8001

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8001
• Author: Western Regional Instream Flow Conference.
• Title: Proceedings, Western Regional Instream Flow Conference.
• USFW Year: 1992.
• USFW - Doc Type: Oct. 2-3, 1992.
• Copyright Material: NO

these are the kinds of economies of scale that you're talking
about, and again the difference is if you leave water in the
river, you make more money. And that, in this society of
ours, is so often, too often, the bottom line.
So, to begin summing up, there are strong arguments
now for instream flows, not just the moral ones, the
aesthetic ones, the selfish ones. You know, "I like riding lots
of flow because I like whitewater rafting," which I do. I also
like to fish, so I don't like dried-up rivers. But, there are
now arguments that I think argue well for a whole region. It
makes more sense in this era, in many cases, to leave water
in the river than to take it out, and I'm talking economic
sense. And that is maybe the best piece of news that I can
give you.
Now, the bad news is that we have a whole economy and
way of life up here that is based on diversion. We have
cowboy culture, ranch culture. Yesterday, l was along
Snowmass Creek and the Frying Pan and Roaring Fork
Rivers, and there seemed to be a pretty nice balance there.
There was quite a bit of water in the rivers. The fishing was
good, even though I couldn't catch any. And yet there was
still some irrigation along the river and there were some of
those nice green fields. Even some of us who want more
instream flows might miss that irrigated pasture if it
disappeared. So I'm not advocating what the cattle ranchers
who always want to shoot me say I'm advocating. I'm not
saying, "Get rid of every cow, and take it back to the
Mississippi or to the east side of the Mississippi River where
it can grow on rain." Even though, in any kind of metabolic
sense, because cows are so ill-adapted to and conditions,
that really makes sense. It doesn't make social sense to do
that, at least not overnight. I think we have to really start
rethinking pasture, rethinking alfalfa, rethinking diversions
of water.
Now, as Dennis was saying earlier, there are other
politically easier ways to accomplish some of the things we
want to do to put more water back in rivers. You can create
pulses and, in fact, you need dams to do that. You can
actually build dams in California and create better trout
populations where they wouldn't have existed because of
our extreme wet and dry-season patterns. But, generally
speaking, I think these are measures that don't go far
enough. What we really need to do is to rethink this whole
frontier mentality that we've been living with for 100 years,
which says that water is only good when you take it out of
the river and it's no good when you leave it in. I actually
think we're beyond the frontier mentality in our thinking,
but it's in our institutions where we still have a long way to
go.
. So, we need laws like Oregon's law, where if you do have
a water transfer, there is a tax. A 25 percent water tax where
if, let's say, 1,000 acre feet of water that changes hands, 250
acre feet go into the river for an instream flow or they go to
a wetland someplace. We need minimum-flow laws that
are better and stronger than the ones we have today. And
they need to be solid and not fungible, as the lawyers say.
Little Creek, coming down from Snowmass Creek, has a 12
cfs minimum flow set in it, or it did by the Colorado River
Conservation Board until Snowmass, the big ski operation,
decided they needed to take 5 cfs out to make more snow,
because there were so many skiers and the seasons have
been so unreliable the last 20 years. Well, even though an
independent report says you lose 100 percent of the brown
trout in that creek (and they are in there) by taking out
those 5 cfs, the Board decided that 7 cfs was the minimum
flow needed after all. And a former resources secretary from
the state of Colorado was the lawyer who made the
argument. So those kinds of politics are bad politics.
We need ironclad minimum flows, not flexible ones. I
think we need stronger public-trust interpretations as we've
finally begun to get them in the case of Mono Lake, where
we recognize the water doesn't really belong to the user, it
belongs to the people of a state and it has been borrowed.
We allowed you to take this water out of the river for a
beneficial use, but it's up to the public to decide when one
beneficial use is no longer beneficial and another one comes
along that is, and that is the essence, I think, of the Public
Trust Doctrine, and it has to be taken further. And I'm
going to have to say, because even though Dennis is co-
sponsoring this conference, I can't really criticize the
Bureau of Reclamation at all in a forum like this.
We need more realistic water pricing. And, of course,
poor Dennis, he's stuck with these 40-year water contracts
where he gives a guy water for three bucks an acre in 1952,
and he still has to give him $3 for an acre foot of water in
1992 because it's the law. But there are certain reform bills
before Congress right now, which some of you know
about, which would begin to change some of these
things-at least not give people free water for 40 years.
Give them free water only for 10 or 15 years. These are the
kinds of changes we need.
I'm going to get away from economics and politics and
end on an aesthetic note. I wrote a book called "Game
Wars" which, in fact, I happen to have a few copies along
for sale. This book is a profile of a fellow named Dave Hall,
whom some of you may know, who is an undercover game
warden for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service based in
Louisiana. He's a crazy guy, as most undercover people are,
but he's obsessed with wildlife and wilderness preservation.
And I just want to echo what he says, how he feels about
the modem world, and what our attitude toward it ought
to be. Now, Dave is a waterfowl nut. His issue is not rivers,
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