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I. INTRODUCTION l.l. Historical Context. One of the great paradoxes among several notable ones in the history of western water law and policy is that it is characterized both by intense levels of conflict and by remarkable episodes of cooperation. Further, both of these modes of interaction have been played out from the smallest to the grandest of scales -- from disputes among nineteenth century miners on the same mountain stream which gave rise to the prior appropriation system, to interstate disputes involving entire river basins and millions of acre-feet of water that resulted in compacts allocating water among states. When negotiators from seven western states assembled in Santa Fe in 1922 to craft the Colorado River Compact, they were impelled by a common understanding that the alternative to agreement was grim indeed: water rights litigation of unprecedented scope, complexity, expense, and duration. Upon refusing to ratify the Compact, the state of Arizona did indeed spend much of the next half-century seeking to establish its rights against California and Nevada in court, while the upper Colorado River Basin states divided waters allocated to the upper half of the river peaceably among themselves in 1948. It was in the spirit of these Colorado River compacts that representatives of the states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, water user groups, environmental organizations, and the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1988 reached agreement on how the Endangered Species Act should be implemented in the Upper Colorado River Basin with respect to the endangered fish species. Their agreement took the form of the Recovery Implementation Program for Endangered Fish Species in the Upper Colorado River Basin (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, 9/29/87), the purpose of which was to recover the endangered fish species in the Upper Colorado River Basin while water development proceeds in the Upper Basin. The endangered species include the Colorado 1-1