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approximately the same even though $75 million had already been spent on con- struction of the dam. If endangered species protection is somehow to be held to a benefit-cost test, then surely the same rules ought to apply to water resource developments financed with public resources. Finally, some of the reforms of the water resource allocation system, especially l.n the West, would be likely to mitigate these conflicts. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the merits and demerits of these proposals, but it should be pointed out that at least two would be likely to have an incidental salutary effect on endangered species protection. One is instream flow reservation. Traditionally, instream flows have not been considered a "beneficial use" in Western water law, which prevented water from being reserved for this purpose.* Considering that much of the impact of water resource development on endangered species is due to depletions, it is clear that reservation of instream flows would tend to mitigate those impacts. In addition, instream flow reservation provides recreation benefits and protec- tion to nonendangered wildlife, and these may be more quantified or have a larger constituency than endangered species protection, especially for obscure species. One advantage of instream flow reservations, for all parties, is that once quantified, much of the procedural delay now inevitable in endangered species disputes can be avoided. Still, several difficult problems must be overcome before the notion of instream flow reservation is widely accepted in the West. First, given the extreme variation in annual flow that characterizes most Western streams to- gether with the very limited state of current knowledge in fisheries biology, relating any given instream flow to a biological outcome is nearly impossible. Also very much in dispute are the usual economic questions: Must instream flows be maintained for all streams? If not, how does one choose? These tech- nical problems may, l.n fact, be relatively easy to deal with compared to the political problems, however. After all, water reserved for instream uses does not disappear, but continues downstream. Not surprisingly, many westerners thus view "instream flow reservations" as a code expression for "more water for California." This is something the Mountain States have been fighting since the turn of the century. *This is slowly changing. Colorado recently changed its water law to allow instream flows to be considered a beneficial use. Also, Montana recently made rather large instream flow reservations for the Yellowstone River. 25