DitchInTime

The fatal blow to the conventional wisdom comes when the conventional ideas fail signally to deal with some contingency to which obsolescence has made them palpably inapplicable. This, sooner or later, must be the fate of ideas which have lost their relation to the world.

Every minute in every western city and suburb, the omnipresent lawn offers the promise of liberation from fatalism and from stale habits of mind.

Colorado’s American settlers brought with them an intense loyalty and devotion to imported plants—grasses, trees, flowers, bushes. The passage of a century and a half has not dramatically reduced the conviction of the state’s residents (on the Western Slope as much as on the Front Range) that bright green is the proper color for a summer landscape. In the twenty-first century, the color green receives almost universal deference as the color of nature. Even the most ardent environmentalists in the interior West refer to their cause as the green movement, despite living in a part of the planet in which bright green is usually the color of disturbance, resting on a major, purposeful redistribution of water to compensate for the unreliable rainfall. The environmental movement in the interior West might, in other words, be better labeled the tan or russet or, at the least, the olive-green movement.

In a far cry from the dusty, young town that the Rocky Mountain News once described as “treeless, grassless, and bushless,” today the Denver metro area’s suburbs are amply shaded by trees, carpeted in bluegrass, and full of bushes.

Currently, 54 percent of the water that Denver Water provides to its customers goes to outdoor landscaping. The territory that the agency serves remains ornamented with plenty of bright green lawns, maintained with generous doses of water, fertilizer, and fossil fuel for mowers. The greater share of these lawns simply offer a visual display, rarely trod upon even for a pleasant round of croquet or badminton. For westerners coming to recognize the relative scarcity of water in the region, lawns seem to parade their pointlessness, making it hard to figure out why a utility trying to reduce waste continues to supply water to keep these landscapes so radiantly green.3

For many who question the need for the expansion of Gross Reservoir and the related diversion of Western Slope water through the Moffat System in order to fill that added space, the persuasiveness of the justification for outdoor irrigation in urban and suburban settings has already petered out. To people of this persuasion, the pleasant appearance of a lawn in an urban neighborhood is the departing station of a train of thought leading directly to a distant place where a reduced flow of water threatens the beauty and the biological richness of a once-abundant river. “It is economically impractical to supply water for all uses all of the time, given Colorado’s semi-arid climate,” Western Resource Advocates said in its statement on the Moffat System expansion. “Denver is located in a semi-arid environment that receives far too little rain to support Kentucky bluegrass without supplemental irrigation,” the statement continues, making “the conversion to natural areas, whereby Denver Water replaces turf grass with natural grass and native flowers,” into an admirable act of conservation.4

To water managers, however, lawns deliver a service that would be far from evident to most observers. Lawns are devices that receive water that would otherwise depart Denver unused. Besides stymieing any schemes that Nebraskans might have to benefit from the Western Slope importations that Denver Water has achieved at considerable expense, lawns offer a cushion if severe drought should arise. Without that cushion, demand would be hardened; take out the lawns, and water would be directed only to needs that would not be susceptible to restriction. You can tell people to quit watering their lawns, and they will engage in a moderate amount of grousing. But if you were to tell people to shorten their showers and hold off on washing their clothes, they will grouse up a storm (and not the kind that produces precipitation). If you were to go all out with conservation and ensure that homeowners used water only for necessities and scattered not a drop on bluegrass or marigolds, you would be in a nearly impossible position when a serious drought hits. Without the margin represented by lawns, reducing waste would mean pushing beyond the reduction of luxury, cutting painfully into necessity. Thus, to Chips Barry, former manager of the Denver Water Department, the lawn looked a lot like a dispersed version of a reservoir, holding the water that could, in urgent circumstances, be shifted to respond to genuine need.

And yet the more important arena for thinking about the future of the lawn may well be not the calculations of the water managers but the hearts and minds of western residents. For the great majority of urban residents, lawns look like pockets of nature within the city, rather than insults to nature and affronts to the planet. They carry associations that are the opposite of environmental disturbance and manipulation. In homes surrounded by smooth green grass, families can find refuges embraced in expanses of nature; in well-watered parks and playing fields, people of limited means can enjoy outdoor leisure and exertion that would otherwise require an unworkable investment of time and travel.

The lawn, as writer Elizabeth Kohlbert writes, “has no productive value. The only work it does is cultural.” And, since cultural values are dynamic, the lawn is subject to the same sort of changeability that, for instance, caused the beaver hat and the extravagantly feathered millinery to plummet in popularity, much to the relief and pleasure of North America’s beavers and snowy egrets. “This is perhaps the final stage of the American lawn,” Kohlbert speculates. Planting and maintaining a lawn has, in her judgment, become a matter of habit and expedience: “We no longer choose to keep lawns,” she says; “we just keep on keeping them.” Individually and collectively, minds may lose traction when searching for the answer to the question, Just why is that we devote so much time, land, water, money, and energy to the well-being of lawns? As historian Ted Steinberg gracefully phrased this, “The lawn has entered a vulnerable period in its history.”5

Much stranger transformations than a decline in affection for lawns have, after all, happened in American perceptions of nature. Following the twists and turns of a story over two centuries has the pleasant effect of reviving one’s sense of contingency, improbability, and even implausibility. The experience deepens one’s humility when it comes to confident predictions about the future. The well-watered lawn may seem to hold an unshakable place in American loyalties and preferences. And then again, trends and priorities may swerve and zigzag around, and green grass may, in a generation or two, be reconstituted as an inexplicable enthusiasm of the people of the past, who put unimaginable effort and exertion into raising a crop that no one would buy.

