FLOOD05967 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Rivers Without Boundaries: Lessons from tbe Colorado Plateau Clu1r1es F. Wilkinson I would like to thank you for the many counesies you have showu me here in Grand Junction. I have learned a good many things in my discussions with you that will help me in my own work. And it has been fun. This gathering has a rare camaraderie and high spirit. For you love rivers, you love the mad, unpredictable rush of wild, free water. You share that with nearly every member of our species, for it is elemental to our kind that we are drawn irresistibly and passionately to flowing rivers. Yet those of you here are bound together by somethitlg else, which is that you have acted upon that passion out of the donhle knowledge that our waters are at terrible risk but that this may be the time when the old ways are losing their grip, that this may be the time for a deep and progressive change if we can just stay the course. Most of you are pUblic officials and I'd like to thank you for acting upon your love of rivers, for letting it ride, openly, on your shoulder each day. Thank you. We need you. Weare gathered this morning on the eastern edge of the Colorado Plateau, the eighty million acre geologic province that encompasses parts of the each of the Four Comer States. When Lu Verne Grussing and I discussed my presentation tOday we agreed that the Plateau would make a good topic for my presentation. There are several reasons for that. The Plateau is an exciting place -- of world-wide importance in several respects -- and soon may well become the object of one of our most ambitious efforts in ecosystem management. Then, too, most of us learn our best lessons, not through abstract discussions of natural resources policy, but through actual events in actual places. Often -- and the Colorado Plateau is surely an eXlUIlple of this -- understanding a particUlar place helps us understand regional and national patterns. So the story of the Colorado Plateau sheds blight light on the story of the American West and the nation. Yet the Plateau also proves an opposite point. The Plateau has many elements of nature and humanity that are different and distinctive, reminding ns that one of the essential qualities of good ecosystem management, watershed management, or large area planning is that each natural area has its own uniqueness and that we must keep our minds open, and listen to the rivers and the land, and that even such a vivid eXlUIlple as Yellowstone can restrict us if our learning there creates boundaries by suggesting that we can simply stay within the lessons of Yellowstone, take them, and apply them elsewhere -- for we cannot, because each area and its people must have their own approach. The Colorado Plateau, too, is the subject of a book I'm now finishing, and so mnch of my current thinking is on that subject, and this gives me a chance to try to tie some ideas together. I hope very much that these thoughts will be of some use to you. I. The Big Build-up on the Colorado Plateau The Colorado Plateau has become the site of a large-scale build-up that sends both water and energy out to metropolitan areas spanning the Pecos and the Pacific, from EI Paso to San Diego. This intensive development is a phenomenon of the twentieth century, especially the second half. In trying to understand the magnitode and speed of this big build-up, it has been helpful to me to try to imagine the situation both at the turn of the century and at the end of W odd War II. If a public opinion poll had been taken in 1900, the Colorado Plateau wonld probably have been voted the most God-forsaken place in the continental United States. It had been only thirty",ne years since John Wesley Powell had floated the Colorado River, including the Grand Canyon; Powell put the last mountain range in the continental United States -- the Henry Mountains -- and the last river -- the Escalante -- on the maps. It was