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Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River
A brilliant, eye-opening account of where our water comes from and where it all goes
The Colorado River is a crucial resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado's headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry.
Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on.
The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert, and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.
The Colorado River is a crucial resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado's headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry.
Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on.
The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert, and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 11, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 502 reviews
June 29, 2017
As a rural Westerner who writes about his home and stomping grounds, and who shares his writing for free on his blog, I always find it disheartening that the East Coast-based publishing industry habitually elevates Eastern urban writers as experts on rural Western subjects.
Momentarily forgetting this, I picked up Owen's book at the local library, only to encounter, in the first few pages, characters from Harvard, Yale, and a dazzling array of national organizations based in Washington, DC, from environmental nonprofits to the U.S. Senate and various governmental agencies. Thus, in a classic instance of cultural imperialism, are the hierarchies of our hierarchical society enforced, and the West is again implied to be a colony of the established Eastern power structure.
But I gamely plowed ahead, only to find, a few pages later, our East-Coast author bragging that by parachuting into the West for a few weeks, he acquired a "graduate-level education" in the river, etc. The many scientists with whom I've done field work over the years may or may not be amused by such ignorance and arrogance.
And a few paragraphs later, the author revealed himself to be a golfer. The last thing we need in the West is to be lectured on water by golfers. Easterners – and urbanites in general – may get a superficial overview of the Rio Colorado from this book, but it's an East Coast urbanite's overview, heavy on academic research, light on field work, and completely lacking in lived experience. It would be like me parachuting into Owen's hometown in Connecticut for a few weeks, interviewing a few people, reading a few books, and presuming to tell its definitive story. It's just not the respectful way to do it.
Momentarily forgetting this, I picked up Owen's book at the local library, only to encounter, in the first few pages, characters from Harvard, Yale, and a dazzling array of national organizations based in Washington, DC, from environmental nonprofits to the U.S. Senate and various governmental agencies. Thus, in a classic instance of cultural imperialism, are the hierarchies of our hierarchical society enforced, and the West is again implied to be a colony of the established Eastern power structure.
But I gamely plowed ahead, only to find, a few pages later, our East-Coast author bragging that by parachuting into the West for a few weeks, he acquired a "graduate-level education" in the river, etc. The many scientists with whom I've done field work over the years may or may not be amused by such ignorance and arrogance.
And a few paragraphs later, the author revealed himself to be a golfer. The last thing we need in the West is to be lectured on water by golfers. Easterners – and urbanites in general – may get a superficial overview of the Rio Colorado from this book, but it's an East Coast urbanite's overview, heavy on academic research, light on field work, and completely lacking in lived experience. It would be like me parachuting into Owen's hometown in Connecticut for a few weeks, interviewing a few people, reading a few books, and presuming to tell its definitive story. It's just not the respectful way to do it.
January 12, 2023
A fascinating and sobering look at the Colorado River's flow, starting in Colorado, and ending at the former (now non-existant) delta in Mexico. Owen travels through time and space, spending less ink on the geology of the river's formation over millions of years, and much more on the engineering and the legal battles that has dramatically changed the region within the last 100 years.
The book is structured as a report, and there is very little literary interjection, aside from a few descriptions of the people and places that David Owen himself travels on the river and tributaries. I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the construction of the dams, the input and output of pumping stations and reservoirs, and the madness and short-sightedness of water rights and access in the upper basin (Colorado, Utah) and the lower basin (Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico).
On establishing the Bureau of Reclamation:
I am always interested in learning more on landscape politics and philosophy, and Owen's brief history on conservation thought was of particular interest.
...and I am in love with this cover.
3.5/5 rounded up.
The book is structured as a report, and there is very little literary interjection, aside from a few descriptions of the people and places that David Owen himself travels on the river and tributaries. I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the construction of the dams, the input and output of pumping stations and reservoirs, and the madness and short-sightedness of water rights and access in the upper basin (Colorado, Utah) and the lower basin (Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico).
On establishing the Bureau of Reclamation:
There was a quasi-theological element in the notion of REclaiming land, of taking it back, as though the western deserts were in a fallen state and could be returned to their rightful place in Creation through determined intervention.
I am always interested in learning more on landscape politics and philosophy, and Owen's brief history on conservation thought was of particular interest.
...and I am in love with this cover.
3.5/5 rounded up.
May 19, 2017
So interesting. The sort of book I have always wanted to read about the Colorado River and the West's water situation. Like a supplement and update to Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert.
