Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft

• File Number: 8461.100
• Description: Adaptive Management Workgroup ‎(PRRIP)‎
• State: CO
• Basin: South Platte
• Water Division: 1
• Author: David M. Freeman, Ph.D,, Annie Epperson and Troy Lepper
• Title: Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Report/Study

Analytically, then, the quesition 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/in(iustries), and common property resource benefits (e.g., ditch
companies, irrigation districts, mur?icipal water suppliers), and small scale collective goods (e.g.,
environmental organizations working on modest ecosystem patches), have entered into
negotiations with a view toward pnaducing on a larger scale than ever before a collective
good/property in the form of specie:s habitat?
To produce this new form cif collective property, the players have had to agree to
transcend and adapt their particulac• 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 mare 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 t:he 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-come closer to reflecting 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, it is an astounding development-undertaken by virtually no other
society--and one well worth investigation.
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