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minimum stream flows or natural lake levels ... to preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree.~ The strange notion that water might be benefi- cially used in the river is still being worked out down on the gTound in the Upper River Basin. Some of its impetus is biocentric altruism, but it also reflects a growing economic shift away from the out-of-stream consumptive industrial and ag-industrial OC1:upations to in-stream recreation-industrial activities - fish- ing, white.water boating and other economic uses that need the flowing water that incidentally bene. fits natural systems. Utah and Wyoming have since passed similar instream laws. Colorado also pioneered, in 1974, some fairly radical land-use legislation, which g-ave county-level governments unprecedented authority to demand adequate impact miti- gation from the developers of everything from subdivisions to major industrial pro- jects. It was clear that a new age was dawn. ing when these "1041 powers~ (from Colorado House Bill 1041, 1974) were used by the Eagle County commissioners to stop a water diversion to Denver suburbs on the Front Range. So, by the time the inland sea behind Glen Canyon Dam was full, the Upper River had become America's first solid base for an effective down-on.the-ground alternative to the Industrial Revolution. The water estab- lishment was still dominant, but it was being eroded from above as well as below. In 1976, just two years after Wayne Aspinall lost his congressional seat, President Carter issued a "hit list~ ofWestem water projects that shut down funding for nearly all remaining CRSP projects. And in 1990, the EPAjust said no to the Denver metropolitan region's Two Forks Project for storing water diverted from the Upper Colorado River Basin. So the mountain.river Upper Basin region today has gained some federa.\ protec- tion from the LA.like cities outside its watershed, but witbin the Upper Basin states. Added to those environmental laws is the compact itself and Lake Powell - an ,.) inland sea that holds close to twice the annual flow of the river, and that can meet the demands of the Lower Basin through even a lengthy series of dry years. Those walls provide more breathing room than the counter.revolution has ever had in America. ., e :e Do We need the compact - and the dam? At tbe 75-year mark, it is time to ask if the compact has been - and still is - use- ful. To some, it looks merely naive. The ~river's joke~ - an average flow well below the amount of water apportioned in the com- pact - was a bad enough mistake. There was also no mention of system losses - tbe evap- oration of up to six feet ofwater a year from desert reservoirs, the use of water by natural riparian systems, the leakage through the "solid" rock of Glen Canyon, etc. This turns out to be a healthy tax: at least 2.2 MAP, 15 percent ofthe river's total flow, according to published Bureau figures, and, acrording to other organizations, so much more than that one wonders how any water ever gets to California. And there was no mention in the compact of what happens to the quality of water when it is run over the alkaloid soils of arid lands again and again. The California dreamers of the Lower Colorado River do not want to talk about these things, ptefer- ring instead to fall back on the myth of ~surplus water~ so vaguely mentioned in the compact. California admits that it has been using unappropri. ated water that belongs to the Upper River - but only the million acre-feet or so for which it has writ- ten Bureau contracts. The state is virtuously trying to come up with a "4.4 Plan~ for living within the 4.4 MAP of its legal entitlement. But it refuses to admit that the 4.4 MAP should also include its share of the river's system losses, or a share of Mexico's water; it e wants these charged to the fiction of "surplus water~ above the basic 16.5 MAP of apportioned water. . According to Bureau figures that include system losses, wildlife use, Mexican water and everything, actual consumptive use of the water today is almost three-fourths for the Lower River, one.fourth for the Upper (ll-plus MAP to 3.9 MAF in 1985). It means the Colorado River's flow is being fully consumed. It also means that the people of the Upper Basin have the moral and legal base for taking the Lower Basin to eourt to aget back our water." Any further Upper Basin water development depends on suing the downstream bastards. There is considerable enthusi. asm for this in the Upper River Basin states - but not necessarily in the Upper River Basin itself. And this is where discourse on. "the spirit of the compact~ gets interesting. If you are just another industrial revolutionary still looking for your main chance, then you probably believe that the compact was just about "water prob- lems," and you would go with the Upper Basin states in calling back "our water" from the Lower Basin states. But if you are carrying the fragile flame of the .plumbing of the Colorado River Basin G,... .".. -. - tion revenues and the like. They came up with com- pelling evidence that every acre.foot of Upper Riv['r \~ater that flows downstream adds more wealth, by ::I factor of three or four timcs, to the region than if that water were consumptively consumed in the Upper Basin or diverted to Denver or Salt Lake or Albuquerque. (This study is in the World Resoure('s Institute's Water and arid lands of the western United States.) That money of (:Durse does