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about each of these themes - the piecemeal approach, the inadequacy of information, and elevating competi- tion over cooperation. I will conclude that we are not doomed to repeating history but actually may be moving, perhaps in fits and starts, toward a fuller consideration of issues instead of addressing them one at a time. We are assembling and at least capable of basing decisions on better facts. And we are discovering that cooperative dialogue can solve more problems than competition and combat. SOLVING PROBLEMS ONE AT A TIME The history of the Colorado River - at least for us lawyers, begins with the 1922 seven-state compact. Though we celebrate it as a breakthrough in interstate relations, all it addressed was one question: how to carve up the rights to consume water among the seven states that touched it. What it actually did was even less. Crudely, it divided the river into two sub-basins and said that the states of each sub-basin would share collectively about half the water. That's it. Problem solved? To be sure, we reached agreement on a compact, but not even all the seven states that negotiat- ed it ended up ratifying it. Arizona held out for decades. States within the two basins barely talked to one another, let alone figured out how to use their respective "halves" of the river's resources. Then we moved into development of the river. The motive was how to enable each basin to make the con- sumptive uses authorized by the compact. But develop- ment became a purpose in itself. Early development on the river was consistent with the 1902 Reclamation Act - a law written to help settle the West with small fam- ily farms by enabling them to grow crops in an arid 10 region. Hoover Dam, constructed under the Boulder Canyon Project Act primarily as a source for agricul- tural water, was also authorized for flood control of the once wild river. It was outfitted with power generating turbines, too. After all, boosters from a young and growing Los Angeles gave their political support to fed- eral funding of the project largely because of the potential for a large, inexpensive source of electricity. Inspired by Hoover's potential for performing multiple functions, Congress began to authorize reclamation projects throughout the West for multiple purposes. That was the case with the 1956 Colorado River Storage Project Act that authorized Glen Canyon and several upper basin projects to generate power "as an incident of" the primary purposes of water supply and flood control. The power-generating capacity of these facilities soon eclipsed the importance of the system for delivering water to the states according to the compact. Ultimately, power sales have the capacity of producing income to payoff project costs, reducing the burdens on irrigators. So the states and irrigators uneasily sup- ported the elevation of power generation as paramount function of the Colorado River system. So we set out to develop the river and did, using whatever justifications and resources were available. It was not a program for distributing benefits allocated by the compact and other laws. As water development in the basin moved forward, we began to discover how much we had addressed. Mexico had to be reckoned with. At the tail of the river, it could take only what water was left over after uses in the United States. And that amount diminished with each dam and diversion upstream. Finally, in 1944 the treaty with Mexico was negotiated and we