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Introduction | Source |
Rights | Mining | Salinity | Tourism | Dams | Ending |
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"The statements and opinions expressed by the
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views of the Tibetan Ecology Foundation."
Blood of the Earth Colorado River
Gene
R. Reetz, Ph.d., Former Water
Specialist, Environmental Protection Agency:
The
name actually came from the Spanish
explorers and it means red, color
red, because the Colorado River
carries a lot of sediment. When
the Spanish saw it, it looked
very reddish. And so the name
originated from the early Spanish
explorers in the American
Southwest.
Jim
Pokrandt, Colorado River District, Glenwood Spring:
The Colorado River is really a
desert river. It’s a hard-working
river. Water from the Colorado River
serves 30 million people in the
American Southwest and in the
Republic of Mexico. Now, people hear
about that around the world, and
they think the Colorado River must
be very, very big, but as
you can see here, it’s not
very big at all.
Justice
Gregory J. Hobbs, Justice, Supreme
Court, State of Colorado:
It is a very water-short area
which we have in the Southwestern
Colorado River states- 7 states.
Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah,
--that’s what we call the Basin
states. The Lower Basin states
are Nevada, Arizona and California.
And then Mexico, the Republic of
Mexico. So, the Colorado River
starts here in Colorado, but the
state of Colorado can only use
one-third of the river. The rest
of it, two-thirds, must go down
stream to these other states and
Mexico. Now, there is a 1922
Colorado River Compact, which divides
up the water use allocations among
the 7 Colorado Basin states within
the United States. There’s a 1944
treaty between the United States
and Mexico, guaranteeing Mexico 1,500,000
acre-feet of water a year at
the Mexican border.
Rita
L. Crumpton, Manager, Orchard Mesa
Irrigation District, Grand Junction,
Colorado:
We provide irrigation water to about
9,400 acres of ground. We have
apricots, peaches, vineyards-where they
grow grapes. We have some wineries,
a lot of wineries that use
the grape. We grow some hay.
And then, a lot of houses with
their yards and their gardens,
private homes, and they use the
water for their lawns and their
garden.
The irrigation water that I use
comes from high in the Rocky
Mountains, from snowmelt, and it
comes out of the Colorado River.
That’s what we use. We divert
the water from the Colorado River
and take it through the canal,
and send it back to the
Colorado River when we’re finished
with it.
Larry
A. Gilbert, Farmer, Imperial Valley,
California:
There’s probably 50 crops grown in
the Valley every year, maybe more.
A lot of them are forage
crops: alfalfa, Sudan grass, Bermuda
grass, and cline grass. Forage crops
are probably the biggest acreage.
And they’re used for feeding cattle,
or horses, or dairy cows. A
lot of it is used in this
country, in California, and some
in Arizona, and some is exported
to Japan, Taiwan, and other
countries as well.
Bradley
H. Udall, Director, Colorado University-NOAA
Western Water Assessment Cooperative
Institute for Research in Environmental
Sciences:
Las Vegas gets 90% of its
water supply out of the Colorado
River. It cannot tolerate an
emptying of Lake Mead, which is
right there at Las Vegas, and
that reservoir has gone down
significantly over the last nine
years, during this unprecedented drought.
There is, I don’t think it’s
an exaggeration to say, grave
concern inside Las Vegas right now,
about the future of their water
supply. Because they’re not, unlike
most Western cities, they’re not
particularly diversified in their sources
of supply. Los Angeles, for
example, gets water out of the
Northern Sierras, it gets it out
of the Owens Valley in California,
it actually gets it of course
out of the Colorado River Basin.
Here in Denver, some of our
supplies are local, and some of
them are these trans-mountain supplies
out of the Colorado River Basin.
Phoenix gets a large proportion of
its water, and Tucson Arizona in
particular, out of an enormous,
multi-billion dollar engineering project
called the Central Arizona
Project.
River Source
Carol
T. Linnig, Park Ranger, Rocky
Mountain National Park, Colorado River
District:
Rocky Mountain National Park encompasses
108,000 hectares. The headwaters are
up on the side of the
mountain. It starts from snow melt
and precipitation and little feeder
streams that come together, and
then the river flows down the
mountain and through the Kawuneeche
Valley.