It is rarely, in other words, a rewarding practice to take customs for granted, to steer by unexamined assumptions, and to defer to what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the conventional wisdom.” The history of Denver Water provides us with prime examples of, to use Galbraith’s phrasing, “the fate of ideas which have lost their relation to the world.”§§§§§§ The following pages apply the historical story presented in this book to the reconsideration of some of these well-entrenched ideas. I know they are well-entrenched because, until recently, I believed them myself.

§§§§§§ While I am adopting Galbraith’s concept, for the sake of clarity I am substituting the term mistaken assumption for conventional wisdom. I sum up each section with what I believe to be a better assumption, a better place to start one’s thinking about water.

Mistaken Assumption Number 1: The supply of water and the rate of population growth and residential development are inherently and inevitably intertwined. To increase population growth and residential land development, add water. To limit population growth and residential land development, stop adding water. Thus, agencies like Denver Water could control growth if their leaders would face up to their responsibilities.

Neither prophets of doom nor prophets of progress get a lot of cooperation from the future. In the 1980s, Denver Water’s leadership predicted that growth would screech to a halt and the economy of Denver would falter if the Two Forks Dam were not built. “Rejection of Two Forks will have a devastating impact on the Denver metropolitan area,” Monte Pascoe of the Denver Water Board predicted.6 The next years mocked his every word. Two Forks was not built. A carnival of growth in the Denver metropolitan region took place.

For its first seven decades, Denver Water’s leadership alternated between proclamations of progress and predictions of gloom. After a round of celebrating its crucial contributions to local prosperity, the agency would declare that if it did not receive permission and support for its next project, the well-being of Denver would head straight for a cliff, and landing at the bottom of that cliff would mean certain civic death. These grim prophecies usually came with a precise deadline: the year when the projected demand for water would exceed the current supply. If Denver Water were not allowed to increase the water supply on the Front Range, growth and prosperity would end.

Denver Water and its opponents have, on occasion, united in the assumption that water and growth are causally connected in the most direct way. Coloradans who supported growth and Coloradans who opposed have converged on the belief that water is the factor that determines whether growth escalates, continues, sputters, declines, stops, or revives. Believers have stated this conviction as if they spoke of a natural law. Writing a short history of the department in 1944, longtime employee Walter Eha placed this belief at the foundation of his thinking. “Every man of vision living in this dry climate, who has looked back upon history and forward to the future, has understood that Denver’s continued growth was and is absolutely dependent upon the development of her water supply,” Eha declared. “The development of water resources has been the key to the development of the Denver area.” Three decades later, holding an exactly opposite opinion of the desirability of growth, Alan Merson, the regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, nonetheless matched Eha’s belief in the causal connection between water and growth: “The record is very clear,” Merson said in 1977, that “the availability of water determines whether growth occurs, where it occurs and the rate at which it can occur.” Plenty of other knowledgeable folks have sung in this chorus. “Economic growth and development in the Denver metropolitan area depend on the availability of water,” scholar Brian Ellison wrote. By the mid-twentieth century, “suburban leaders realized, like Denver’s early progressives, that water was the key to controlling and benefitting from growth.”7

In the early nineteenth century, starting from different premises and using very different language, explorers Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long had observed the scarcity of water on the Front Range and declared that this factor would constrain and even prohibit American settlement. Two hundred years later, a variation on Pike and Long’s idea has taken the form of a faith in the concept of carrying capacity, by which the maximum number of human beings, like the maximum number of wild animals or plants, would be determined by the natural environment. More than any other resource, water is cast as nature’s enforcer. At an identifiable moment, when the numbers of people come to exceed the water supply, growth is supposed to hit a nonnegotiable limit with the force of a car full of crash dummies slamming into a very sturdy wall.

The problem with the idea of carrying capacity arises from the fact that human beings are a very peculiar species. Mule deer and prairie dogs do not get degrees in engineering, and their capacity to rearrange and reconfigure the location of the resources they need is correspondingly tiny. And, in an equally consequential difference, Americans colonizing western locales placed a big cushion in their water use. Their biological needs for water are small, but their social and cultural desires for water are vast. They use water for lawns, golf courses, swimming pools, fountains, and water parks. They would not die and their population would not crash if they were to find themselves forced to cut back in these luxuries. In other words, in determining the limits that water might impose on a human settlement, while it is important to know the sheer numbers of the population, it is even more important to know how much water individuals in that population are using. To arrive at a number of any value in estimating how many people could be supported by the available water supply, you must multiply the number of people by the number of gallons of water they use. Even when Denver Water’s leaders were enthusiastic doomsayers who proclaimed that an inability to secure more water would soon produce disaster, they did not—and could not—say that Denverites were at risk of collapsing on their withered lawns and golf courses, perishing from hunger in long lines at water-restricted car washes, diving cataclysmically into emptied swimming pools, and thereby dying off. Despite the omnipresence of an enormously popular rhetorical flourish, very few Coloradans—unlike millions of others in much tougher circumstances on the planet¶¶¶¶¶¶—live in circumstances where water is a matter of life and death.

¶¶¶¶¶¶ The United Nations reports that “a third of the world’s population is enduring some form of water scarcity. One in every six human beings has no access to clean water within a kilometer of their homes. Half of all people in developing countries have no access to proper sanitation” (United Nations, “The Global Water Crisis,” online at www.un.org/works/sub2 .asp?lang=en&s=19). In his recent book, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (New York: Harper Collns, 2010), Steven Solomon makes a compelling argument for access to clean water as a basic human right, reminding us “how dehumanizing and economically crippling the lack of water for basic needs can be” (493). For a reckoning with problems of equity in water in western locales, see F. Lee Brown and Helen M. Ingram, Water and Poverty in the Southwest (Tucson: Univ.of Arizona Press, 1987).

