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minimum stream flows or natural lake levels... to preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree." The smnll" 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 shill.way from the out-of-stream consumptive industrial and ag-industrial occupations 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 radicalland.use legislation, which gave 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 ))OWen" (from Colorado House BilII0-n, 1974) were used by the Eagle County cotnmissioners to stop a water diversion to Denver suburbs on the Front Range. So, by the time the inland sea behind Glen Canyon Dam was lUll, the Upper River had become America's first solid base for lIll effective down-on-tbe-ground ahernative to the Industrial Revolution. The water estab- lishment was still dominant. but it was being eroded from above as well.. below. In 1976, just two years after Wayne Aspinall 1_ hill congressKmalllellt, President Carter issued a "hit Iiat" ofWestem water projects that ml.lt dawn fundin, 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 federal protec- tion from the LA.like cities outside its watershed, but within the Upper Basin statell. Added to tbOlM environmental laws is . tbe compact itself and Lake Powell - an .J inland sea that hold. cloee to twice the 8.IlDual 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 haa ever had in America. Do we Deed the compact -aDd the dam? At the 75-year mark, it is time to ask if the compact has been _ and still is - use.. ful. 1b some, it Iooka merely naive. Tbe "'river'. joke" - an average flow well below the amount of water apportioned in the com- pact _ was a bad enough mistake. There ..s also no motion of systenllosses - the evap- oration of up to six feet of water a year from desert reservoirs, the use of water by natural riparian systems, the leUage thNugh the -solid" rock of Glen Canyon, ate. This turns out to be a healthy tax: at leaat 2.2 MAF, 15 percent of the river's total flow, according to published Bureau figures, and, according to ather organizations, so much more than that one wonden how any water ever gets to California. And then was no mention in the compact of what happens to the quality ofwaterwl'len it is ND over the alkaloid 6cils of arid Ian<is again and again. The California dreamers ofthe Lower Colorado River do not want to tallr. about these things, ptefer- ring instead to fall back on the myth of~surplus water" 80 vaguely mentioned iD 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 hell writ- ten Bureau contracts. The state is virtuously trying to come up with a -4.. Plan" for living within the 4.4 MAF of its legal entitlement. But it refuses to admit that tbe 4.4 MAF should also include its $hare of the river's system losses, or II share of Mexico's water; it wants these charged to the fiction of "surplus water"' above the basic 16.5 MAF of apportioned water. According to Bureau figures that include system loaaes, wildlife use, Mexican water and everything, actual consumptive use of the water today is almost three.fourtha for the Lower River, one-folU'tb for the Upper (U-plus MAP to 3.9 MAr in 1985). It means the Colorado River's flow i. being fully oonaumed. It also means that the people of the Upper basin have t)l.e moral and legal base for taking the Lower Basin to court to -get back our water." Any further Upper Basin water development depends on suing the downstt'eam 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 r;,,~. .;,., - - C'". .~~ " t~ ~: ".; tion revenues and the like. They came up with com. pelling evidence that every acre_foot of Upper Riv....r water that flows downstream adds more wealth, by n factor of three or four times, 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 Resourcell Institute's Water and (Jrid lands of the Wf:skrn Unitl!dStates.' That money of course does not come back from California and Nevada and Arizona to the Upper Basin now, and most interpretations of both appro-- priatiQns doctrine and the compact preclude that happening; that may indicate that the ~Law of the River~ needs modification, to open up opportunitil'!' for a real "'cross-flow~ of money and water. But to get hung up in water marketinll" issues, to get involved in figuring ho~' Ut make money flow toward water - this is like getting hung up in whether Lake Powell should be drained for the'sake of the 10nJi- term canyon ecology or whether the canyon ecology should become adapted to long-term river lI1anagement. Instead of that argument, we should be confronting this window of opportunity for developing alternatives to a California f.te. The odds are still daunting. Economicall)' and socially, industrial culture thoroughly infiltr1/.tea and permeates the Upper Colorado region. And the current wave of refugees from Californin and oUler indu~tri. alized areas carry the germs they are flee- ing. Nevertheleu. thero is hope in the pres. ence olIO many articul~te and educated pen. pIe for whom the Upper Basin is a refuge from America, coupled with a legal and moral environment that puts the Jeffersonian approach on a more or less equal footing with the increasingly rundown industrial nvolution. If an intelligent post-industrial society is WJing to be ecologically coherent, then the Upper Colorado River might be world enough (or now, and lhe inland sea at the od of the river a virtue for the time being. I am not ~n. a '"rol1-the+rock" isolation- ist se~bility a la The Riden; oftM: Pulpl/! &we; I am only sua:gesting that we not unthinkingly throw aWtly the clellr-CUt defi- nition of regional spaCf.' and independence the dll1D 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 with our ideals than we think. And what should WI:! do - what would a society countering the CXce5l'es of the Industrial Jtevolution be like? It is too eaf;y to drift into utopian mirages. I -would sug- gest inStead that we learn the following from the compact: Pt'PSerV8 opportunity. The compact Pre8I!f\.'ed the chance for other things to happen. Without it. the Upper Basin would have betn forced to appropri. ate waler as fast. as possible. Development would have been even more reckless and destructive than it has bCt'n. Most probably, the surrounding cities would have rushed to drain the Colorado River before California could appropriate the wllter. Make culture eonJruent 'With nature. \\'hl!re the compact was organized around natural boUDd~ and dh.'isions, it helped us. \\onere it either ignored or did not understand natural limits, it failcd us. Fot'get tIN! broad visionary strokc~. MO\'ll in increments. Dave Wegner, one (If the princip31 ar(hi. teets of the Glen Canyon Dam manBltllmellt plan adopted last year to restore and maintain the Gl'o"d Canyon, and wbo was treated shabbily by the Bureau of Reclamation, now dismisses thost' effortll as ~Band-Aids." He has become n leader in the Mpul1. the-plug- on Lake Powell movement. But the bios- phere works a lot more with Band.Aids than witb "broad visionary strokes." And finatly. Look for strange bedfellows. Allies exist out. side the standard corridors of power - strange endangered actors like the humpback chub, or rural county commissions driven to the wall by cities with. in their states but outside the Colorado River B3sin. Resistance to the industrialization oCthe Upper Bnsin started Ion&' before the 19r1Os. We I'nay ha\'t' a1lies we've never dreamt of. _ COtO'u,O ~'H'~ ~ oi.,eaw.. - - nytotM ..- S!!D plumbing syMm ~.. - -=-~ ~ i !l 0 p:._: :tr u__ ""........ 1laed00001tibyLelllerOott. ~C<<r'..ryNwl counter-revolution. 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 oft'in out.of-basin exports to the Denver metro' area, the Salt Lake metro area, the Santa Fe-Albuquerque area and other areal! outside the natural boundaries of the Upper River Basin. That's about a fifth of the U~per rover'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."1b 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 Valley to take a relatively piddling quantity of water. The more we learn about the two reconstnJcted rinn, however, the more it seems that a proper ac::counting of water and money might even advance the_post~indust.riaJ agenda. In the mid-l980s, two University of Colorado economic scientista ezami.ned, valley by Valley in the Upper River, agricultural pr0- ductivity and farm income, the downriver salt-load- ing costa of uptiver consumptive use, power-genera- f;. Hlj!h COllntry Ncws - No\'el1llX"r 10. HJ97 ~ l!'i