To be entitled means believing you have an inherent right to something. It is very easy to feel entitled, to feel like we deserve a certain quality of life or valuable opportunities. I don’t know that anyone is immune from entitlement at one time or another…
— from an op-ed by Roxane Gay, ‘The Politics of Entitlement’ on TheRumpus.net, 2012
The Steamboat Pilot & Today, serving Colorado’s (mostly rural) Routt County, posted an article last month by reporter Eleanor Hasenbeck that briefly summarized current agreements referenced in the ‘Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan’ — a multi-state plan with one obvious aim: to raise the water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead and enable those two reservoirs to continue to deliver stored water, and to produce hydropower. Ms. Hasenback suggests in her article that the state of Colorado might take the following possible actions to address that plan:
Creating a bank of stored water in federally-owned reservoirs upstream of Lake Powell. This water would be released into Lake Powell in order to make sure Colorado continues to meet obligations to deliver a certain amount of water to downstream states under the Colorado River Compact.
Increasing cloud seeding and removing deep-rooted, invasive plants that take up a lot of water, such as tamarisk.
Creating a voluntary program that would temporarily pay agricultural water users to fallow their land and send water they have a right to downstream. This is called ‘demand management’.
Of the options on the table, demand management — the option that would pay farmers not to use their water — is the one most likely to impact Routt County.
Demand management would be most likely to affect Archuleta County as well, where 98 percent of our water consumption goes into ranching and farming.
The Steamboat Pilot & Today also allowed its readers to weigh in, in the Comments Section, on the general topic of agricultural water use, beginning with the warning: Start a dialogue, stay on topic and be civil. If you don’t follow the rules, your comment may be deleted.
Some of the resulting dialogue struck me as ‘less than civil.’
Fred Duckels
This might work, as some ranchers seem to run water in order to keep their rights.
James Todd
What is it about irrigation you idiot city dwellers cannot understand? If crops are not kept wet they will not produce.
Scott Wedel
Water rights is the ability to take one’s allotted amount for free and risking having the allotment reduced if it isn’t used. It is not a very efficient system to allocate water. A lot of ag uses relatively scarce water to grow low value crops such as hay which only makes sense if the water is free. It is quite possible that local ranchers could make more money by selling their water instead of irrigating hay fields and relying upon natural rainfall. Or being able to sell water allows farmers to pay for improvements that conserve water and making a profit in selling what is now excess water…
James Todd
You just proved you are not smart enough to understand crop irrigation. The majority of years do not have enough rainfall to raise a crop. In many years with low snowpack they could not raise enough crops to feed their livestock. Had to sell the livestock so it meant you paid more for groceries the next year. Just too dumb to understand the facts. You should have been around in the dust bowl days or the drought of the fifties… People did not have anything to do with that…
Manual Paleologos
James Todd, apparently you weren’t smart enough to actually read his reply. Try reading for comprehension instead of spouting talking points.
No one can doubt that the Colorado Doctrine, established in the 1860s, brought water conflicts into the courtroom, rather than seeing them fought out in the hills and valleys with loaded weapons. The Doctrine is based on four core ideas:
- The state’s surface and groundwater is a public resource for beneficial use by public agencies, private persons and entities;
- A water right is a right to use a portion of the public’s water supply;
- Water rights owners may build facilities on the lands of others to divert, extract, or move water from a stream or aquifer to its place of use;
- Water rights owners may use streams and aquifers for the transportation and storage of water.
No doubt that Colorado’s key rivers seemed like a limitless supply in the 1860s, when ranchers and farmers began applying for water rights to irrigate their crops and pasturelands, and constructing ditches to guide the water away from the rivers and into their fields. The population of the Colorado Territory, according to the 1860 US Census, was 34,277 (including 46 ‘Free Colored.’)
160 years later, the descendants of our early ranchers and farmers still maintain strong feelings of entitlement, based on Colorado’s water use traditions and the Colorado Doctrine. Were it not for those traditions and that Doctrine, the agriculture industry in Colorado might have dried up and blown away, decades ago.
But times change… and values and priorities change. In 2015, the Hickenlooper administration published the Colorado Water Plan, and the plan clearly reflected those changing times. In the recent past, the key water controversies concerned the growth of Colorado cities and their power to redirect water away from agricultural uses and toward municipal water consumption.
The Colorado Water Plan, however, clearly acknowledges the newest kids on the block: Tourism. And the Environment.
…Colorado is composed of vibrant and sustainable cities, viable and productive agriculture, a robust recreation and tourism industry, and a thriving natural environment…
The Colorado water industry would like nothing more than to continue building dams and reservoirs and pipelines, to direct water out of our rivers and streams and into ‘productive’ uses. That’s the work in which the industry has been happily engaged, for the past century.
But the recreation industry and the folks concerned with preserving the natural environment have a very different goal:
Leave the water in the river.