Water, moreover, is far from the only factor that makes population growth possible. J. Gordon Milliken stated this proposition with great clarity:

How large a role does water play in development? In a semiarid region, a reasonably secure supply of potable water is no doubt a major prerequisite of land development. Residential, commercial, and industrial land uses all require water. But the availability of water is not the sole factor influencing the pace and pattern of urban development.

Driving his point home, Milliken then offered a weighty list of additional factors governing the pace of growth:

Repeatedly in the history of Denver Water, people acted on the assumption that increasing the water supply necessarily and directly increases the population. The border between belief and fact proved to be very permeable; strongly held convictions can shape human conduct and thereby can seem to confirm that the conviction was accurate. If, in other words, an influential group believes that more water means more growth, they will act in ways that make this a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will increase the water supply, and when more people appear and pitch into the use of that water supply, the influential group will be certain that these two phenomena join together as cause and effect. Neither the people who increased the water supply nor the newcomers who took advantage of this will ask how much water the new arrivals (and the old-timers who preceded them) actually needed, nor will they stop to recognize the many other factors that played a part in this sequence.

With a different assumption about how much water people require, could the population grow substantially without an increase in the water supply? This is well within the reach of the possible. A lot more people could live with a lot less water if they recalculated the meaning of need and also if significantly higher prices invited them to think harder about the amount of water they used.

Many thoughtful and observant people have questioned the tightness and immediacy of the connection between increasing water and increasing growth. During the Two Forks fight, the Colorado Environmental Caucus considered “water an ineffective growth control mechanism.” As one leader of the caucus, hydrologist Daniel Luecke, put it recently:

In looking at it both regionally and nationally . . . you can’t stimulate [growth] by supplying water nor can you prevent it by constraining access to water, in part because there are always options and in part because water is not a very expensive commodity. You can [stimulate or prevent growth] with transportation; you can do it with institutions of higher education; you can do it with airports; you can do with social services; but you can’t do it with water.

With characteristically blunt phrasing, environmental historian Hal Rothman offered a variation on the same point: “No American city has ever ceased to grow because of a lack of water.”9

Human beings have reason to be very attracted by the idea of having nature make our decisions for us, communicating its decrees through rates of precipitation and acre-feet of streamflow. But decisions to limit growth are decisions human beings must make, despite the pleasure we take in imagining ways to remove that weighty burden from our own shoulders and to delegate it to nature itself.

The Denver Water Board has been remarkable for its success in increasing the supply of water for residents, but it has also been remarkable in its success in periodically asking for conservation and efficiency in the use of water. With early calls for reduced use in the drought years of the 1930s, the effort to define the Blue Line to restrict the domain of service, the adoption of metering, the pioneering campaign for Xeriscaping, and the creation of tiered rates, Denver Water has accumulated a track record of exploring alternatives to the cycle by which increased demand and increased supply seem to chase each other in an upward spiral.

One of the most interesting questions in the twenty-first-century West is this: How much power do agencies like Denver Water have to direct the behavior of their citizens, clients, and consumers toward a sustainable relationship with water? Can an organization of this sort require citizens to distinguish their desires and whims from their actual needs and then to act on those distinctions, insisting on their needs and yielding on their desires and whims? Can an agency like Denver Water, well-positioned by virtue of having looked ahead and secured water rights early on, design and follow a policy of tough love in urging its neighboring communities to match their ambitions and plans to their actual capacities and assets?

Denver Water’s charter gives the agency significant powers and responsibilities. The Board of Water Commissioners has “complete charge and control of a water works system and plant for supplying the City and County of Denver and its inhabitants with water for all uses and purposes.” In responding to neighboring communities, the charter adopted in 1959 specifies that “The Board shall have power to lease water and water rights for use outside the territorial limits of the City and County of Denver, but such leases shall provide for limitations of delivery of water to whatever extent may be necessary to enable the Board to provide an adequate supply of water to the people of Denver.” The original charter and the amended charter, in other words, have from the beginning been unambiguous that the board’s first obligation is to the residents of the City and County of Denver, not to the residents of its suburbs, of other parts of the state or of the Colorado River Basin.10

Conspicuously absent from this charter is even a hint of the power that would enable the water agency to determine how citizens are to live in an arid region. The charter delegates no power to tell residents where to live or which lands to develop for homes and which to leave undeveloped. If it remains in compliance with its charter, Denver Water cannot wield the authority to encourage or discourage population movement into the area. The right of Americans to move and to choose their places of residence has not been placed under the agency’s jurisdiction. And it is an interesting and lasting paradox that key attractions, drawing in new residents to the Denver area, are the many days of bright sunshine and the escape from the discomforts of eastern humidity, exactly the features of the climate that constrain the natural water supply.

On July 8, 1972, when The Denver Post printed a letter from a professor at the University of Colorado, the public expression of wisdom on the actual extent of the power that Denver Water could assert over growth reached its high point.11 Charles Howe began with a good-natured recognition of the achievements of the Denver Water Department, “an expert organization for the provision of water.” “They know their engineering,” he wrote, “and have a great system to prove it.” An economist who was no slouch as a historian, Howe provided a capsule summary of the agency’s first half century of existence: “The board is caught in the age-old dilemma of most water authorities of being charged with supplying water while having no control over major determinants of the demand for water, nor having any clear-cut guidelines as to what those determinants are likely to be in the future.” The public, Howe noted, had a limited emotional repertoire when it came to attitudes toward the agency: indifference when the “supply is adequately provided” and “wrath . . . if water shortages should occur.” Anticipating that wrath, Denver Water had understood getting control over water while it is available to be its priority.

