On the battle for water in the West
Langfur, Hal
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing...
...Some of the answers lie in the history of urban development and water use in Colorado...
...This ambition has produced bigger dams, such as Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, and transported water greater distances, as in the California Aqueduct...
...In the suburbs, which rely on the core city for much of their water, officials are particularly adamant...
...Inundating thirty miles of the South Platte's Cheesman Canyon, it would create a reservoir whose surface area would be half the size of Manhattan...
...Unfortunately for dam proponents, the years of exploiting Western Slope water have bred resentment...
...By the mid-1970s, about half of the water used on the Front Range—the densely populated corridor running along the eastern edge of the Rockies—came from western Colorado...
...By proceeding recklessly, Westerners may destroy some of the very things that are most appealing about the region: the moderate size of the cities, the proximity to natural beauty, the recreational opportunities provided by open spaces and free-flowing rivers...
...Studied and debated for the better part of a decade, the project has forced state residents to weigh the value of preserving a scenic river canyon against the need for water for future urban development...
...This establishment consists of real estate developers, water lawyers, water engineers, and sprawling administrative systems that directly 392 • DISSENT provide thousands of jobs...
...From the tunnel's mouth the torrent would descend a tributary of the South Platte and Two Forks Dam would block its flow twenty-five miles southwest of Denver...
...Those opposing the project have challenged what the environmental writer Ed Marston calls "the primacy of water development as the concept around which the West is organized...
...But in a debate dominated by lawyers and politicians, public opinion goes only so far...
...Four major rivers begin in Colorado's Rocky Mountains: the South Platte, the Arkansas, the Rio Grande, and the Colorado...
...So it is not without reason that the western mind places a premium on water and begins to come unhinged when its supply seems threatened...
...The overriding message of the Two Forks debate is that the "water establishment" is fast losing the public's support...
...What makes the project so critical to supporters and critics alike is Colorado's position, actual and symbolic, at the headwaters of the entire West...
...The significance of the Two Forks project, however, transcends the immediate environmental concerns...
...A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye...
...Most of the water would be diverted from the far side of the Continental Divide, or Western Slope, where high peaks scrape 80 percent of the state's snow and rain from the sky before it reaches the eastern watersheds...
...From the Mississippi to the Pacific, their waters power industries, irrigate farmland, and keep Kentucky bluegrass green...
...SUMMER • 1989 393...
...The change suggests that Westerners, at least some of them, have begun to abandon a century-old imperative to subdue the land, that a wild river may now be more soothing to the western eye than Didion's filtered pool...
...The unprecedented level of public concern over the project suggests the debate has as much to do with clashing visions of the West as with water's supply and demand...
...Army Corps of Engineers, which in January announced its intention to grant a construction permit, the Two Forks project would plug the South Platte with one of the biggest dams ever erected without federal funds...
...Many minds have come unhinged in the debate over who will control Colorado's water...
...Hundreds of miles downstream in Nebraska, reduced flows in the South Platte would damage wetlands essential to endangered whooping cranes and other waterfowl...
...As herculean as the scheme may seem, a giant water diversion and storage system that pierces the ranges of Continental Divide, captures the small amount of unclaimed water still remaining on the Western Slope and reverses its natural flow to supply the water taps of a distant city is only a logical step in the century-long struggle to make the West habitable—and profitable—on a large scale...
...The inhabited West ends, with few exceptions, where hydraulic engineers have been unable to divert or trap enough water to irrigate farmland and quench settlers' thirsts...
...Specifically, it does not explain why each side has accused the other of trying to spoil Colorado's future...
...The sheer size of the project has fueled such rhetoric...
...more than fifty years ago, city engineers began diverting water from the Western Slope...
...Each year during the spring thaw, tributaries of the westward flowing Colorado River swell with what local water engineers like to call "excess flow...
...These communities, they say, will be short of water by 1990...
...More than a century ago, Denver's thirst outgrew the supply of water naturally flowing past the city...
...Geographically, this translates to the one hundredth meridian, the line of west longitude that stretches from Carrizo Springs, Texas, to Dunseith, North Dakota and beyond, which few crops can survive without constant irrigation...
...Hence, the issue of size and complexity alone leaves much of the controversy unexplained...
...The Two Forks project would provide water for Denver's expansion, just as similar water projects sustain every major city in the West...
...Colorado's opposition to the Two Forks project points to the emergence of a different ethic, a reaction against the unchecked environmental exploitation that has ruled the region since the gold rush...
...Now, with half the state's inhabitants living in and around Denver, city planners forecast water shortages within a decade unless Two Forks is built...
...In western Colorado, reduced flows in the Blue, Frazer, and Colorado rivers would threaten several endangered fish species...
...Ever since the Forty-Niners learned to divert streams into sluice boxes in the Sierra foothills, water has meant wealth in the West...
