The West's Gordian Knot

D. H. LAWRENCE : "The Third Thing"

WATER has been at the front edge of initiatives to create new settlements and economies ever since Americans took control of the arid landscape of the American West in the 1840s. The great rush that drew settlers west and that made the United States a force in the world's economy was built on the gold country streams that carried the precious metal, supplied the domestic needs of the mining camps, and drove the powerful hydraulic hoses that blew lode deposits out of the hillsides. A generation later, water was the essential ingredient in fulfilling the Jeffersonian ideal of allowing farmers and ranchers to settle new lands, lands where crops grew only if the settlers put water on the fields by means of irrigation. Still later, elaborate plumbing systems transported water over great distances, often across natural divides, enabling growth of industry and development of housing subdivisions in booming metropolitan areas. Today, water feeds the rivers, lakes, and landscapes that attract millions of tourists and recreationists to the region.

Yet, while there is agreement about water's critical role, water policy has become the Gordian knot of the American West, a system so tangled that it can never be untied. The subject of water policy and law is daunting, almost forbidding. The ancient, intricate, and seemingly solid structure of water policy, like King Gordius' tangled knot of old, is surrounded by an aura of unapproachability. Decisions governing the public's waters involve little public participation. Laypeople perceive the subject as too complicated and hypertechnical and are intimidated by the confused web of engineering jargon and legalese—cubic feet per second, transmountain diversions, hydroelectric power grids, and senior and junior water rights, for example. The whole structure is so complex, delicate, and interrelated, and the stakes so high, that reform seems risky.

Leave it to the experts. Don't try to untie the knot, let alone slice through it.

The root difficulty with preserving the status quo is that western water is governed by one of the most outmoded collection of rules found anywhere in American public policy. The society that created the current system well over a century ago saw the rivers of the American West through a particular lens: Water was a commodity that needed to be removed from the river channel and "put to use." Water left wild and flowing in the channel was "wasted." Extravagant government expenditures to impound and transport water were justified in the name of "conservation."

This single-minded focus on the extraction of water at any cost was overwhelmingly successful in achieving the objectives of official nineteenth-century policy: to encourage American citizens to settle the broad, dry, and inhospitable western lands. The federal and state governments made western water development—dams, reservoirs, transmountain tunnels, pipelines, and canals—a first-line priority and laid out a sprawling program of subsidies that led to engineering triumph after engineering triumph. The human effort and ingenuity were extraordinary, and the benefits were many, whether measured by solid farm and ranch communities, construction jobs, or the museums and symphonies of the region's urban centers.

Today's westerners expect some of the same things from the rivers of the West—farms, ranches, mines, and shining urban centers—but they also expect much more, for the region has become a very different place. The end of World War I I marked the beginning of an era every bit as important as the California gold rush. The postwar population in the West boomed from 19 million to 51 million. This influx of newcomers, along with larger national and global economic and environmental trends, has created a new context. Today, the public treasuries are stretched thin. People increasingly appreciate the great stresses facing all of our natural resources, water included; they see that long-term sustainability is in jeopardy.

There are other new perceptions. Westerners now view water as more than a commodity. They see western rivers and lakes, like the mountains, forests, and wide-open spaces, as public assets of inestimable value. By and large, today's populace came west, not to wrestle an existence out of a harsh land, but to capture the privilege of living, working, and raising their families in a blessed place. To do that requires some water development, but it does not require the radical posture that water policy adopted and has held since the middle nineteenth century.

The western water regime has caused serious, deeply embedded problems. The most pressing problems—for example, vanishing Pacific salmon in Washington, overtapped groundwater in Arizona—may vary, and the severity may differ, but all western states share the essential commonality of aridity and scarcity when it comes to water. That is logical and inevitable, for water policy in every western state traces to the same era and the same attitudes.

While there is no definitive, formal, West-wide inventory of the region's mounting water problems, some current vignettes may help suggest the magnitude of the difficulty. To be sure, there are success stories, and we will recount many of them in this book. In our judgment, however, the necessary starting point is to understand the depth of the chasm between western water policy and what the modern West demands of it. The following episodes, like many others that we will describe in the pages to come, represent the West's challenges:

• The National Marine Fisheries Service, warning that 100 stocks of salmon and steelhead have become extinct and that most of the remaining runs are in danger, has put the chinook salmon and four other runs on the threatened species list for most of the rivers of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. In 1991 the American Fisheries Society expressed concern for the survival of 214 native naturally spawning salmon and steelhead stocks in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

• In the early 1980s thousands of birds were poisoned in the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge by irrigation drainage waters tainted with toxic levels of selenium leached from the waterlogged fields of California's...