While Howe believed that the board could and should put more effort into presenting alternatives to the public, other forms of criticism struck him as unfair. His assertions deserve quoting at length:

The board should not, however, be blamed for the gross failure of the governor and legislature to provide meaningful guidelines for land use planning at the state level. To flail the water board for failing to control growth is really beating a straw man. If unwarranted, unplanned growth destroys the beauty of Colorado, it won’t be because of the water board; it will follow from the absence of meaningful land use planning.

In the most forthright way, Howe reminded his readers that Denver Water had no authority to overrule the choices of people who wanted to move to this attractive region nor to prohibit the reallocation of land from farms to suburbs. Condemning the agency for failing to exercise power that it did not possess could never be more than a project in ineffective lamentation.

One would give a great deal to know what was in the mind of Denver Water counsel Glenn Saunders when he clipped Howe’s letter from the newspaper and pasted it into his personal scrapbook. Even if we cannot know much beyond the fact that Saunders thought that Howe’s commentary was worth preserving, the documentary evidence of Saunders’s knowledge of this letter offers an irresistible temptation to hindsight speculation. What if the Denver Water Board, at Saunders’s suggestion, had seized this opportunity and placed Howe’s spirited statement—“To flail the water board for failing to control growth is really beating a straw man”—at the top of their letterhead?******* Just below the quotation, they could have placed the invitation, “Let’s talk about this!” What if Howe’s sharp commentary on who actually held authority over growth had become a frequently cited point of reference in hearings, courtrooms, federal offices, and in rooms where environmental activists met and planned?

******* If this idea seems preposterous, it is important to remind readers that the local newspaper The Denver Post has led the world in the use of quotations in this manner. The weather page carries the statement “’Tis a privilege to live in Colorado,” while the editorial page carries the somewhat mystifying aphorism “There is no hope for the satisfied man,” with both quotations originating with the Post’s founder, Frederick Bonfils. In that context, placing on stationery the aphorism “To flail the water board for failing to control growth is really beating a straw man” actually fits in regional practice.

Contrary to this flight of imagination, Howe’s letter seems to have carried little impact in its own time. Energetic flailing of Denver Water for failing to control growth continued without interruption after the publication of Howe’s letter. And yet, if few at the time paid attention to Howe’s letter, his statement carries undiminished relevance four decades later. “The Water Board is not a social engineering body,” he wrote. “They have no expertise in planning the broad aspects of the good life in Colorado.” At the risk of crossing the boundary between the religious and the secular, that remark qualifies as God’s truth.

Better Assumption Number 1: Water is only one factor in population growth and not always the most important one. Controlling water does not necessarily translate into authority over growth.

Mistaken Assumption Number 2: Power over water in the American West has been concentrated in the hands of a small, centralized, somewhat toxic elite.

Through much of the twentieth century, representatives of the Western Slope and of Front Range suburbs characterized Denver Water as an autocratic, authoritarian, and imperial power. Much of this book shows that characterization to be exaggerated, even though it is perfectly understandable why rivals and opponents saw Denver Water in those terms. Despite condemnations of its vast and unconstrained power, Denver Water maneuvered its way through a world densely populated by competing agencies and entities, ranging from suburban governments to the US Supreme Court, from the US Bureau of Reclamation to the Colorado Supreme Court, from the Colorado River Water Conservation District to the US Army Corps of Engineers. Operating in this crowded arena, Denver Water never approached a position of unilateral power over water in the state of Colorado.

With this statement, I part ways from an older orthodoxy in the interpretation of western water history and join, instead, in the assertion of the fragmentation and decentralization of authority over water. As American attitudes toward nature changed directions in the last half of the twentieth century, the publication of two very influential books, Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire in 1985 and Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert in 1986, reflected that shift and established a new orthodoxy in the field. To both Worster and Reisner, the history of the development of water in the West followed a plot (in both senses of the word) that led to the centralization of power in the hands of a small, inflexible, undemocratic, entirely self-interested elite.††††††† “The hydraulic society of the West,” Worster asserted in a widely quoted statement, “is increasingly a coercive, monolithic, and hierarchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise.”12

††††††† Marc Reisner kept readers’ attention focused on the arbitrary powers of the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Army Corps of Engineers, and yet in a number of passages, he acknowledged that the undertakings of those agencies enjoyed widespread popular support.

When shifting paradigms, a student of mine once noted that it is important to remember to put in the clutch. In the last two decades, other scholars have doggedly deployed such a clutch to shift the paradigms for interpreting western water history. Western historians Donald Pisani and Norris Hundley have called into question the ostensible consolidation of power over water in the hands of a coordinated and even conspiratorial few, putting forward stories structured much more by contesting groups than by a power-hoarding elite. In his most effective challenge to the image of a coherent and cohesive empire of control over water, Pisani makes a compelling point about the fragmentation that characterized the efforts of westerners to claim and develop water. “Fragmentation,” Pisani writes, “resulted from a pervasive mercantilism that pitted community against community and state against state, from intense competition between regions within the West, . . . and from a decentralized system of government.” Water policy thus arose from a political and cultural atmosphere of “persistent suspicions and irreconcilable differences,” an inauspicious foundation for the imposition of monolithic power.13