Gene
R. Reetz, Ph.d., Former Water
Specialist, Environmental Protection Agency:
Rocky Mountain National Park is
actually the headwaters of the
Colorado River. The river originates
in Rocky Mountain Park. Some of
the activities that are environmentally
damaging actually occurred before the
park was established. In Rocky
Mountain National Park, on the West
side, you can see the Grand
Ditch, which is a big scar on
the mountain, which diverts quite
a bit of water from the very
headwaters.
Carol
T. Linnig, Park Ranger, Rocky
Mountain National Park, Colorado River
District:
And [the Grand Ditch] was constructed
between the 1890s and the 1930s.
It is a water diversion project,
so it’s impacting the Colorado
River right at the headwaters,
because it collects all of the
snow off of the Never Summers,
so that water never gets down
to the valley anymore. And it
takes the water north, and over
to the east side and out to
the eastern plains for the farmers
and the ranchers.
We
also have another Water diversion
project, a tunnel running through the
park, Adam’s Tunnel. So again,
water is being taken from the
Colorado River and diverted over to
the east side. There are more
people over there but less
precipitation.
Gene
R. Reetz, Ph.d., Former Water
Specialist, Environmental Protection Agency:
The Park Service manages Rocky
Mountain National Park, but the
Environmental Protection Agency is
responsible for reviewing, for example,
environmental impact statements. Under
federal law -the National Environmental
Policy Act in the United States
- if there is a major
activity (whether it is a dam
or a highway), the lead federal
agency has to prepare an
environmental impact statement. And that’s
a very, very important process.
An environmental impact statement identifies
what the proposed action is, what
some of the consequences are, and
mitigation. And that is a public
document, so that allows the
public and decision-makers to look at
the project and decide: is it
good, is it bad. And the
Environmental Protection Agency, legally,
has to review and comment on
the documents. We’re the only
official agency that has to do
that.
Carol
T. Linnig: We have no
development in the Park. We permit
no collecting of any items in
the Park. We limit backcountry
use. And we preserve the natural
conditions.
In
the case of Rocky, we have
very spectacular scenery, and also
wonderful opportunities for viewing
wildlife. We have tremendous diversity
of animals. We have over 65
species of mammals, including eight
species of bats. We have 285
species of birds, four amphibians,
one reptile, seven native fish, and
over 125 species of butterflies.
Rocky
Mountain National Park was the
tenth National Park, and it was
created by an act of Congress
and signed by President Woodrow
Wilson on January 29th,
1915.
The
base-budget at Rocky is 10 million
dollars, which is allocated by
Congress. In addition, the Park is
permitted to retain 80% of the
gate receipts, which adds another
3-4 million dollars to our budget.
Well,
it’s required by the Park’s
enabling legislation and the National
Park Service’s mission to preserve
and protect this area for future
generations. It’s the mandate of
this park to preserve natural
conditions.
Impacts
of Climate Change
Carol
T. Linnig: As far as glaciers,
we don’t really have any data
on that. Where we are seeing
climate change impacts is in the
infestation of the mountain pine
beetle. That’s why we have all
these dead trees. It’s believed
that that is partly due –we
think maybe a little bit at
least—because of the milder winters,
shorter winters because of those mild
temperatures.
Bradley
H. Udall: So the mountain pine
beetle: it’s a really interesting
phenomenon, and it’s part climate
change, it’s part natural cycle, and
it’s probably part human management
as well. And what we now
think is that due to all three
of these factors together, the
climate change, and lack of really
cold winters that would kill the
pest, the single-age stands and
the lack of forest fires to
naturally thin these stands, we’re
going to loose 90% of the
dominant species here in Colorado –
the high-country lodgepole pine. What
we think in the short-term is
that you will actually get
increased runoff because the trees
actually take up water, right, as
they grow. No one really knows
what this means in the long-run
for runoff, but in the short-term,
in the five to ten year
time frame, you probably actually see
higher amounts of runoff, you
probably see some reductions in water
quality. The trees actually absorb
some key nutrients that now are
going to end up in our
streams and will then promote growth
in those streams that wouldn’t
have otherwise occurred were the
trees healthy and absorbing those
nutrients. So there’s a whole series
of changes associated with these
pine beetles that we don’t fully
understand. I mean, it’s an
ongoing science experiment how this
plays out.
Water
Rights
Rita
L. Crumpton, Manager, Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, Grand Junction,
Colorado: The water right that we own, that
is a property right that we own. The government can’t take it away from
us. The government does not own the water. The water belongs to the
citizens of the state of Colorado. So, they can put new regulations in
place that we have to follow in order to use the water, but they can’t
take the water away from us. It belongs to all of us.
