continue an appropriation in
effect under its priority date for another type or place of use, or through a
different point of diversion, are limited to their historic beneficial consumptive
use measured over a representative period of time and cannot be decreed if
they will cause injury to other water rights;
--A state must comply with the interstate compacts and United States Supreme
Court equitable apportionment decrees that define the allocation of interstateapportioned waters.55
Drought-Induced Water Institutions
The years 1893-1905 witnessed multi-year cycles of severe drought in many
areas of the West. In southwestern Colorado, 1899-1902 saw four consecutive years
with less than 80 percent of average precipitation. Faced with an unreliable water
supply, the West’s largely agrarian society struggled to remain productive.
To promote continued settlement and development of the western United
States, Congress passed the 1902 Reclamation Act, creating the Bureau of
Reclamation. Today, the Bureau of Reclamation is best known for its construction of
more than 600 dams, power plants, and canals across the 17 western states.
One of the first authorized Bureau projects in Colorado was the Gunnison
(Uncompahgre) Project in western Colorado. The Uncompahgre Project, opened in
1909, now irrigates some 80,000 acres from Montrose to Delta. The Gunnison
Tunnel made the project possible, diverting Gunnison River water through 5.8 miles
of solid rock into the Uncompahgre Valley.
Empire Lodge Homeowners’ Ass’n v. Moyer, 39 P.3d 1139 (Colo. 2001); Santa Fe
Trail Ranches Prop. Owners Ass’n v. Simpson, 990 P.2d 46 (Colo. 1999).
55
15
In October 1929, the Wall Street crash launched the nation into the worst
depression in American history. Further intensifying the economic crisis, the most
widespread and longest lasting drought in Colorado’s recorded history dragged on
from 1930-1940, famously known as the “Dust Bowl Years.” Severe drought peaked
in 1934 and 1935, culminating in 1939 with one of the driest years in recorded
history, especially along the Front Range.
In March 1933, desperate to bolster the failing economy, Franklin D.
Roosevelt called a special session of Congress to develop a series of programs known
as the “New Deal.” As part of these efforts, Congress gave the newly-created Public
Works Administration $3.3 billion for construction of public works projects,
including reservoirs.
By 1937, Colorado Senator Alva B. Adams and Congressman Ed Taylor
helped secure reclamation funding from the Interior Department to construct, among
others, the Colorado-Big Thompson (CB-T) Project. One of the first of its kind to
provide both agricultural and municipal water, this project tapped the headwaters of
the Colorado River by boring a hole through the Continental Divide. Presently, the CBT Project delivers over 200,000 acre-feet of water each year to northeastern
Colorado for agricultural, municipal, and industrial uses, with Green Mountain
Reservoir providing some 100,000 acre-feet of water annually for western slope use.
The Dust Bowl years motivated the Colorado State Legislature to find better
ways to manage water locally. The 1937 Conservancy Law created a network of local
and statewide water management agencies known as conservancy districts. Created to
construct, finance, and manage water projects, today 51 conservancy districts operate
in Colorado. The Legislature also established three conservation districts to assist in
the development of water policy: the Colorado, Rio Grande, and Southwestern
conservation districts. On a statewide level, the Colorado Water Conservation Board
was established to coordinate the protection and development of the state’s waters.
From 1950 to 1956 another drought hit the West, with some areas reporting
conditions more severe than the Dust Bowl. In response, in 1956 the U.S. Congress
enacted the Colorado River Storage Project, a savings account of reservoirs designed
to help the Upper Colorado River Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and
Wyoming) meet their 1922 Colorado River Compact entitlements. The resulting
projects —the Aspinall Unit, Navajo, Glen Canyon, and Flaming Gorge dams—today
provide substantial hydropower and recreational benefits along with local water
supply and interstate water delivery functions.
During the dry years of the fifties, farmers faced with dwindling surface water
supplies looked to newly-improved groundwater well-pumping technologies to keep
their crops from failing. But many of these wells tapped groundwater tributary to
surface water. This meant that in some years, pumping of these wells diminished the
water available to senior surface water rights. In 1965, the Colorado Legislature
passed the Groundwater Management Act, requiring every new well in the state
diverting tributary, nontributary, Denver Basin groundwater, or geothermal resources
to have a permit.
Coinciding with a sustained multi-year drought from 1974 to 1978, state
lawmakers started to put efforts into planning for prolonged dry cycles. By 1981,
Colorado initiated drought planning efforts at the state and local level incorporating
monitoring, impact assessment, response, and mitigation systems. These efforts
presaged a much more concentrated state drought coordination role in the 2002
drought, as Colorado stream flows fell to one-fourth of the annual average.