In the development of water in California, Hundley acknowledges “the appearance of a new kind of social imperialist whose goal was to acquire the water of others and grow at their expense.” And yet, while noting the “monumental conflicts and social costs” created by these energetic “social imperialists,” Hundley declares that “at the same time, this is a story of extraordinary feats of fulfilling basic social needs when communities mobilized and focused their political energies on providing abundant clean water to multitudes of people who clearly wished that to be done.” Rather than a centralized process purposefully orchestrated and conducted by a narrowly self-interested elite, Hundley “describes the activities of a wider and often confused and cross-cutting range of interest groups and bureaucrats, both public and private, who accomplish what they do as a result of shifting alliances and despite frequent disputes among themselves.”14

For advocates of the earlier paradigm that Pisani and Hundley have challenged, and certainly for Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, the prime example of centralized, coercive, and secretive power at work appeared in the case study of the city of Los Angeles’s acquisition of water from the Owens River Valley. The influential movie Chinatown was the cinematic apogee of this school of historical judgment. But even this widely known tale has recently submitted to convincing revision. In 2006, Steven Erie pointed out major flaws in the conventional wisdom that structures the far-better-known version of this tale. Rather than the Chinatown version, in which “unscrupulous developers in league with conniving water officials secretly orchestrated water megaprojects for private financial gain,” Erie declared that it was time to “retell much of the region’s twentieth-century water and development saga as an innovative public venture rather than a sordid secretive affair.” The notorious engineer for Los Angeles, William Mulholland, Erie argues, did not pursue personal profit, and even if individual land developers in the San Fernando Valley later profited from the delivery of water from the Owens Valley, they were not themselves the initiators or arrangers of the original plan for the diversion. Erie’s work has failed to inspire filmmakers to produce an answer to Chinatown that would feature this factually accurate, comparatively colorless version of the Owens Valley tale.15 Given the pleasure that Americans seem to find in scaring themselves silly, don’t expect Hollywood to race to seize this opportunity.

Better Assumption Number 2: The acquisition, development, allocation, and management of western water have been processes characterized by fragmentation and competition as much as (if not more than) the exertion of centralized power.

Rural Virtue and Urban Wickedness: The Long-Awaited Retirement of Thomas Jefferson, Agrarian Dreamer and Urban Condemner

Mistaken Assumption Number 3: In opinions on and judgments of competing demands for water, use for farms and ranches carries a greater ethical integrity and is more justifiable than the use of water for environmentally parasitic cities and suburbs.

As Steven Erie’s fresh perspective on the Owens Valley story reveals, an unexamined but very influential assumption of rural virtue and urban wickedness has shaped common understandings of the history of urban water development in the West. In a lively passage worth quoting at length, leading historian of the urban West, Carl Abbott, joins with Erie and Hundley in sending the conventional wisdom on the Owens Valley diversion through a spirited reappraisal. Substituting Denver for Los Angeles and Western Slope for Owens Valley, readers will note, does not require much change in the contents of this passage.

There are, of course, some problems with the [usual] moral understanding [of this historical episode]. . . . Los Angeles may have been shrewd in buying water rights, but it purchased something that Owens Valley residents had themselves transformed into a commodity. Owens Valley people had already manipulated the water through irrigation systems, so Los Angeles did not acquire and pervert something that was purely “natural.” Left unanswered is the question of how far water can legitimately be diverted: one mile? ten miles? 200 miles?. . . There is a strong assumption that it is “unnatural” to live in Los Angeles, but is it any more natural to impose Euro-American agriculture on a semi-arid landscape only a mountain range away from Death Valley?16

As Abbott’s energetic critique shows, any appraisal that instantly discounts and discredits the legitimacy of urban water development reveals its dependence on arbitrary and doubtful assumptions.

While readers of this book are encouraged to reach their own appraisals (and to convey them to the author), my own habits of thought have changed to match the perspectives of Pisani, Hundley, Erie, and Abbott. Before this recent conversion, with hundreds of students sitting in lecture halls mistaking me, sadly enough, for a knowledgeable authority, I followed the old version of urban condemnation when I told them the history of Los Angeles and the Owens Valley and of San Francisco and Hetch Hetchy. Looking back at my embrace of this orthodoxy, I am impressed by the degree to which I and many others of my generational cohort steered by the tenets of agrarian idealism when appraising the allocation of water in the West.

We know who led us down this path: President Thomas Jefferson took quotability to great heights in his characterizations of rural virtue and urban wickedness. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” Jefferson declaimed, “if ever He had a chosen people, whose breast He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” Meanwhile, things did not look good for the cities, where workers depended on wages for the purchase of their subsistence: “Dependence,” Jefferson said, “begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germs of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” And then Jefferson ascended to the peak of antiurban rhetoric: “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” As a “canker which soon eats to the hearts of [a republic’s] laws and constitution,” the American city had a few strikes against it after the most articulate of the nation’s Founding Fathers characterized it as a symptom of a repellent disease.17

Belief in the inherent superiority of the enterprise of farming played a big role in shaping the material reality of the West. The passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902, directing the federal government to use public resources to expand irrigated farming in the West, demonstrates the power of the agrarian ideal. Down to our own times, the proportion of water directed to agriculture remains above 80 percent in western states. The Jeffersonian agrarian ideal has not only shaped the writings and teachings of academic historians; it has been a fundamental force in reshaping the western landscape.18

On the even more consequential front of popular culture, the rural areas have also trounced the urban areas. The mythic appeal of the West has simply been better situated, and shown to better advantage, in open space. Cowboys riding freely on handsome horses toward a distant horizon have been targets of admiration and objects of envy. There was something considerably less appealing in the circumstances of cowboys walking down dusty town streets and into claustrophobic saloons, tearing their hair (not an easy achievement with the regulation cowboy hat) over their obligation to protect a bunch of townspeople, usually rendered weak and witless and thereby not particularly fun to protect when they were caught in crossfire between bad guys and good guys. Countless movies and novels thus added vast force to Jefferson’s antiurbanist cause.

