Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft

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PART II SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE CRISIS CHA-PTER THREE: GETTING INTO THE FEDERAL NEXUS "...all great values of this territory have ultimately to be measured to you in acre feet" John Wesley Powell, speaking at the Montana Constitutional Constitution in 1889, (Peirce 1972). 0 Degraded habitat for three birds-whooping cranes, piping plovers, and least terns--was ? intimately linked to the construction of Platte basin water facilities, most especially large dams, ? reservoirs, and diversions. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 would force a confrontation , between activities of water users in the basin and the needs of three birds listed under that law. • The ESA has compelled a sustained twenty-seven year conversation about how to reconcile human water work with needs of the listed birds. Two Traditions The American west has always been a major federal project. The federal government has been the purveyor of cheap homesteads, subsidizer of railroads and highways, investor in military facilities, promoter of irrigation, builder of the Panama canal, fighter of native Americans, provider of reservations for native Americans, organizer of grazing resources, steward and restorer of soils beginning with the great "blow-out of the 1930's, and manager of parks and forests. It is, in the eleven westernmost states (of the lower 48) by far the largest landowner. Federal agencies own almost half of the 17 Western states as compared to eastern states that have been overwhelmingly privatized in their landholdings. Nevada has the highest proportion of land under federal ownership (82.9%), Wyoming is 48.9°io federally owned, Colorado (36.3%), but Nebraska contains only 1.4% federal land (Riebsame and Robb 1997: 58). ? Significant federal presence in the West has always meant close relationships among ? federal, state, and local natural resource interests but in the 1960's-1970's, the rules that governed ? the relationship drastically changed. For decades, the Bureau of Reclamation was promoted by its powerful constituencies as a force for progress by advancing the story of the small struggling community starved for essential services-educational, religious, health, commercial, and financial-transformed into a thriving population center by a bureau dam. In the early years of the twentieth century, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service served that same vision by attempting to remove those predators that threatened to make the West unsafe for a cow. When the Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) constructed the large dams and reservoirs on the Wyoming's North Platte, and when it built the system of Colorado west and east slope storage reservoirs and a system of pumps and tunnels bringing Colorado river water to the burgeoning populations on the east side, the federal-local vision was utilitarian commodity production. There were no ESA or other environmental mandates to be fulfilled. But, a spate of environmental legislation began to change all that and, most especially 14