7846 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

3 was free. As if that were not incentive enough to generate a race to the western rivers, the federal and state govenunents provided a whole range of subsidies for water development What a combination: free water, development subsidies, and little or no govenunental oversight. That was the narrow lens through which we looked at our rivers. There were alternative approaches to water that we might have considered. The rural Mormon settlements proceeded on a community basis. Ward bishops distributed water rights to members of the community equally -- there was no notion of "fIrst in time." There were limits: only community members could receive water rights and they could receive no more than their own families could farm. Hispanos had a somewhat similar system, based on the mother ditch that served the whole community. Water rights were held, not by individuals, but by acequia associations and were administered by a mayor domo. John Wesley Powell, who wrote his famous Am! ~ report in 1878, premised his report on the idea that water should be set aside for watershed communities. Powell's whole approach toward the West was based upon its aridity, upon the limits imposed by this arid land. For Indian people, water was spiritual. Like the land and animals, water was part of the whole natural world, to which duties were owed. Human beings and the rivers were equals, and hwnan beings could use them, but with respect and with prayers. And John Muir had offered his own alternative vision. Like the Indians, he saw spirituality everywhere in nature, including water. He also saw beauty and spirituality in the deep canyons and believed that they should be preserved. But this was the 1950s and ideas such as these were of no moment at all. The original Mormon ideal was long dead; by the late 1800s, the Utah Supreme Court had adopted the prior appropriation doctrine wholesale. As for Indians and Hispanos, who would want to listen to them? They were societies on the way out. And Powell, who had not yet been memorialized in Wallace Stegner's great book, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, published in 1973, was, at best, just a half-remembered nineteenth-century fIgure who had been drummed out of his post as Director of the U.S. Geological Survey by angry western senators in the 1890s. No one took the environmentalists seriously. Muir, like Powell, was a vague presence and only David Brower was around in the 19505 to raise Muir's issues. Brower opposed the dam at Dinosaur, and the big interests simply moved the dam farther down river to Glen Canyon, which was a bigger and better site in any event We can see the force of the big build-up on the Plateau by focusing for a moment on one of the Plateau's major rivers, the San Juan. The San Juan and its tributaries rise in the San Juan Mountains, the great range in southwestern Colorado. The west-running river picks up steam, runs down into New Mexico through Fannington and then cuts almost exactly through the Four Comers before emptying into what was once the Colorado River but is now Lake Powell. The San Juan was put up for grabs by the apex of the big build-up, the 1956 Colorado River Basin Storage Act, and related legislation. The San Juan-Chama Project was built at the headwaters of the San Juan. One hundred thousand acre feet of water were transported through more than twenty miles of tunnels east into the Chama, then the mainstem Rio Grande. It is worthwhile to note how large this mediwn-sized project is. If a football fIeld could somehow be built with retaining walls on the sides, one hundred thousand acre feet would be enough water to fIll that football field to a height of twenty miles. Each year. All of that water was lost to the riparian areas, and other uses downstream on the Sanjuan. Yet water from the San Juan-Chama Project still is not yet put to use in the Rio Grande watershed. The main beneficiary was intended to be Albuquerque, which still does not have need for the water and still does not have a conservation plan. Thus almost all of the San Juan-Chama water literally evaporates in the hot Rio Grande sun. Downstream on the San Juan, almost to Aztec, sits Navajo Dam, forty stories high and creating a reservoir twenty miles long. I mentioned earlier the Hispano community of Rosa, settled in the early 1880s. I was lucky enough to meet at some length with Miguel Quintana and his daughter, Martha. Miguel was born in Rosa in 1912. Martha grew up in the town in the 1950s. It was a close-knit community, and if someone bagged a deer, the venison would be spread around and if someone baked up a batch of bread, there would be knocks on many neighbors' doors. Yet Rosa, and the other Hispano communities in the upper San Juan, never had a chance in the face of the big build-up. The Quintanas vowed to be the last to leave, and they were. Just six short years after the 1956 Colorado River Basin Storage Act, Martha Quintana was wheeling her pickup across tlle dammed and rising river, trying to save her furniture and fiesta dresses from the current Rivers Without Boundaries 1994