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the social and environmental consequences of those endeavors. Norris Hundley, Jr., for <br />example, emphasized the deleterious effects of conflicting local interests in reclamation <br />projects, while Donald Pisani pointed to a lack of coordi nated planning and governmental <br />leadership as the main culprit for social a nd environmental costs. Even Donald Worster, <br />who has articulated environmental agency in much of the rest of his work, portrayed <br />water itself as largely a passive canvas for human acti on and social change in Rivers of <br />4 <br />Empire. Although water is not alive, and its move ments are usually pr edictable in terms <br />of slope, gradient, and volume, water nevert heless follows its own agenda. Apart from <br />human designs and control, its presence and motion can fl uctuate with climate and <br />weather patterns. It sometimes moves in unexp ected ways: in the Sout h Platte valley, it <br />connects a river and an aquifer. Despite the f act that surface-water rights in Colorado <br />were established separately from groundwater rights, the South Pl atte River and its <br />underlying aquifer respected no such boundaries – they exchanged water naturally, <br />creating a hydrological commons that the state’s regulatory structure had not accounted <br />5 6 <br />for. The historical agency of water carved its own identity into human affairs. <br />4 <br /> For an overview of the historiography of water in the American West, see Norris Hundley, Jr., “Water and <br />the West in Historical Imagination,” Western Historical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 4-31. Also see <br />Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. <br />See also Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New <br />York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Pisani, Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public <br />Policy, 1850-1920 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996); Hundley, The Great Thirst: Californians <br />and Water: A History , rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). <br />5 <br /> A similar kind of natural commons regime is anal yzed by Mark Fiege in “The Weedy West: Mobile <br />Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape,” The Western Historical Quarterly 35 , <br />no. 1 (2005): 22-48. Fiege postulat ed an “ecological commons” that de fied regulation or private property <br />schemes – weeds presented a mutual problem in Montana, tumbling through fences and across property <br />lines, linking together land that was supposed to be separate. As in the South Platte valley, these schemes <br />and regulations ultimately hindered the consistent management of shared environmental characteristics. <br />6 <br /> The portrayal of water as an active historical elem ent has never been applied to groundwater. Scholars <br />such as John Opie, and Geoff Cunfer have studied deep aquifers such as the Ogallala, where water has little <br />relation to surface flows and may be accurately character ized as a passive resource, something that can be <br />“mined.” In the South Platte valley aquifer, water’s motion is more dynamic. In some historical studies <br />involving water, inroads have been made toward a more inclusive model. For example, Richard White <br />illustrated the hybrid characteristics of the Columbia River valley, arguing that although the river was <br />3 <br />