16
Timeline of Drought and Important and Important Policy and Legal Changes
Drought
Duration
1865-1872
Region Impacted
Policy and Legal Changes
Statewide
1890-1894
Eastern Colorado
1898-1904
1930-1940
Southwestern
Colorado
Statewide
1950-1956
Statewide
1974-1978
1980-1981
Mountains &
Western Slope
1872: Colorado Territorial Supreme Court
announces basic water law principles of water
scarcity and public access to water sources for
beneficial use.
1897: Colorado General Assembly adopts first
statutes allowing exchanges of water rights
between agricultural, municipal, and other
users.
1902: Congress adopts Reclamation Act providing
federal aid for irrigation projects.
1937: General Assembly creates Water Conservancy
and Conservation Districts, and the Colorado
Water Conservation Board.
Congress authorizes C-BT Project
1948 Upper Colorado River Basin Compact
1956: Congress adopts Colorado River Storage
Project Act; authorizes Glen Canyon, Flaming
Gorge, Aspinall, and Navajo dams
1965: Colorado Groundwater Management Act
1981: Water Availability Task Force established;
Colorado Drought Response Plan developed
The severe drought year of 2002 prompted the Colorado Supreme Court to
order the State Water Engineer to curtail the pumping of junior tributary ground water
wells in the South Platte River unless accompanied by court-approved augmentation
plans to replace depletions that diminished the supply of water otherwise available to
senior rights.56 The General Assembly responded by allowing the State Engineer to
approve annual substitute supply plans for continued ground water pumping while
permanent plans of augmentation were pending in water court. But 1000 out of
approximately 4000 wells have been unable to locate replacement water sources and
are subject to shutdown orders by the State Engineer.
Since 1891, Colorado law has allowed the sale and transfer of water rights
from agricultural to municipal use.57 Because of its concern about the permanent loss
of agricultural lands and the economy they generate for rural Colorado, the legislature
has adopted laws that allow temporary leases of water for municipal and
environmental needs. Farmers may lease their consumptive use water to cities for
three out of ten years. They may also provide water to the Colorado Water
56
Simpson v. Bijou Irrigation Co., 69 P.3d 50 (Colo. 2003).
Strickler v. City of Colorado Springs, 26 P. 313, 316 (Colo. 1891). Also, High
Plains A & M, LLC v. Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy Dist., 120 P.3d 710
(Colo. 2005); ISG, LLC v. Arkansas Valley Ditch Ass’n., 120 P.3d 724 (Colo. 2005).
57
17
Conservation Board on a temporary basis to supplement stream flow for preservation
of the environment.58
Drought and the 1922 and 1948 Colorado River Compacts
The 1922 Colorado River Compact59 divided the virgin flow of the Colorado
River between the lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada and the
upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
Apportioning the waters on the basis of an assumed annual average of 16
million acre-feet of water available at Lee Ferry, Arizona, the dividing line between
the two basins, this compact assigned each basin the right to make 7.5 million acrefeet of beneficial consumptive use annually (conversion factor: acre-ft x 1233.49 =
cubic meters).
Taking into account Arizona’s use of the Gila River, the compact also allows
the lower basin to increase its use another 1 million acre-feet annually. The upper
basin states agreed not to deplete the flow of the Colorado River at Lee Ferry more
than 75 million acre-feet on a 10 year running average. The seven states agreed that
any water required for delivery to Mexico would come out of surplus water; in the
event of a deficiency, the upper and lower basin would contribute one-half of the
Mexican delivery requirement.
The 1945 United States-Mexico Treaty guarantees Mexico a delivery of 1.5
million acre-feet annually from the Colorado River.60 When the upper basin states
were negotiating the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact of 1948, water studies for
the 1914-1945 period showed a virgin supply of 15,638,500 acre-feet of water.
However, the studies also showed for the drought period 1931-1941 that the annual
average flow was only 10,151,000 acre-feet at Lee Ferry and as low as 4.4 million
acre-feet in 1934.61
While negotiations for the 1948 Upper Basin Compact were ongoing, the
United States Bureau of Reclamation in July of 1947 issued a report on potential
water development projects in the Colorado River Basin. If all of the projects studied
for the upper basin were built, total depletions there from existing projects and new
projects would amount to 9,136,500 acre-feet.62 Because the 1922 Compact allocated
at most 7.5 million acre-feet annually to the upper basin, the Secretary of Interior
recommended a moratorium on projects until the upper basin states entered into a
compact among themselves for their share of Colorado River water. The Bureau’s
studies showed that the upper basin, during a critical period such as 1931-40, would
have no more than 6,077,000 acre-feet of water available to it after taking in account
reservoir evaporation.63
Faced with federal pressure, an uncertain water supply, and the need for
federal funding of large carry-over storage, the upper basin states agreed to divide the
58
§§ 37-80.5-104 to -106, 37-83-104, 37-83-105, 37-92-309, C.R.S. (2004).
