Page 35 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

Now we are the titans bearing the weight of the Colorado River world on our shoulders. We are composed of the seven states, the thirty tribes in the basin, the Republic of Mexico, United States government, cities, industries, NGOs and farmers. And we’re trying to hold up the Colorado River itself. The elements include policy issues, the law, the climate change impacts that are occurring, and the use of data. We all have views of what the law of the river is. We have views of what climate change will or won’t do. We have views of what proper policies or not should be put into place. This definitely impacts how we try to negotiate outcomes for the management of the river. We have been successful over the last few decades of moving away from divisive lawsuits, like the landmark Arizona v. California law- suit over the Colorado River. We hold ourselves up as a model worldwide in that regard but, honestly, that’s getting harder and harder to do as the water supplies continue to shrink and shrink on the river.
With that, Tom turned it over to Brenda, who told us:
There really couldn’t be a more important topic here in Ari- zona and the West. Whether your community is more con- cerned with pushing away water or with bringing water in, water is life.
We are showing up in the national press. We hadn’t been used to that until about two years ago. We were used to some re- gional reporting but now the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Boston Herald have started talking about the Colorado River. One of my goals this morning is that you walk away from this realizing that, like all the subjects when someone tries to hone them down to a few paragraphs, they miss most of the complexity.
So we’ll start with the Colorado River Basin. We cross seven states in the United States, two states in Mexico. When you read news reports, they’ll talk about the upper basin states, which are Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. And then they’ll talk about the lower basin states. This is over forty million people between the two countries. Millions of acres of farmland. Thirty tribes. Some of the earliest and most important power sources to the Western United States. And of course, this river flows through our major iconic national parks, preserves, monuments. It is the heart of the West and has been called the hardest working river.
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