Ecological integrity, new Western myth: a critique of the Long's Peak report.

• Author: Hobbs, Jr., Gregory J.
• Position: Long's Peak Report: Reforming National Water Policy

The myth-makers of the American West have produced another one. One hundred and thirty years ago, Bierstadt painted The Rocky Mountains-Lander's Peak (1863) and A Storm in the Rockies-Mt. Rosalie (1866), immense canvases that fired the Eastern imagination with water shining at the base of savage peaks.(1) hi that tradition, the 1992 Long's Peak Report conjures up another imaginary western landscape promising "A New Era of Sustainability" for America's waters based on "social equity, economic efficiency, ecological integrity, and continued commitment to federal trust responsibilities to tribes:" a national water policy to "fulfill[] Aldo Leopold's ~Land Etydc'."(2)

But the Long's Peak Report is no Bierstadt. Its loftiness quickly fades into a one-dimensional argument for the exercise of federal agency power over state and local planning. Composed mainly of representatives of the major national environmental groups and their ideological allies, the invitation list foreordained the outcome, a panoply of recommendations intended to nationalize water policy and effectuate a reallocation of existing water supplies.(3) Recommendation 30, for example, asserts that "[r]eallocation of existing supplies should be preferred as an alternative to new storage."(4) Representatives of the Colorado General Assembly, state agencies, water organizations, farmers, and cities who hold rights to those water supplies were not asked to participate, although the forum was hosted by the Natural Resources Law Center of the University of Colorado School of Law.(5) As a result, the report is biased by its anti-storage, anti-use, anti-local-government agenda. The group's timely message about the need for water use efficiency, environmental protection, market mechanisms for water transfers, and community participation in water decision-making is lost in the strident din of preservationism.

Hitching state water law and the Bureau of Reclamation to the whipping post has been a favorite sport of writers like Fradkin(6) and Reisner(7) and professors like Wilkinson and his colleagues at the Natural Resources Law Center who helped to write the Long's Peak Report. At Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College in February of 1991, Wilkinson eulogized the death of a mythological figure he called Prior Appropriation.(8) In subsequent writings, he broadly smears western water use as "prodigal waste" perpetrated by the "lords of yesterday" demonstrating an "essential pattern" that he describes as:

the single-minded pressure to develop water for extractive uses;

the competition among states over interstate rivers; extensive federal

subsidies for private users; far-reaching environmental impacts;

the subversion of established Indian rights; the raids by cities on

rural areas; the blunting of normal market incentives; and the inexorable

drive toward bigger and grander projects.(9) The Long Peak's Report echoes the politically aimed hyperbole:

the endangered Columbia River salmon, the over-taxed San Francisco

Bay Delta, the poisoned Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, the

salt-choked Colorado River, the vanishing Ogalalla Aquifer,

Louisiana's eroding Delta, New York's precarious Delaware River

water supply, and the dying Florida Everglades. The environmental

costs of current water policy are extraordinary, both to this and

future generations.(10)

Here is painted the modem despoliation myth: rapacious water diverters have desecrated virgin America for filthy gain. In comparison, the Nineteenth century boomer agricultural irrigation myth was that "rain follows the plow."(11) Neither myth accurately portrays the West of the past, present, or future.

Wilkinson's so-called lords of yesterday were and are farmers, businesspeople, and community officials. "Water follows the shovel and the city council" would more accurately characterize the history of western water policy. Water projects are the product of state and local long-range planning in response to the natural hydrologic cycle and citizen need. The Colorado-Big Thompson Project (C-BT), for example, was sponsored by farmers and cities who had experienced the Great Depression and devastating Dust Bowl drought of the Thirties.(12) In those days, the national government invested in the livelihood of citizens and the infrastructure of the nation, instead of obstructing both. Local sponsorship and the execution of multi-year repayment contracts ensured continuing community involvement and responsibility.

On the ground, the C-BT project does not look like despoliation. A National Recreation Area surrounds the West Slope features, consisting of Grand Lake and Shadow Mountain, Granby, and Willow Creek Reservoirs. A gold medal trout fishery exists below these reservoirs on the Colorado River. A tunnel through the Continental Divide underneath Rocky Mountain National Park delivers water to 650,000 acres of irrigated farmland and twenty six northeastern Colorado communities, including Boulder, Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins, and Greeley: highly liveable cities surrounded by a sustainable rural irrigated greenbelt. The river below Fort Morgan now flows perennially because of irrigation and municipal return flows from transmountain deliveries into the South Platte River Basin. Historically, the river ran dry after the late spring snowmelt.

The C-BT Project is not unique. Water diversion and storage have made the West an attractive and productive region for Americans. The Long's Peak Report fails as sustainable water policy for this region, and the nation, because it ignores four enduring western factors: 1) water scarcity, 2) state and local citizen initiative; 3) the essential role of water storage; and 4) the necessity for a stable, secure and flexible water allocation law. If implemented, the Report would intensify competition for already scarce water supplies in order to serve "the ecological community," "ethnic communities," "ecosystems," "in-stream flow protection," "pollution prevention," "ecological integrity and restoration," "water quality," "biological diversity," "the viability of ecosystems," "community and economic sustainability," and "watershed restoration."(13)

Presumably, a national water policy would address how much water is needed for these uses, by what means that amount will be quantified and administered in relation to other uses, and how such uses can be served without new storage and without causing injury to state and local economies and established water rights. However, without any study of the feasibility, costs, or Impacts of Implementing such a policy and without inviting the participation of those with opposing viewpoints and established rights, the authors of the Long's Peak Report called for immediate imposition of this supposedly national policy by Executive Order in derogation of state and...