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achieve a new level of efficiency is not prohibited by existing decrees or constitutional provisions. I understand, of course, that the lords of yesterday, not the ideas I have just suggested, continue to rule Colorado water. But these kinds of reform will come. There are too many physi- cal, economic, and social imperatives for the vested interests to hold the lords of yesterday in place indefinitely. The only question is how long. How, ultimately, do we make a rich, a full, a complete water policy? The beginning of the answer is that a great many factors must go into any natural resources policy in the American West, for these are complex times. Colorado water means too many things to too many people for it to be pat, one-dimensional, bound up in a single ideology, as is the case with prior appropriation. Another, but related, part of the answer is that we must move away from jargon, from bland words and thinking that dehumanize what ultimately are intensely human, even spiritual, matters. In the very last analysis, none of us knows whether this is wholly a secular world. But if there are spirits, surely they must reside, as John Muir believed, in the mountain West. And their favored places -- where they most prefer to dip and twirl and revel -- must be in the deep canyons. And of those places, they must keen most of all toward those mystical spots where the power is the greatest, where the big canyons form narrow corri- dors and the rivers must gather up all of their strength, and -16-