Because a book about a river probably can't be written without traveling the length of the river, river books are always part travelogue, part episodic history and part geography lesson. The over-arching story is the same one told in 'Cadillac Dessert', the mid-eighties masterpiece that introduced me* to the water crisis in the West. The 1922 Colorado River Compact between seven states (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and California) very reasonably allocated the river's water based on the rainfall, snowpack and river flow of the era. The problem was and still is that the early-20th century was later found to have been the wettest patch in hundreds of years. There simply is not enough water to fulfill the agreed-upon allocations of the seven states, not to mention Mexico or the 10 Indian tribes that have reservations in the river basin.
Just about everyone agrees that the current system of allocating water is so flawed that it will collapse upon itself in the future. The Bureau of Reclamation believes that by 2060 the annual shortage will be 3 million acre feet. "Both the upper and lower basin are too busy grabbing what water they can instead of seeking a sustainable relationship with that water." The author has no solution, but suggests the federal government is the likely decision-maker, and that agriculture's 80% usage of the river's water is the place to start looking.
Some of the fun facts unearthed herein are: the flow of the Colorado over a year is equal to two weeks of the Mississippi's; the single largest user of the river's water is the Imperial Valley of California, which receives 2.85 inches of rain per year; Colorado has 20,000 abandoned subsurface flooded mines, and the Indians could probably overturn the whole compact because they weren't privy to it and their water rights precede everyone else's.
*My Colorado house is on the western slope and is supplied with water from the Eagle River, a Colorado tributary.
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