Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat

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FOREWORD Around the world, water users go into marketplaces and are promptly served, given sufficient capacity to pay, with desired agricultural implements, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and all those other necessary things that confer mutually direct benefit to buyer and seller. However, in no water culture, have people been able to order up, in those same private transactions, a unit of ditch water control, a"fair share" allocation of stream flow, a solution to the problem of conjunctively using well water with surface supplies among nearby neighbors and others more remote, or an increment of improved ecosystem diversity. Such things require coordinated action of social organizations beyond the capacity of marketplaces to provide. In the North American context such organizations are mutual companies, acequias, irrigation districts, conservancy districts, metropolitan water supply districts and government agencies. ? In their historic struggles with each other and the arid high plains environment, people of ? the basin have evolved a rich organizational capacity to do things collectively that could not be - accomplished via private exchange in marketplaces. They have organized to divert water into ditches, to share the "shrink" among parties on those same canals, and then employ their ? collectively owned and managed water systems as a foundation upon which to construct their ? communities. Then, to protect those communities from the depredations of the newcomer • upstream, they had to organize to allocate scarce water among ditch headgates along extensive • river systems. When surface water sources could no longer suffice, many people sought relief in use of groundwater; this, in turn at least in some places, compelled additional organization to ? integrate generally newer groundwater exploitation with older surface water uses. Now, all this ? organizational tradition is put to a newer test in the Platte River Basin. Can this tradition that . grew up on a heavy dose of utilitarian water use largely blind to environmental consequence, a • tradition forged around boundaries that divided the federal government from the states, the three basin states from each other, and user from user, environmentalist from environmentalist, ? undertake a successful basin-wide program of collective cooperative action for integrating within ? the water management agenda habitat needs of three bird species and one fish listed under the - terms of the Endangered Species Act? This report addresses only a late portion of the larger story, that part having to do with the genesis and progress of basin-wide discussions that were sporadically launched in the 1970's and early 1980's, that came into intensified focus in the 1990's, and that-it is hoped by the participants-will be successfully brought to fruition by early 2005. These discussions have had, as their central focus, the construction of a cooperative basin-wide recovery program for designated critical habitat on Nebraska's central Platte for the whooping crane, piping plover, interior least tern, and-on the lower end of the river-the pallid sturgeon. This work constitutes an interim report in two senses. First, it represents a draft that will be revised. Finally, since the story of getting to a viable program has yet to fully unfold, a future edition will track the negotiations to their conclusion. Meanwhile, reader comments are invited.