Advocates for the preservation of nature made their own lasting contribution to the allocation of virtue to the countryside and wickedness to the city. For the better part of a century and a half, people who wanted to have nature left undisturbed and wildlife protected from human encroachment have not volunteered as enthusiasts and cheerleaders for cities. And yet, with the characterization of cities as places with qualities that were quite the opposite of the beauty, appeal, and power to uplift the human soul delivered by open spaces, antiurban sentiment posed an ironic obstacle to the well-being of those open spaces. The popularizing of an ardent affection for nature carried the corollary that a life lived close to nature was a better, more grounded, and more uplifting life. The material outcome of that belief was the rejection of city life and a vast increase in the number of homes built with picture windows with views reminding the homeowners that they were indeed close to nature. The proliferation of suburban and exurban residences meant a disruption of open landscapes and wildlife habitat. As historian Kenneth Jackson pointedly reminds us, “The first necessary condition for the unusual residential dispersal of the American people is a national distrust of urban life and communal living.”19

In fact, concentrating human populations in dense urban settings is an effective method—possibly the most effective method—for reducing the impacts of human settlement on the landscapes and rivers of many regions, including the West. In Green Metropolis, David Owen uses New York City as his example of the environmental advantages of urban density. He acknowledges the degree to which his convictions defy conventional wisdom: “Thinking of crowded cities as environmental role models requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief, because most of us have been accustomed to viewing urban centers as ecological calamities.” But Owen declares “the apparent ecological innocuousness of widely dispersed populations—in leafy suburbs or seemingly natural exurban areas” to be “an illusion.” “Spreading people thinly across the countryside,” he observes, “doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address.” Owen’s observations have enormous bearing on western America: “Wild landscapes are less often destroyed by people who despise wild landscapes than by people who love them, or think they do—by people who move to be near them, and then, when others follow, move again.” In his most compelling point, Owen declares that “you create open spaces not by spreading people out but by moving them closer together.”20

The environmental standing of the city has indeed been undergoing a makeover. As environmental historian Martin Melosi wrote in 2000, “cities have the capacity, when properly designed, to use resources more efficiently than highly decentralized populations.” In an opinion piece in The New York Times, University of Michigan urban planning professor Christopher B. Leinberger declares that “the good news is that there is great pent-up demand for walkable, centrally located neighborhoods in cities like Portland, Denver, Philadelphia, and Chattanooga, Tenn.” “It is time,” he asserts, to “build what the market wants: mixed-income, walkable cities and suburbs that will support the knowledge economy, promote environmental sustainability, and create jobs.”21

What If Henry David Thoreau had written more about the charms of Boston than the appeal of Walden, if John Muir had featured the attractions of San Francisco over the beauty of the Sierras (though this might have posed some trouble for his crusading against the Hetch Hetchy Dam), if Edward Abbey had written more about good times in Hoboken, New Jersey, than about the entrancing qualities of the Four Corners canyonlands? The persuasive strategies of preservationists and environmentalists would have been dramatically better aligned with their goals. A society that felt better about urban density would be a society better positioned to support and sustain healthy ecosystems in the great outdoors.

And yet support for the transfer of water from agriculture to cities is by no means the obvious conclusion from this line of reflection. The trend toward agricultural water transfers, in which urban and suburban areas purchase rights from farmers and ranchers, is shaping up as a major force affecting the rural landscape that, for so many, represents the “real West.” In the twenty-first century, the habit of mind that pits rural interests against urban interests proves to be distinctly un-useful. In down-to-earth reality, urban well-being and rural well-being are more intertwined than they are distinct or reciprocally injurious. A thriving rural world is an asset for a neighboring city; the proximity to open spaces is, after all, a principal reason why people want to live in a city like Denver. Ranching and farming are essential forces in the preservation of the West’s open horizons. Moreover, a growing enthusiasm for local food production offers an expanding market for farmers in the vicinity of cities, adding another argument for pursuing the hope of a shared urban and rural prosperity.

A recent report from three environmental groups, “Filling the Gap: Commonsense Solutions for Meeting Front Range Water Needs,” puts forward a “Smart Principle” that connects very directly to this line of thought, offering this advice to decision makers: “Recognizing that market forces now drive water reallocation from agriculture to municipal uses, structure such transfers, where possible, to maintain agriculture and in all cases to mitigate the adverse impacts to rural communities from these transfers.” To put that in language a little less pitched to professionals working in the field of water management: “Don’t waste effort on fighting an unmistakable trend of moving water, by sales and leases, from farms and ranches to cities and suburbs. But do seek out every opportunity to keep farms and ranches from going out of business, and at the very least, when the supplying of water to a city will produce injury to a rural area, find a way of repairing or reducing that injury.” In practical terms, this recommendation means stopping these transactions short of permanent, irreversible sale of water rights: “Innovative arrangements, such as rotational fallowing, interruptible supply agreements, water banks, crop changes, and deficit irrigation,‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ could allow for temporary transfer of irrigation water to municipal uses without permanently drying irrigated lands.” And, with more attention to conservation and efficiency, the demand for water in irrigated farming could be significantly lowered, leaving more water available to build an alliance between rural areas and urban areas.22

‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Deficit irrigation is a system of reducing the water applied to crops in a strategically timed manner, when the water stress will have minimal impact on the plants’ productivity.

