4202

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 4202
• Author: Wilkinson, C. F.
• Title: Colorado Water and the Lords of Yesterday.
• USFW Year: 1987.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: NO

basic goal ought to be to require conservation of water by
existing users so that we can rationally plan for future uses
and, where feasible, avoid expensive, environmentally-destructive
water projects. To implement that broad objective, Colorado
ought to give serious consideration to the following proposals.
These suggestions are radical in the current climate that per-
vades Colorado water -- a climate dominated by the lords of
yesterday and their powerful proponents -- but these kinds of
changes will certainly come. They are consistent with policies
that we follow in regard to all resources other than water and
they will be demanded by the increasing press of people and ever
scarcer resources. My proposals are a mixture of market-based
devices and principles of modern resource management.
First, Colorado ought to view all water policy -- to plan it
-- in a coordinated way, comprehensively, by watershed. The
state has made a good beginning in two respects. It has devel-
oped water courts with jurisdiction by watershed. Watersheds are
the logical planning units in the West. Colorado also adjudi-
cates the appropriation of surface and groundwater conjunctively,
and has the most advanced system in the country in that regard.
But the lords of yesterday still have a hammerlock on policy:
appropriative water rights are isolated out, elevated in impor-
tance, granted within an essentially closed system, and enforced
rigorously according to seniority and decreed amount. Colorado
water has been parceled out with virtually no thought having been
given to these crucial things: water quality; fish and wildlife,
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