March 16, 2019
Generic and pedestrian overview of the Colorado River and the Law of the River by a journalist/book writer who writes on a variety of topics. It’s a good introduction to someone with little to no knowledge. I’ve studied water law and policy a crap ton, have read all the classics, worked in that field, and written an academic paper on it, so I’m not the audience for this book. I will say I did like the updates on the topic, as I haven’t kept my knowledge super current.
Even if you are new to this subject matter, I suggest reading “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Resiner, there’s more detail and real passion. As an environmentalist and former staff member of the Natural Resource Defense Council, Reisner dedicated his life to conservation, and protecting and reviving ecosystem integrity. In contrast, this book is really just Owen driving his car along to different places along the Colorado River, its tributaries, and places that divert or receive discharges of water from it, as he recounts the law/policy of the River, as well as the history, current state, and possible future of the River and the places that depend on it. Kudos to him for trying to bring awareness to it with some updates, but it feels more like he’s just tried to make a book to sell. It reads like a Mary Roach book. Again, if you are someone with little to no knowledge, then this is a good read.
If you want a good fiction book that discusses the reality of water law and policy and how it can create conflict, specifically between white, affluent, water right owners and poor, people of color in the rural West in a comedic manner, then read “The Milagro Beanfield War” by John Nichols. It’s great! https://www.denverpost.com/2006/11/09...
Even if you are new to this subject matter, I suggest reading “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Resiner, there’s more detail and real passion. As an environmentalist and former staff member of the Natural Resource Defense Council, Reisner dedicated his life to conservation, and protecting and reviving ecosystem integrity. In contrast, this book is really just Owen driving his car along to different places along the Colorado River, its tributaries, and places that divert or receive discharges of water from it, as he recounts the law/policy of the River, as well as the history, current state, and possible future of the River and the places that depend on it. Kudos to him for trying to bring awareness to it with some updates, but it feels more like he’s just tried to make a book to sell. It reads like a Mary Roach book. Again, if you are someone with little to no knowledge, then this is a good read.
If you want a good fiction book that discusses the reality of water law and policy and how it can create conflict, specifically between white, affluent, water right owners and poor, people of color in the rural West in a comedic manner, then read “The Milagro Beanfield War” by John Nichols. It’s great! https://www.denverpost.com/2006/11/09...
December 31, 2019
---WHY THE COLORADO RIVER MATTERS---
The Colorado River—which used to be known as the Grand River, hence the name of the city of Grand Junction (the Colorado River intersects the Gunnison River)—is kind of like the “American Nile,” as the author puts it. Its basin covers a huge portion of the American West.
Still, you might think that if you don’t live in Colorado—or one of the surrounding states that fall within the Colorado River Basin, like Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and even Mexico (okay, not a state)—that the health of the river doesn’t really matter to you.
Think again, my friend. The water from the CO River irrigates crops you eat every day—it supplies the water for Imperial Valley in California, one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US . If you eat fruit in the wintertime, you bet you’ve eaten Colorado River fruit thousands of times over.
Plus, it’s something of a perfect case study, because although it’s extra obvious for the Colorado, the same things happening to it are happening to rivers all over the country—all over the world, in fact.
Interested in the different ways sub-surface metal mining (crucial considering rare metals are very important for what are usually considered “green” energy sources, like wind turbines, and for electronics like cell phones), hydraulic oil and gas fracking, reservoir/dam systems, can harm our water? David Owen is your guy.
However, I’ll note that if, like me, you are not intimately familiar with the waterways and cities/towns and mountains and other landmarks of the western US (especially Colorado and Arizona), you probably want to have Google Maps open while reading this. I found it extremely helpful (and, as a bonus, I now have a way better mental map of my new home state). Because of the constant Maps queries, it took me much longer than expected to read this book, which is only about 250 pages long.
---WHY WESTERN WATER LAW IS STUPID---
“If you picked just about any high school civics class in the country, they could almost certainly come up with an approach to western water use that would be more rational than the arcane patchwork we have currently. But that’s not going to happen.”
Why’s that? Because unlike the eastern US, the west was settled in patches, and everything else was just kind of . . . filled in around those patches.
And that doesn’t make for a very good water use scheme, does it, precious? Stupid fat hobbits.
Sorry, wrong genre. Anyway, it’s pretty unlikely we can change that patchwork schema, because it’s really fucking hard to remove or reduce legal rights of a state once it has them.
Now, currently, most state parties to the western water compact are not taking all the water they’re legally entitled to—not even close. And thank God, because if they did, there would be less than no water left. There’s more paper water than real water.
But populations in the west are rising, and states are all beginning to take more and more, which is going to test the compact’s long-term viability.