§ 37-61-101, C.R.S..
60
59 Stat. 1219.
61
Vol. III, Record Upper Colorado River Basin Compact Commission, Negotiation of
Upper Colorado River Basin Compact 62 (1948).
62
The Colorado River, House Document 419, Eightieth Congress, First Session,
Interim Report on the Status of the Investigations Authorized to be Made by the
Boulder Canyon Project Act and the Boulder Canyon Project Adjustment Act 37 (July
1947).
63
Id. at 33-34.
59
18
Colorado River water available to them under the 1922 Compact by percentages:
Colorado 51.75%, Utah 23%, Wyoming 14%, and New Mexico 11.25%.
Recent reconstruction analysis through tree ring studies shows an annual
average virgin water supply of 14.7 million acre-feet of water at Lee Ferry. Based on
an annual 8.3 million acre-feet of delivery by the Bureau out of Lake Powell past Lee
Ferry—7.5 million acre-feet for the lower basin states and 750,000 acre-feet for
Mexico—this leaves the upper basin states 6.4 million acre-feet annually for their use
(including reservoir evaporation) 1.1 million acre-feet short of what the 1922 compact
envisioned for them.
To help fulfill the promise of the 1922 Compact, Congress adopted the
Colorado River Storage Project Act,64 resulting in the construction of Lake Powell
just above Lee Ferry and the upstream Aspinall, Navajo, and Flaming Gorge
reservoirs. During the early 21st Century drought, the Bureau of Reclamation’s
operation of these reservoirs has avoided a compact call by the lower basin states
against the upper basin states.
Nevertheless, prospects of multi-decadal drought, as demonstrated by the tree
ring studies, has propelled the United States and the seven Colorado River Basin
States into examining shortage and curtailment measures to enforce the 1922
Compact. Fear of drought and the necessity of supplying community water continue
to animate the western Americas.
On August 25, 2005, representatives of the seven Colorado River Basin states
wrote the Secretary of Interior, Gale Norton, concerning their intention to negotiate
drought criteria to avoid litigation over Colorado River Compact issues. Among the
goals of this negotiation are to: (1) “maximize the protection afforded to the Upper
Basin by Lake Powell against possible calls upon the Upper Basin to curtail uses;” (2)
premise “shortage guidelines . . . upon proportionate sharing of shortages by Mexico
pursuant to the Mexican treaty;” (3) design “management strategies” that are
“designed to delay the onset and minimize the extent and duration of shortages in the
Lower Basin;” (4) “develop a prioritized list of specific measures that will result in
the more efficient management of the River in the Lower Basin;” (5) “analyze and
implement a program of tamarisk eradication throughout the basin;” and (6)
coordinating the operation of Lake Powell above Lee Ferry and Lake Mead below
Lee Ferry under drought conditions, first under a set of interim criteria, to be
followed later by longer term criteria.
The graphics that follow clearly demonstrate how the tree ring reconstructions
of major drought periods and huge population growth have spurred the willingness of
the seven Colorado River Basin states to enter into an entire new arena of discussion
and management of the river. Solving problems rather than litigating potential legal
issues concerning the 1922 Colorado River Compact is the most worthy aim of these
hopeful discussions.
The American West’s population surge has happened during an unusually wet
climate period. Public officials must now turn to conservation, desalinization,
proportionate shortage-sharing, farm to city water leasing and other strategies to meet
water supply and environmental needs, even in normal water years. The very real
possibility of drought much longer than those of the 1930s, 1950s, and early 21
Century droughts deserves the highest degree of public attention.
64
43 U.S.C. § 1501.
19
Woodhouse, C.A., S.T. Gray, and D.M. Meko, in review. Updated streamflow
reconstructions for the Upper Colorado River basin. /Water Resources
Research/.
Population Growth of Colorado River Basin
1900-2000
60
1978 to 1997: 4th
Wettest 20-Year Period
in last ~450 Years
(Woodhouse et al.)
Other 6 Basin States Combined
Population in Millions
50
California
40
30
20
1905-1924: 2nd
Wettest 20-Year
Period in last ~450
Years (Woodhouse
et al.)
1922: Colorado
River Compact
Negotiated
Population Data Source:
www.census.gov
10
0
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
Image Courtesy Brad Udall, CU-NOAA Western Water Assessment,
http://wwa.colorado.edu/in_focus/colorado_river/
20
1990
2000