...The South Platte itself does not carry nearly enough water to fill such a basin...
...The dam would be a concrete sign 615 feet high and 1,700 feet wide...
...Bill Hornby, senior editor of the Denver Post, has labeled opponents of the dam the dupes of "a myth of the West that holds the region to be predominantly a preservable paradise of wide open spaces and natural beauties...
...They argue that the preoccupation with Denver's development ignores the state's shift in recent years to an economy increasingly based on tourism and recreation, and that the strain Two Forks will place on mountain resources could threaten the skiing, camping, kayaking, rafting, and fishing that attract nearly two-hundred-thousand visitors to Colorado each year...
...Read Two Forks Reservoir, a canyon-sized pool that Denver developers want to impound behind a giant dam on the South Platte River, a pool five times bigger than any other standing body of water in Colorado...
...Read, too, control over Denver's economy, control over state politics, control over a precious resource that otherwise would be lost to faraway places like Phoenix, Tucson, and Los Angeles...
...What happens in Colorado, both in terms of water usage and water law, affects millions of people living downstream in hundreds of cities and towns throughout the West...
...The project's direct environmental damage would be most devastating in, but by no means limited to, the stretch of Cheesman Canyon to be flooded...
...People who live in the mountainous two-thirds of the state are no longer as willing to drain their rivers for city dwellers...
...When environmentalists say they want to stop the Two Forks project because it will threaten the existence of a tiny butterfly or because it will submerge certain backcountry trails, urban developers blink in disbelief...
...In other words, aridity defines the West...
...Over time we have built up an establishment with extraordinary vested personal interests in more water development...
...Currently in the hands of the U.S...
...Ever since the Mormons became the country's first commercially successful irrigators, establishing a man-made oasis at the barren foot of Utah's Wasatch Mountains, water has been central to the gospel of western expansion...
...Every recent public opinion poll on the subject has tallied significantly more Coloradans opposing Two Forks than supporting it, even in Denver itself, which will reap the benefits...
...So much water is heading east already that they fear Two Forks may be the project that finally places their own housing developments, farms, and industries in jeopardy...
...The same gospel informs the exhortations of those who defend the Two Forks project...
...So has the fact that its construction would mean a lot to the contractors and unions whose workers it would employ, to the home builders whose developments it would supply with water, to the politicians whose careers depend on concrete signs of economic development...
...They also etch the West with twisting lines of political import...
...or why the state's traditionally conservative rural residents have teamed up with its environmental activists...
...But those who reduce the issue to dollars, drinking water, or endangered species miss its broader significance...
...or why national environmental organizations consider the project threatening enough to have sent some of their best lawyers, scientists, and lobbyists to fight it...
...Water developers could not have contrived a more damaging project...
...A report by Denver's Independence Institute, a conservative think tank, asserts that the project would allow the city to "set a course for the stars in economic growth and individual opportunity...
...Environmentalists say the canyon comprises an irreplaceable habitat for elk, beaver, mule deer, bald eagle, bighorn sheep, and the endangered Pawnee montane skipper butterfly...
...The political pressures are ninety-five to five in favor of Two Forks," says Charles Wilkinson, a University of Colorado law professor specializing in western resource law...
...This water would be pumped east through a subterranean tunnel more than twenty miles in length, SUMMER • 1989 391 under peaks ranging up to 13,000 feet...
...The West begins," wrote Bernard DeVoto, "where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches...
...The resulting reservoir would hold 1.1 million acre-feet of water, or about 355 billion gallons...
...Control is the recompense dam proponents seek for the $37 million they already have spent without yet pouring a cubic yard of concrete and for the onus of soliciting $1 billion from city residents to build the dam if its construction is ever approved...
...a seasonal abundance or deficiency of moisture, like last summer's drought, merely eases or exacerbates a water shortage that is generalized and unrelenting...
...By that they mean water not already committed to states, cities, farmers, and other users downstream...
...There is no other vested interest group in the American West dealing with natural resources as powerful as this one...
...Joan Didion, The White Album !lead reservoir for pool and one of the West's great environmental controversies begins to unsnarl...
...That explains why more than half the country's water lawyers live in Colorado...
...As new sources of water become increasingly hard to find, the traditional, giant water storage and diversion projects will seem less appealing than ever...
...the feats of engineering required to exploit the remaining, less accessible sources will make future dams prohibitively expensive and far more damaging to the environment...
...With a rousing call for western pride and progress, they invoke a modern-day version of Manifest Destiny...
...it also explains why some of the nation's most powerful environmental organizations—the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Audubon Society—have pledged to tie up the project in court if the Corps of Engineers grants a construction permit...
...Hydraulic engineers already have diverted and dammed most of the West's "easy water...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