---WHO’S USING ALL THIS WATER?---
People who live on farms that are irrigated with Colorado River water often accuse people who live in cities of causing shortages by taking water that doesn’t belong to them—but throughout the western US, the main water consumers are farms, not cities. Agriculture accounts for roughly 80% of all CO River Basin water use.
Of course, it’s mostly people in cities who consume the agriculture. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
---SO WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?---
This is a little more complicated than identifying the problem.
See, clean energy is less pollutive, but hydro dams are massively harmful to the water systems in dozens of different ways.
Likewise, cotton crops are a huge consumer of water from the Colorado River, but it’s not better to consume cotton from other countries like India, which have even worse water supply issues. But does that mean we should all wear synthetic clothes made from fossil fuels? Doesn’t seem like that’s good for the planet, either.
Along those lines: organic is good—fewer chemicals and pollution, right? Nope, yields are lower, requiring more water and more land, threatening limited natural resources. Plus, without chemicals to fertilize, it’s mostly manure from livestock crops, which have high water usage compared to vegetables.
So maybe we look for water somewhere else. Desalinating seawater helps solve the water shortage, but aside from being very expensive (there are only 2 desalination plants in the US, one in Florida and one in California), it requires lots of coal to burn for energy. Burning lots of coal isn’t good. Obviously.
---DIGRESSION: VERY STUPID IDEAS HUMANS HAVE HAD, OR ARE CURRENTLY HAVING---
So many times, the author recounted an incredibly idiotic idea that human beings had and implemented, or currently have and plan to implement, that made me want to bang my head against a wall. We are willfully suicidal as a species.
Exhibit A:
Project Rulison. We thought it would be smart to explode an atom bomb 2.5x more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, underground, near Parachute, CO. The reason? We thought we could replace fracking and would release natural gas for collection, somehow less problematically than actual fracking. Here’s a governmental ad excitedly describing the experiment a few years before it gets carried out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHEGB...
How fucking insane does that sound? It’s like a cartoon! It’s like Ben and Jerry level!
As it turns out, that was really fucking stupid, because the bomb contaminated the gas with tritium, making it volatile and unusable. (Isn’t it shocking that exploding nuclear bombs has side effects?)
Today, there’s a small plaque at the site warning visitors against removing materials from 6000 feet or more (the bomb was detonated at a total of 8400 feet). Because it’s incredibly radioactive. But that didn’t stop good old Uncle Sam! We re-did this experiment no fewer than three more times before finally dropping the madness. The site is still monitored today by the Department of Energy, which claims there’s no radiation on the surface, but then again, they did plan this whole stupid thing, so sue me if I don’t plan my next camping trip in Parachute, Colorado.
Exhibit B:
The Salton Sea, a very large saline lake in California, was created by accident, by humans, in 1905. They were digging a trench to divert water from the Colorado River just south of the Mexican border, and too much snowmelt runoff that year, so it flooded the intended diversion trench and the river created a new path— right into the old, dry lakebed.
It took almost a year for them to re-divert the river back to its original course, and by that time, a huge volume of water was lost from the river and created the Salton Sea. For a few decades, it was the “desert version of Lake Tahoe”—a winter destination with expensive real estate and celebrity patrons.
But then evaporation increased the salinity of the water, which, combined with agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley and Coachella Valley (yes, that Coachella), made the lake so toxic that fish died in droves. Now it’s a fucking wasteland.
Exhibit C:
Cloud seeding, which I’ve heard about but didn’t really understand before—is INSANE.
Wyoming is doing it to generate more water for their downstream users (like Lake Powell and Lake Mead). They shoot silver iodide from 20 ft tall towers into moist clouds to form ice crystals, which would then fall as snow, eventually melting and running into the river.
“Cloud seeding seems like moving your pocket from your right pocket to your left, since rain that falls in one place can’t fall in another. But, since one of the predicted effects of climate change is a catastrophic increase in precipitation in places that already have more than they need, maybe everything would balance out— assuming, of course, that it can actually be made to work, and that spraying silver iodide into the atmosphere doesn’t turn out to be a terrible idea for some other reason.”
YEAH, ASSUMING. And that’s a big assumption, considering we have a shitty track record of wildly spraying chemicals that we think or claim are totally safe but . . . fucking are not (see also: DDT, Agent Orange, Roundup . . . ).
-----------CONCLUSIONS------------
“The question typically posed by people concerned about climate change is whether we have trhe will, as a nation, to make a sufficiently large investment in renewable energy sources. But the real question is whether we have the will, as a species, to leave a sufficiently large fraction of the earth’s abundant remaining fossil fuels in the ground, forever, entirely untouched. That’s a different question, and it’s one that, in various ways, we all answer no to every day.”