Exploring the history of Chicago and its hinterland, historian William Cronon drew conclusions that illuminate and deepen the history of water in Colorado. Cronon initially thought he saw “reassuringly sharp boundaries between city and county.” But “the moment [he] tried to trace those boundaries back into history, they began to dissolve.” Urban and rural landscapes, he came to believe, “are not two places but one. They created each other, they transformed each other’s environments and economies, and they now depend on each other for their survival. To see them separately is to misunderstand where they came from and where they might go in the future.”23

Better Assumption Number 3: There are many good reasons to reject old appraisals of the distribution of virtue and the corresponding allocation of water between rural and urban areas and to search instead for the ties that link the well-being of both domains.

An Awkward Debt, with Interest Accumulating: Society, Engineers, and Infrastructure

Mistaken Assumption Number 4: Although members of the engineering profession should be reprimanded when they make messes, they should generally be left to their own devices. Infrastructure works best when the great majority of citizens never have to pay any attention to it.

The history of Denver Water provides a rich case study in the force of human ingenuity, particularly as that force has powered the profession of engineering. The plans and actions of engineers, more than any other factor, produced the transformation of the Denver metropolitan region. And yet, in a curious pattern in the writing of western American history, other occupations have drawn the lion’s share of attention, and engineering has been left waiting for recognition. The historical field has long been well supplied with studies of explorers, fur trappers, cowboys, ranchers, farmers, and loggers. Studies of engineers are very rare, even though engineers have been central to the key enterprises in western development: mining, railroading, water diversion, road building, energy production, and urban development.§§§§§§§

§§§§§§§ The conspicuous exception has been the attention paid to the engineers who surveyed the routes and supervised the construction of transcontinental railroads, though even in that case the attention has been more on colorful, self-dramatizing individuals like Grenville Dodge than on the broader significance of the profession.

A heightened attention to the profession of engineering is of practical, as well as scholarly, consequence because the relationship between the American people and the engineering profession is in need of some significant reengineering itself. To use the phrasing of historian Martin Melosi, engineers have been “facing a major transition in how they were perceived and how they perceived their function.” For more than a century, citizens, customers, clients, and public officials have said to engineers, “Get us what we want in water supply; make sure that the water is clean and cheap; and be careful not to place any unsightly disruption in the landscapes that we love.” In the history of Denver, thousands of people lived lives of considerable comfort under these less-than-fair terms. Reckoning with that history gives us a prime opportunity to note—and act on—the need for better terms for this relationship. A major project for the twenty-first century rests on persuading those who benefit from vast engineering projects to forge a more honest assessment of the consequences of their own needs and to face up to their complicity in—and their many benefits from—the work of engineers. As writer Diane Ward put it, “for the most part engineers have been only as good—or as bad—as the tasks they were given by the rest of us.”24

Also posing an obstacle to the improvement in the working relationship between society and the engineering profession is the quick impulse to condemn technology. Engineers have operated with insensitivity toward and contempt for nature, the complaint goes. They have been unrestrained in the exercise of their power. They put all their faith in technological fixes and never raise the possibility of wise adaptation to natural constraints. This line of thought presents two problems. First, to deal with the consequences of a century and a half of rearranging the natural environment, we are very much dependent on the skills, insights, and good will of engineers. The need for their ingenuity shows no signs of shrinking. And, second, the litany of condemnation and complaint ignores a spirit-lifting development of recent time: the rise of the profession of environmental engineering, in which engineers, with impressive clarity and honesty, assess the dilemmas that their predecessors have created and seek to correct or reduce the injury, damage, or loss produced by previous professional practices. Legal scholar Robert Glennon’s observation is certainly accurate: “In the past, when we needed more water, we engineered our way out of the problem by diverting rivers, building dams, or drilling water. Today, with few exceptions, these options are not viable solutions.”25 The solutions of the present and future will, however, still require engineering our way—but guided by the values of the emerging practices of the environmental engineers.

As our shared inheritance, the vast American infrastructure built in an increasingly distant past is showing its age. Infrastructure briefly rockets to national attention when it breaks down in a sudden calamity, while matters of maintenance and replacement languish from inattention, resistance to public expenditures, and dislike of big government. Indeed, without the stimulus of crisis, the very word infrastructure currently works not to ignite enthusiasm and recruit support but to send minds wandering in search of something more interesting to contemplate. As the history of Denver Water shows, infrastructure enjoys the briefest of glory days: at the moment of their completion, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, treatment plants, and pumping stations will be saluted with a ceremony of completion, with a few solemn speeches and some rarely-very-spirit-lifting photographs of dignitaries engaged in ribbon cutting. When the ceremony is over and the applause dies down, the infrastructure is supposed to recede to a state of invisibility, delivering water in the manner of an unobtrusive, uncomplaining, self-effacing servant. The people who manage the infrastructure are supposed to keep an equally low profile, maintaining the infrastructure in a manner that keeps costs low, prohibits interruptions or breakdowns in service, and somehow holds off time’s legendary aggressiveness as an agent of demolition, relentlessly deploying the tools of corrosion, abrasion, and gravity.

And yet, in the early twenty-first century, a cadre of brave people refuse to defer to the popular preference for keeping infrastructure out of sight and out of mind. A plucky group of public officials and pundits keeps reminding us that our well-being rests on a vast network of aging structures and facilities, while a widely shared resistance to paying the price for the restoration and rehabilitation of this network leaves our circumstances ever more precarious. When it comes to restoring and rehabilitating our sense of responsibility for and indebtedness to the systems that supply us with essential services, a visit back to the point of origin of these systems has unquestionable value. For the open-minded, there is also wonder and surprise in the recognition that, in a distant time, human beings so rapidly conceived of and built structures of such scale—and such consequence.

