HoleInTheRiverHistoryOfGroundwater

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But human conceptions of water’s meaning and purpose also influenced groundwater use in the South Platte valley. The interplay of opposing perspectives shaped attitudes about groundw ater’s proper use and management. In the 1930s, drought- stricken farmers, scrambling to save th eir crops, tapped common underground supplies with little restrain t or regulation. By the 1950s, however, as depletions became undeniable in many places, most western states sought to control groundwater in order to conserve it. In Colorado, sc ientists and engineers regard ed groundwater as a vulnerable resource that required protection to prolong its use, and they were among the first to call for state regulation. But while scientists saw primarily a physical resource in need of conservation, lawmakers encountered an abst ract web of overlapp ing property rights – both groundwater rights that required recogni tion and definition, and established surface- water rights that demanded legal protection. Ca ught between these exte rnal perspectives were farmers, many of whom perceived ac cess to groundwater in terms of economic survival. To produce irrigated cash crops such as sugar beets and corn, they sought to achieve local control over this vital part of their enterpri se, while also recognizing the wide diversity of local conditions that st andardized management constraints would overlook. They saw groundwater primarily as an economic necessity and sought to altered substantially by people, its natural character also endured. Likewise, Mark Fiege has argued that people could not eradicate nature from western agricu ltural landscapes despite their intensive efforts at environmental mastery. Both studies emphasized the blurred boundaries between people and their natural surroundings, illustrating that society and environment do not function in isolation but rather in dialogue, each reshaping the other. See Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West (Seattle: University of Washin gton Press, 1999); and White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). For histories of groundwater in confined aquifers, see Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, ( 2005); John Opie, Ogallalla : Water for a Dry Land Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Theodore Steinberg, Slide Mountain, or the Folly of Owning Nature ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 82-105. For a comparison of groundwate r law across the west, see Robert G. Dunbar, “The Adaptation of Groundwater Control Institutions to the Arid West,” Agricultural History 51 (1977): 677. 4