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Trends in Water Management We are being forced to deal with how we are going to use our finite water supplies. We are past the point where the answer to every question can be "build more dams." There may be nothing to fill them with. Many more people are getting into the decision- making process. 12 Edwin H. Clark II, Ph.D. Senior Associate The Conservation Foundation Change is always a slow process, and water management is no exception. we are beginning, however, to confront certain realities about water- realities that will change forever the ways we view and manage our water resources. Superficially, very little seems to be happening in relation to water resource policy. When we look more carefully, however, we can see some dramatic trends. Inexoribly, we are being forced to deal with some fundamental water resource issues, to answer some basic questions on how we are going to use our finite water supplies, As in the past, we may dream of ways to avoid these issues - sucking water though giant straws from the Great Lakes or the Yukon River, making freshwater from the oceans, bringing Alabamas climate to Colorado through weather modification, or other wondrous fixes. Increasingly, we are realizing that they are only dreams. We may attempt to ignore reality - as we have done in the Colorado River Basin - by authorizing more projects and more allocations than there is water available. Increasingly, however, we are recognizing that our supplies are, in fact, limited. Confronting Reality Although retreats to dreams and willful ignorance will undoubtedly persist, we are steadily being pushed, by a combination of factors, to confront reality. The most important factor is, of course, that only so much water is available: As our demand for it increases, we cannot continue to avoid difficult decisions about how the available supplies will be allocated or reallocated. We are past the point where the answer to every question can be "build more dams." There may be nothing to fill them with, A second factor is the economic and budgetary trends of the past decade - trends likely to continue for the foreseeable future. We often cannot afford to build new dams even if there is water to fill them, much less pay fOr transporting the Great Lakes to Texas. A third trend is that many more people are getting into the decision-making process. The previously exclusive domain of a relatively limited number of water users must now be expanded to include environmentalists, Indians, academics, recreationists and taxpayers. There is every reason to expect that these trends will only intensify over the foreseeable future, forcing us to deal with some basic policy questions regarding both water quantity and water quality. who is going to decide how we use our water?Who is going to pay for our water policies? And most fundamentally, what do we want to use our limited water supplies for? The Federal Response The federal government has made very little progress in answering any of these questions, It has dismantled the institutions responsible for formulating and analyzing water policies; reduced the amount of the information it collects, as well as (through budget and personnel cuts) its ability to use that information effectively; and made it generally more difficult for the public to obtain the information that is collected.