Better Assumption Number 4: To help in the crucial cause of building a direct and honest relationship with technology and its creators, citizens benefitting from the water infrastructure should cultivate both the company of engineers and a livelier sense of personal responsibility. Engineers will be essential participants in finding solutions for the dilemmas generated by history, making hindsight condemnation of the profession into an unrewarding and even counterproductive sport.

“Whiskey Is for Drinking and Water Is for Fighting Over”: Mark Twain’s Doubtful Career Achievement as a Water Policy Analyst

Mistaken Assumption Number 5: Water is fated to produce conflicts, contests, and even wars because it is so important to every enterprise and undertaking and to human life.

People who attend a water conference are almost guaranteed to hear at least one speaker (if not five or ten) quote Mark’s Twain’s legendary remark, “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.” Unending wear and tear from rubbing up against too many podiums and microphones has made this remark into the equivalent, in freshness and originality, of the story about the waiter who when asked by a customer what a fly was doing in her soup responded, “The backstroke.”

Besides overuse, this old saying has two flaws: inauthenticity and inaccuracy. First, there is no evidence to support the assertion that Mark Twain coined this tedious aphorism.26 Second, there is a good likelihood that the statement is only half-true. Whiskey is for drinking. Water, by contrast, is for every activity under the sun. Every now and then, it is for fighting, but it is also for negotiating, deal making, marketing, collaborating, and conserving.

Several years ago, publishers persuaded a sharp and thoughtful writer named Wendy Barnaby to write a book on water wars. She took this assignment willingly. Experts had gone to town with cataclysmic forecasts in the 1990s; Barnaby cites the particular example of “former World Bank vice-president Ismail Serageldin’s often-quoted 1995 prophecy that, although ‘the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.’” But her work on the book did not proceed smoothly. “Power struggles and politics,” Barnaby came to realize, “have led to overt and institutionalized conflict over water—but no armed conflict, as there is over borders and statehood.” Rather than going to war, countries far more often “solve their water shortages through trade and international agreements.” The insights of a British social scientist, Tony Allan, showed how this worked. When a city or a nation imports food from rural areas, this adds up to a transfer of embedded water, or, in a term Allan increasingly used, virtual water. Every orange, strawberry, kernel of wheat, potato, or cucumber comes into being with a significant deployment of water.¶¶¶¶¶¶¶ Water-abundant areas could grow those products, and water-short but prosperous countries could buy them. Allan focused his studies on conflict-rich areas of the Middle East where, he found, arid countries dealt with their shortage by importing grain and its embedded water.27

¶¶¶¶¶¶¶ Allan’s point usefully complicates the familiar phrasing by which urban water use is distinguished from rural water use; the importing of food grown in rural areas into a city like Denver also entails the importing of embedded, or virtual, water.

Rather than going to war, Barnaby came to believe, nations “solve their water shortages through trade and international agreements.” This presented a challenge, not only to Mark Twain’s endlessly quoted apocryphal assertion, but also, more immediately, to the author’s relationship with her publishers. Allan’s analysis “killed [her] book.” She “offered to revise its thesis, but [her] publishers pointed out that predicting an absence of war over water would not sell.”

Concluding a book on water by calling attention to the death of Barnaby’s planned book may seem an ill-fated move for a hopeful author. But there are irresistible satisfactions to going out on this note. Writer Alexander Bell chimed in on the chorus with Allan and Barnaby: “Cooperation on water,” he wrote, “is very resilient.” Water may be of such crucial importance that feisty leaders of nations have to come to their senses and negotiate. “The truth is,” Bell concludes, “that water may be just as effective at disarming man’s war instincts as it is as starting the fight.”28 Allan, Barnaby, and Bell offer a vitally important challenge to an ancient and fatigued piece of conventional wisdom about water’s inherent and inevitable power to pit individuals and communities against each other. Applying their thinking to the history of western water offers strenuous but valuable exercise to westerners in the twenty-first century, precisely the kind of exercise that reduces gloom and enhances hope.

Consider the fact that the Colorado Constitution, despite the powerful forces of antiurban thinking in the American past, gives domestic water use the highest priority in times of water shortage. Consider, as well, this thought-provoking pair of numbers: Denver Water uses slightly more than 2 percent of all of the treated and untreated water used in the state to support more than 25 percent of the state’s population.******** To a remarkable degree, we inherit legal principles and an infrastructure that support the density of settlement that offers hope for the prospect of clustering people in ways that reduce environmental disturbance and disruption.29

******** According to Denver Water, the agency uses about 265,000 acre-feet per year. According to the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s Statewide Water Supply Initiative–2010 report, municipal and industrial uses divert 1.16 million acre-feet per year and agriculture uses 4.8 million acre-feet per year. Assuming a typical irrigation efficiency of 50 percent, the total diversion for agriculture is approximately 9.6 million acre-feet. Thus, the total diversion of treated and untreated water for municipal, industrial, and agricultural uses is approximately 10.76 million acre-feet per year. Denver Water’s use of 265,000 acre-feet represents slightly less than 2.5 percent of this total. The 2010 census pegged the state’s population at 5,029,196, and Denver Water serves approximately 1.3 million customers, or just over a quarter of the population.

Our predecessors on the planet went tooth and nail at the development of resources, carrying on as if there were no tomorrow. But there turned out to be a tomorrow, and we are its occupants. There are unmistakable assets, as much as unmistakable liabilities, in our inheritance from the past. In the inventory of the estate left to us by our predecessors, there is no argument for fatalism.

Better Assumption Number 5: “It would be great if we could unclog our stream of thought about the misleading notion of ‘water wars.’”30