Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat

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? ? ? ? - traditional organizational agendas to work together at the river basin level to produce a new form - af collective/public property-quality habitat for threatened and endangered species. ? Analytically, then, the question becomes: how has it happened that a constellation of ? water user organizations that have emerged over the last 130 years to provide a combination of - private benefits (e.g. agriculture/industries), and common property resource benefits (e.g., ditch - companies, irrigation districts, conservancy districts, municipal water suppliers), and small scale collective goods (e.g., environmental organizations working on modest ecosystem patches), have ? entered into negotiations with a view toward producing on a larger scale than ever before a ? collective goodlproperty in the form of species habitat? To produce this new and expanded form of collective property, the players have had to agree to transcend and adapt their particular private and common property resource rationalities. They have proposed to invest in creative solutions of their own making to produce a product from which they will not capture any more benefit than anybody else in the basin, the nation, the world. Like others, they know not the value of a plover, a tern, or a whooping crane. Whatever that value, it is not to be measured in market exchange of private goods. They do know that there is no profit in sustaining these umbrella species, and all the life forms that will flourish with them. They know that to enhance the environment, their customers and members will pay a bit more for an acre foot of water and a kilowatt hour of electricity. They know that they would not have undertaken to produce this collective good if left alone. They also know that they have been capable of negotiating a new regime of things that will-more than has been the case in the past-com p`reflect the true costs that our production and consumption of private goods has placed on the river and other living things that depend on it. They would have to adjust their former organizational rationalities to make room on the rivers of the basin for a new collective agenda. All in all, the attempt to establish a basin-wide multiple state, state-federal cooperative species habitat recovery prograrri is an astounding development-undertaken by virtually no other society- -and one well worth investigation. 5