Word: colorados
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ENVIRONMENTALISTS AND RECREATIONALISTS. Both groups were in shorter supply when the Colorado was being harnessed than they are today, and their concerns often diverge. A recreationalist's dream -- a motorboat rally on Lake Havasu, with plenty of beer -- is a nature lover's nightmare. But some vacationers come to the river merely to hike or look at wildlife, and they are as likely to be disturbed by the encroachments of civilization and mechanized control as are the environmentalists. Says Darrell Knuffke, the Central Rockies regional director of the Wilderness Society: "As the river has been divided, subdivided, ditched, dammed...
...large-scale transfers of Colorado River water rights become a reality, the experience of Crowley County in eastern Colorado could become a somber indicator of the future. Starting in the 1970s, farmers along the Arkansas River, a separate system from the Colorado, began selling their water rights to the mushrooming cities of Colorado Springs and Aurora. Prices soon soared to more than $700 an acre-foot. Now what used to be 70,000 acres of irrigated land has shrunk to 5,000 acres, and the closing of dozens of farms has wrecked the local tax base. "We're drifting back...
...rest of the nation, the Southwest has been growing increasingly urban. What were only recently one-horse outposts now exfoliate for miles into the blazing environs, their citizens housed in air-conditioned comfort and assuming plentiful water as a God-given right. Among the seven states served by the Colorado River, California has become the 800-lb. gorilla at all negotiations, its cities expanding, their thirst apparently unquenchable. The Old West here comes into direct conflict with the New: the leathery rancher in Wyoming with his herd to water vs. the condo-dwelling Sybarite in Laguna Beach with a Porsche...
...battle over the Colorado's waters has grown even more frenzied because of the five-year drought. So far, California has been able to cope with water % shortages, which have been exacerbated even further by its booming population, by siphoning off the unused portion of the Upper Basin states' allocation from the river and encouraging conservation...
UTILITIES. The era of stringing huge dams along the Colorado peaked during the '30s and '40s and is long gone. And the relatively cheap hydroelectricity -- and handsome profits -- generated by existing facilities is now being weighed, and found wanting, in the light of other concerns. One long-running dispute concerns the Western Area Power Administration's operations at the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, just above the Grand Canyon. The agency releases huge amounts of water through giant turbines to meet peak power demands in places as far away as Phoenix. These dramatic surges of water create artificial "tides" that...