OPINION: Protecting Waterways Across Colorado and the American Southwest

Today, the public comment period closes for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the “Sweetwater Lake Recreation Management and Development Project” in the White River National Forest, and Save The World’s Rivers (STWR) is getting an “AI-Assist” from Anthropic’s Claude.

STWR’s DEIS comment letter, posted here, was assisted by Claude and then edited and refined by STWR.

Increasingly, project developers and the federal government itself are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop projects and to screen and respond to public comments, and so we are deploying the same technology to protect the environment and the public’s interest,  Anthropic’s ‘Claude for Nonprofits’ gives us a powerful new tool, at an incredibly low price, to accelerate our mission with limited resources.

The Sweetwater Lake Project is just one application for which STWR is getting an assist from Claude.

Next week, STWR is inserting Claude-assisted comments into the massive new Wild Horse Reservoir proposal by the City of Aurora, CO, in Park County. Soon after, STWR will be using Claude to assist with analysis and comments for a proposed large dam in the Virgin River watershed in Kane County, Utah; and after that STWR will deploy a similar effort in the permitting process for expansion of Montgomery Reservoir, a Colorado Springs Utilities project.

The Wild Horse Reservoir project is an excellent example of how AI can support non-profit environmental advocacy: the application is 743 pages of highly technical and legal material, and the public was given only 30 days by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment — the permitting agency for the dam — to analyze and respond. What would have taken STWR a frenetic month of work with an expensive team of consultants can now be done in days using Claude.

Every single one of these proposed projects will increasingly pollute and/or deplete our waterways in Colorado and the American Southwest. The scale of the threats is advancing quickly, and we are responding in kind with the speed and technology that AI gives us.

For more than a year, STWR has been tracking how AI is being deployed by the dam-building industry, and the acceleration is astounding (see analysis here on our website). Engineering firms use AI to design dams and optimize reservoir operations; hydropower companies use AI to squeeze more output from dams; dam builders and water supply districts use AI to help create and write stronger permit applications; in China, AI-programmed robots are actually building dams; and, in the U.S., federal and state regulating agencies — which are supposed to work on behalf of the public — are increasingly using AI in the regulatory process itself, including to read and summarize the public comments that river advocates like STWR spend hundreds of hours writing. These agencies call their use of AI “streamlining” to help projects get permitted and built faster.

“As the dam-building industry and permitting agencies are further cloaked behind complex AI-powered models that marginalize public transparency and scrutiny, we are trying to use AI to pull back the curtain and protect the public’s interest,” said Wockner. “Not doing so would put us in a straitjacket fighting today’s battles with yesterday’s tools.”