Tell me, grampa, why the people back when you were young were so dumb they thought there would always be water, and we would never have to worry about being thirsty.
But, you see, Dearly Beloved, they did know — way back in the 1960’s — they knew there would not be enough water!
Those law-makers, expert in water matters, the local and regional water gurus dedicated to protecting their shares, the reclamation and water establishment that decided how the shares would be sucked and plumbed to move from wild river to alfalfa and other crop fields, and to kitchen taps: they did know.
In the 1960’s, the watermen worked away crafting water legislation for the Colorado River Basin (CRB), worked away to give Arizona its share. And as they worked, they knew they would be sucking water out of an already over-committed, under-productive river.
They didnt know there would be such a horrendous drought;
they didnt know about how their vaunted twentieth-century progress was bringing drastic change to our climate.
They did know their desires for growth and their greed for plentiful water would exceed dependable river flow, that the dreams of the 1922 CRB Compact-writers were fanciful, that the allocations and divisions they were making were a strait-jacket.
They didnt worry. Because they also knew that they and their allies were always able to “find” (= command the water rights to) more water: Los Angeles from the Owens Valley, from northern California, and yes, from the Colorado, Denver from over the Rockies, the Front Range from the Frying Pan.
The water gurus knew, and they had their next target in mind and view: just 10% of the over-abundant Columbia River, channelled into a canal only 800 miles long to flow ever-replenishingly into Lake Mead.
And we know, Dearly Beloved, they understood their CRB would not have the water because, when the watermen of the Columbia said “No”, “Absolutely not”, “not a drop”, “you can send your people; we keep the water”, the CRB got very angry and raved and ranted, not just at the Columbia protectors, also at their own friends in the government: Reclamation and Interior, and at each other as they demanded this or that concession, protection, project, pipe dream.
Which is what the pipe from the Columbia was. So that in 1965-6 when the CRB water mavens labored and built, bigger and higher, a legislative structure to make all of them happy, then trundled it out in Congress for approval, their effort went “pop!” just like the dream balloon it was. And they stormed and they bullied, because their all-inclusive kitchen-sink legislation needed water they knew would not be there in 50 years.
Their tantrums, of course, could not run over the protectors of the Columbia’s water, but then even more infuriating, they ran into, and again not over, the American people, in their role as protectors of the Grand Canyon.
What did the Grand Canyon have to do with piping water to Los Angeles, Phoenix, et al., and all the fields of crops thirsting under the Southwestern sun? Nothing, said the CRB. We just want to put a couple of hydro-dams in it (wonderful damsites!) and sell the electricity to get the dollars to build our Columbia-to-Colorado River pipe. We must, or we will run out of water.
Oh, said the multitude of the Grand Canyon’s friends and protectors, that would all be a very bad, an incomprehensibly bad, idea. As bad an idea as stealing water from the Columbia to keep Lake Mead brim-full. So the Columbia’s and the Grand Canyon’s friends and protectors linked arms and said: No dams! No, not even a little one. And No! no Columbia water sent south. Not a drop.
So, they knew, the CRB watermen, back in 1960’s, that the Colorado would not supply all their needs and greeds. And they did come up with a solution to get more water: their kitchen-sink CRB legislation. They created this monster of a legislative creature to effect their solution, to build their dams and waterworks, to re-shape the physical and human landscape, the environment of the American West. And they hoped to wheedle and bully its way through Congress.
And when the friends and allies of the Grand Canyon and the Columbia River said “No!”, then “POP!” went the CRB creature.
Now here is the strange thing; something, Dearly Beloved, you will not believe. The CRB water folks picked up some of the pieces of their scheme — but no dams, no Columbia — and made a brave effort at pretense. They decided not to worry about what they knew would happen. Can you imagine that? They just cobbled together a more modest piece of water legislation, and set off into the 1970’s and their kind of brave old future.
From that day, over 50 years ago, until this one, full of astonished news articles and gloomy fairy tales with dramatic, beautiful illustrations, about how there is not enough water in the Colorado (look at all the surprised people digging into this news), over that entire near-lifetime, everybody agreed just to forget that they knew.
“Forget” is not a euphemism for “prepared how to deal with”. It is a description of “Let’s pretend”. And so we did, and now the shortage is here. As the wise ones of the 1960’s knew it would come. They tried; they came up with their answer, their usual answer, but the world did not want that answer. Now the 1960’s watermen have died, and the world has changed; their ways are not our ways. Yet the question that we must answer is the same:
How are we to live and prosper in this environment we utterly depend upon, yet still so often fail to respect and protect?
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