Now, we have a water
right that allows us to use the water. We don’t own the water.
Everybody owns the water.
Gregory J. Hobbs Jr.,
Justice, Supreme Court, State of Colorado:
The water is always owned by the public. Everybody. Every citizen owns
the water. But the right to use it, then, is what you turn into a water
right. You know? The water right belongs to, you could say, nature;
you could say, the people. The question is: who can take it and consume
it? Take it out of its channel, consume it in a crop or in a city or a
business. Now, that is what we call a water use right. So please, when
you use the term “water right,” remember what we’re talking about: a
right to use the public’s water resource.
Kenneth G. Poocha,
Executive Director, Arizona Commission of Indian Affairs:
The best way
that I can describe a more generalistic view of how indigenous people
view water is that you may have heard the term “Mother Earth.” And we
believe that the Earth is our mother. She provides just like a mother
does. She provides everything that we need to survive. And that’s part
of the reason why we have no real sense of private ownership. Nobody
owns their own mother. It’s part of your family. When you think of it
like that, you think of it as harming your mother. So if you were to do
something that were to pollute a river, or a land or a canyon or the
air, it is thought of as harming your mother’s body. And nobody would
want to do that.
Grant
Buma, Hydrologist Engineer, Colorado River Indian Tribes:
Right now, the Colorado River is over-proscribed, as far as the use of
the water. Now, we have dams. So, the white man came and he built
dams. And then, the white man said, well, you know, you have to have
water rights. And so the native peoples never understood that. They
were able to negotiate for water rights. It took a long time. But they
have rights to a certain amount of water, which actually took one
hundred years to adjudicate, all the way to the Supreme Court. Where
the Europeans wanted to give the native people, like, you know, we give
you 300 buffalos or something like that. And they said, no, we don’t
need your charity. We can take care of ourselves; just give us back our
water. All we need is the water and the land, and we can take care of
ourselves. Which they did very well for hundreds of years before the
white man showed up.
Gregory
J. Hobbs Jr.:
Because it’s very precious. The whole of life depends upon a water
supply. So always, human beings have figured out how to divert water
and put it to –what we would call in Colorado- beneficial use. And
beneficial use is whatever water is needed for. In Colorado we
recognize agricultural water rights, municipal water rights, business
water rights, recreational water rights, and water rights for fish flow.
Grant
Buma: The native people feel - or felt
certainly, and I think they still do – that God provided the water for
everybody to use, provided the land and the air for everyone to use.
And this is the way they lived for centuries here. Then, of course,
when the Europeans came, and first began to build fences to keep their
livestock in, the Native people didn’t understand that.
Kenneth
G. Poocha: There are very few things that you
can say are across-the-board, or general, among indigenous people here,
in America or in North America, but one of the things that we believe,
almost universally among indigenous people, is: there is no one single
owner of the land or the resources. It was such a part of us in the way
that you might think of your family. No one owned the mountains, no one
owned the waters, no one owned the sky, the land, anything like that.
So, almost no indigenous population felt that way. It was, therefore,
all of our use. Now, there were territories that were established, and
that’s where the wars resulted in, but still, they never believed that
it was theirs.
Grant
Buma: The Europeans came and began to make
regulations and imposed their legal system on the tribes, on the Native
people. That resulted in some significant wars that occurred here
between the Natives and the Europeans.
Gregory
J. Hobbs Jr.: The problem really comes when
you have large business concerns: big cities growing, new corporate
farms, for example, not small farmers, that are going to take water away
from the indigenous people who are already there. Now, in our country,
we have a law that requires us to recognize the rights of the Native
Americans based upon the reservations that were set aside for them by
the government back in the 1800s. And there have been a lot of people
that wanted to take the water away from them, and the law says they
can’t do that.
Kenneth
G. Poucha: The native people really don’t
have a say in that anymore. They only have a say on what’s going on
through their reservation. We may make some opinions about it, but
we’ve lost that ability to comment and to, really, influence what
happens to the land and water outside our own reservation. And that has
been something that has been very detrimental to the indigenous people.
Because we have been confined to our reservations, we’ve lost that
ability to have a say in: how the land is protected, how the water is
protected, who uses it, if it’s polluted or not. We just, we’ve lost
that ability.
coming soon...
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