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PAR'r II SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE CRISIS <br />CHAPTER THREE: <br />GETTING INTO THE FEDERAL NEXUS <br />"...all great values of this territory have ultimately to be measured to you in acre feeY' <br />John Wesley Powell, speaking at the Montana <br />Constitutional Convention in 1889 (Peirce 1972). <br />- Degraded habitat for three birds-whooping cranes, piping plovers, and least terns--was <br />intimately linked, at least in the view of the FWS and the larger environmental community, to the <br />? construction of Platte basin water facilities, most especially dams, reservoirs, and diversions. The <br />? Endangered Species Act of 1973 would force a confrontation between activities of water users in <br />- the basin and the needs of three birds listed under that law. The ESA has compelled a sustained <br />. twenty-seven year conversation about how to reconcile human water work with needs of the listed <br />birds. <br />Two Traditions <br />The American west has always been a major federal project. The federal government has <br />been the purveyor of cheap homesteads, subsidizer of railroads and highways, investor in military <br />facilities, pramoter of irrigation, builder of the Panama canal, fighter of native Americans, <br />provider of reservations for native Americans, organizer of grazing resources, steward and restorer <br />of soils beginning with the great "blow-out of the 1930's", and owner-manager of pazks and <br />forests. It is, in the eleven westernmost states (of the lower 48) by faz the largest landowner. <br />Federal agencies own almost half of the 17 Western states as compared to eastern states that have <br />been overwhelmingly privatized in their landholdings. Nevada has the highest proportion of land <br />under federal ownership (82.9%), Wyoming is 48.9% federally owned, Colorado (36.3%), but <br />federal holdings in Nebraska amount to only 1.4% of that state's total area (Riebsame and Robb <br />1997: 58). <br />? Significant federal presence in the West has always meant close relationships among <br />? federal, state, and local natural resource interests but in the 1960's-1970's, the rules that governed <br />• the relationship drastically changed. For decades, the Bureau of Reclamation was promoted by its powerful constituencies as a <br />force for progress by advancing the story of the small struggling community starved for essential <br />services-educational, religious, health, commercial, and financial-transformed into a thriving <br />population center by a bureau dam. In the early years of the twentieth century, the U.S. Fish and <br />Wildlife Service served that same vision by attempting to remove those predators that threatened <br />to make the West unsafe for a cow. When the Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) constructed the <br />large dams and reservoirs on the Wyoming's North Platte, and when it built the system of <br />Colorado west and east slope storage reservoirs and a system of pumps and tunnels bringing <br />Colorado river water to the burgeoning populations on the east side, the federal-local vision was <br />15