not come back from California and Nevada and Arizona to the Upper Basin now, and most interpretations of both appro- priatiuns doctrine and the compact preclude that happening; that may indicate that the uLaw ofthl' River~ needs modification, to open up opportunitit,~ for a real "cross-flow~ of money and watt'r. But to get hung up in water marketing issues. to get involved in figuring how to make money flow toward water - this is like getting hung up in whether Lake Powell should be drained for the sake of the lon>;- term canyon ecology or whether the canyon ecology should become adapted to long.term river management. Instead of that argument, we should be confronting this window of opportunity for developing alternatives to a California fate. The odds are still daunting. Economically and socially, industrial culture thoroughly infiltrates and permeates the Upper Colorado region. And the current wave of refugees from California and other indm:tri. alized areas carry the germs they are flee. ing. Nevertheless. there is hope in the pres- ence of so many artlculnte and educated peo. pie for whom the Upper Basin is a refuge from America, coupled with a legal and moral environment that puls the Jeffersonian approach on a more or less equal footing with the increasingly rundown industrial revolution. If an intelligent post-industrial society is going to be ecologically coherent, then the Upper Colorado River might be world enough for now, nnd the inland sea at the end of the river a virtue for the time bein~ I am not suggesting a "roll.the.rock~ isolation. ist sensibility a Is The Riders of the Purple Sage; I am only suggesting that we not unthinkingly throw away the clear-cut defi. nition of regional spaC!' and independence the dam and river afford us now. We should at least ask: Is pulling down Glen Canyon Dam the most important thing we can do? Will it further, or hurt. our objectives? I would also ask that we take another look at the Colorado River Compact. We might find that it is more in step wilh our ideals than we think. And what should we do - what would a society countering the t'xces;'('s of the Industrial Revolution be like? It is too eally to drift into utopian mirages. I would sug- gest instead that we learn the following from the compact: Prpserve opportunity. The compact preser'\"('d the chance for other things to happen. Without it. the Upper Basin would have been forced to appropri- ate water as fast as possible. Development would have b('(!n even more re<:kless and destructive than it has be!;'n. Most probably, the sulTtJunding cities would have rushed to drain the Colorado River before California could appropriate the water. Make culture congruent with nature, 'Wht're the compact was organized around natural bounds and divisions, it helped us. 'hnere it either i~nor('d or did not understand natural limits, it failed us. Fot"Ftet the broad visionaT)' !>trokcl'. Mo\'e in increments. Dave Wegner, one ofth", princil'alarrhj. tecta of the Glen Canyon Dam mana}!ement plan adopted last year to restore and maintain the GI"::.o"d Canyon, and who was treated shabbily by the Bureau "f Reclamation, now dismisses tho~e effor1l' as ~Band-Aids." He has become a lelld('r in the ~putl- the.plug~ on Lake Powell movel11ent. But the bios- phere works a lot more with Band-Aids than with "broad visionary strokes.~ And finally. Look for strange bedfellows. Allies exist out. side the standard corridors of power - strange endangered actors like the humpback ('hub, or rural ('ounty commissions driven to the wall by cities with- in their states but outside the Colorado Rh.er Basin. Resistance to the industrialization of the Upper Basin started long before the l!)rlOs. We may have a!lies we've never dreamt of. . COtour>O .,V.. ~ o.ii.,~ t~totN ........- C1InlMcK~ basIldD!lI"byLISI"~, ttglCou~N_ -~ ill" ..- .=.tj.. ",.' ~ ~~. i -fr" : 11 l:.J l0. ,~ ..._ i.' 1>.,,_- ..-- . counteN'evolution against the developers, then you may want to think about further negotiation in the spirit of the compact. Right now, about 0.7 MAP of the Upper River's water is bled off in out-of-basin exports to the Denver metro area, the Salt Lake metro area, the Santa Fe-Albuquerque area and other areas outside the natural boundaries of the Upper River Basin. That's about a fifth oftbe U~per River's consumptive use. And those cities want more; most of the agitation for getting ~our" water back comes from the industrial urban clones of the Desert Empire in the Upper Basin states, but outside of the Upper Basin. Those industrial urbs have developed a smug myth about the omnipotence of money, which is real- ly about their power over the mountain and desert areas within the basin. "In the West,~ they say, "water doesn't flow downhill, it flows uphill toward money.~ To achieve this, however, ever larger quanti- ties of money must flow out from our endlessly grow. ing cities. A Denver metro county is prepared to spend a billion dollars in the Upper Gunnison VaJley to take a relatively piddling quantity of water. The more we learn about the two reconstructed rivers, however, the more it seems that a proper accounting of water and money might even advance the post-industrial agenda_ In the mid-l980s, two University of Colorado economic scientists examined, valley by valley in the Upper River, agricultural pro- ductivity and fann income, the dO\'O'nriver salt-load. ing costs of upriver consumptive use, power.genera- - - .-- S3J ~.. Hi.~h Country News - NovcmlK'r 10, 1997 - I~