Recharging a river with a flow of trust

For the second time in six months, the seven states that make up the Colorado River Basin failed yesterday to meet a federal deadline to reach an agreement on how to cut their cumulative consumption of the river’s water by as much as 40%. That austerity is necessary to prevent the system’s collapse after 23 years of drought – the most severe and prolonged dry stretch in more than a millennium. 

What happens next is uncertain. Forty million people depend on the river for water and hydropower. Washington may impose rationing on the states for the first time in history, a move that would almost certainly trigger lawsuits. The U.S. Department of the Interior has already imposed reduced releases from lakes Powell and Mead, the basin’s two main reservoirs. Both are in danger of reaching levels too low to allow water to flow downstream.

The necessity for stark and balanced sacrifices by the basin states underscores the challenges of adapting to severe weather disruptions under laws drafted long before such a historic drought was foreseen. Yet even before an agreement can be reached, mental dams need to be broken. The current system is built on division and exclusion. Rival water users would need to redefine water security on a new basis, one that starts with trust and leads to fairness.

“What used to happen is that the powers that be would get together and figure out what to do, and then tell everyone else what the plan was,” Stephen Roe Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, told The New Yorker this week. “And what’s changed is that you just can’t do that anymore. Those days are over.” 

The Colorado River Basin is governed by a century-old compact that allocated the full volume of water flowing through the river and its tributaries to the seven states. That scheme deliberately sidelined 30 tribal nations whose rights to those waters predated the compact. A 1963 Supreme Court decision affirmed the tribal water rights, but the nations have been battling ever since for control of their allocations. 

That is now changing. For the first time, the states are starting to work seriously with the tribes. These nations hold rights to 20% of the basin’s water. Honoring those rights – and the dignity they represent – is a first step toward building new partnerships. In Arizona, for example, the Jicarilla Apache Nation is set to release 20,000 acre-feet of water from the San Juan River, a major southern tributary to the Colorado River, in a deal brokered with environmentalists and Arizona state officials. Deals like that show the uniting effect of environmental extremes.  

The Colorado River crisis is forcing a reevaluation of the human currency of shared security across the arid West. The opportunity, as Bruce Yandle, a former Federal Trade Commission executive director, wrote in The Hill recently, is to “make scarcity a prelude to plenty.”