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Colorado Water and the Lords of Yesterdav Charles F. Wilkinson Professor of Law University of Colorado Presented July 27, 1987 at Western State College Gunnison, Colorado for the Colorado Water Workshop I would like to make one brief comment before turning to my assigned topic. We come here to Gunnison from many different geographical directions and we also angle in on these pressing questions of Colorado water from many varying philosophical starting points. Yet we hold in common a key set of beliefs. We love the American West and we revere it as a distinctive region with its own lay of the land, history, peoples, and textured way of life. For each of us, essential aspects of the American West are at risk. We may view different things as being at risk, and the nature of the risk may vary, but we are apprehensive in a serious way, for the pace of change during roughly the last 15 years has been greater than at any time except during the gold strikes. We search out meeting places like this in order to gain a better understanding of these fast-moving events and of the West itself, where it has been and where it is going. These annual workshops in Gunnison are in the front rank of meetings that bring together people who care about Colorado and the West and who are willing to participate in an honest way in the inherently contradictory, but necessary, process of at once preserving and -1-