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6 And, as ever, Wallace Stegner was able to treat our whole regional past and present in full depth and then boil it all down in a few taps of his creaky old typewriter. The Colorado Plateau, he wrote, is a land that "fills up the eye and overflows the sou!." They, and many others, have enriched us and helped open our minds to our possibilities here in the West. III. New Views of Water on the Colorado Plateau The new ideas, the many new lenses that we now use to view our rivers and our lands, really are beginning to take hold. These are some specific actions on the Colorado Plateau that are playing out in different fonns all across the West. The Endangered Species Act is being employed to protect the endangered fish throughout the Colorado River watershed. Most specifically, the just-released draft environmental impact statement, prepared under the auspices of the Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992, will almost certainly lead to a new flow regime from Glen Canyon Dam. Already, interim operating criteria are in effect. The purpose is to protect the fish and the sandbar communities that are of importance for fish habitat, recreation, and other plant and animal communities. These are all resources that we now expect to sustain in our rivers. There has been hard work done on addressing the pollution from energy development that bas obscured the 200- mile vistas on the Colorado Plateau, reducing them to 120 miles, 100,80, or less. In 1991, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the Navajo Generating Station, located just upriver from Grand Canyon, must reduce its sulphur dioxide emissions by ninety percent by 1999. The Grand Canyon Visibility Transport Commission, composed of representatives from eight states, is in an open fact-finding and hearing process designed to make recommendations to remedy the adverse impacts on visibility in the Grand Canyon caused by current or projected air pollutants. The idea is that EP A will ratify the Commission's work and that the result will be a "negotiated rule-making" rather than unilateral federal action. In 1992, as part of the omnibus water legislation, Congress took on one of the Plateau's old-style water projects -- the Central Utah Project -- scaling it back, adopting provisions to protect fish and wildlife, and attempting to fulfill treaty promises made to the Ute tribe of Utah. The CUP piece of the 1992 Act, which in all had more than forty titles, reflected the themes evidenced througbout the legislation: that conservation and water marketing ought to be strongly preserved over new construction; that subsidies for water development ought to be allowed only sparingly; that instream and recreation values of rivers should be promoted; and that promises to Indian tribes ought to be honored. In recent years, we have come to realize the many values of riparian areas and that our treatment of them -- whether through grazing, logging, or other fonns of development -- is a significant aspect of water policy. In December, 1993, a federal administrative law judge ordered a halt to all grazing in five side canyons draining into Comb Wash in southern Utah. This major decision may well prove to be a turning point in grazing policy with respect to fragile desert watersheds. This is coupled with the 6-6 Process in Arizona and the Colorado Resource Roundtable, which have helped bring people together on grazing refonn and which stand for the many open, consensus-building efforts underway in the West. The State of Colorado has continued to improve its instream flow program on the waters of the Plateau. Significantly, The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land have been making major acquisitions of water rights, to be dedicated for inslream flows. There are many frustrations with state instream flow programs -- including the fact that most acquired rights are junior rights -- but we must remember that this effort is very recent, still not a quarter of a century old. The marriage of a market system, through which senior rights can be purchased, with the state instream flow programs is a most promising note. At mile 77 below Lee's Ferry, you careen through the spray and boulders of Hance Rapid -- a ten, the highest rating on the Grand Canyon scale -- and you enter into the Vishnu schist, which is so deep and has been there so long, and has been compacted so much, that when the mid-day sun hits it right, it looks like vast slopes of black, polished steel. You have descended one mile into the eartb by now, working backwards into time, layer after layer, era after era; by the time you have reached the Vishnu schist, you have observed. displayed all the walls of the Grand Canyon, 1.7 billion years of the planet's history. American River Management Society