The world is ending, in rivers and mountains and oceans and fields everywhere, every day, in a million little ways, and there’s nothing we can or will do about it, because we’re all very selfish and stupid. Have a nice day!
The Colorado River—which used to be known as the Grand River, hence the name of the city of Grand Junction (the Colorado River intersects the Gunnison River)—is kind of like the “American Nile,” as the author puts it. Its basin covers a huge portion of the American West.
Still, you might think that if you don’t live in Colorado—or one of the surrounding states that fall within the Colorado River Basin, like Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and even Mexico (okay, not a state)—that the health of the river doesn’t really matter to you.
Think again, my friend. The water from the CO River irrigates crops you eat every day—it supplies the water for Imperial Valley in California, one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US . If you eat fruit in the wintertime, you bet you’ve eaten Colorado River fruit thousands of times over.
Plus, it’s something of a perfect case study, because although it’s extra obvious for the Colorado, the same things happening to it are happening to rivers all over the country—all over the world, in fact.
Interested in the different ways sub-surface metal mining (crucial considering rare metals are very important for what are usually considered “green” energy sources, like wind turbines, and for electronics like cell phones), hydraulic oil and gas fracking, reservoir/dam systems, can harm our water? David Owen is your guy.
However, I’ll note that if, like me, you are not intimately familiar with the waterways and cities/towns and mountains and other landmarks of the western US (especially Colorado and Arizona), you probably want to have Google Maps open while reading this. I found it extremely helpful (and, as a bonus, I now have a way better mental map of my new home state). Because of the constant Maps queries, it took me much longer than expected to read this book, which is only about 250 pages long.
---WHY WESTERN WATER LAW IS STUPID---
“If you picked just about any high school civics class in the country, they could almost certainly come up with an approach to western water use that would be more rational than the arcane patchwork we have currently. But that’s not going to happen.”
Why’s that? Because unlike the eastern US, the west was settled in patches, and everything else was just kind of . . . filled in around those patches.
And that doesn’t make for a very good water use scheme, does it, precious? Stupid fat hobbits.
Sorry, wrong genre. Anyway, it’s pretty unlikely we can change that patchwork schema, because it’s really fucking hard to remove or reduce legal rights of a state once it has them.
Now, currently, most state parties to the western water compact are not taking all the water they’re legally entitled to—not even close. And thank God, because if they did, there would be less than no water left. There’s more paper water than real water.
But populations in the west are rising, and states are all beginning to take more and more, which is going to test the compact’s long-term viability.
---WHO’S USING ALL THIS WATER?---
People who live on farms that are irrigated with Colorado River water often accuse people who live in cities of causing shortages by taking water that doesn’t belong to them—but throughout the western US, the main water consumers are farms, not cities. Agriculture accounts for roughly 80% of all CO River Basin water use.
Of course, it’s mostly people in cities who consume the agriculture. Six of one, half dozen of the other.
---SO WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?---
This is a little more complicated than identifying the problem.
See, clean energy is less pollutive, but hydro dams are massively harmful to the water systems in dozens of different ways.
Likewise, cotton crops are a huge consumer of water from the Colorado River, but it’s not better to consume cotton from other countries like India, which have even worse water supply issues. But does that mean we should all wear synthetic clothes made from fossil fuels? Doesn’t seem like that’s good for the planet, either.
Along those lines: organic is good—fewer chemicals and pollution, right? Nope, yields are lower, requiring more water and more land, threatening limited natural resources. Plus, without chemicals to fertilize, it’s mostly manure from livestock crops, which have high water usage compared to vegetables.
So maybe we look for water somewhere else. Desalinating seawater helps solve the water shortage, but aside from being very expensive (there are only 2 desalination plants in the US, one in Florida and one in California), it requires lots of coal to burn for energy. Burning lots of coal isn’t good. Obviously.
---DIGRESSION: VERY STUPID IDEAS HUMANS HAVE HAD, OR ARE CURRENTLY HAVING---
So many times, the author recounted an incredibly idiotic idea that human beings had and implemented, or currently have and plan to implement, that made me want to bang my head against a wall. We are willfully suicidal as a species.
Exhibit A:
Project Rulison. We thought it would be smart to explode an atom bomb 2.5x more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, underground, near Parachute, CO. The reason? We thought we could replace fracking and would release natural gas for collection, somehow less problematically than actual fracking. Here’s a governmental ad excitedly describing the experiment a few years before it gets carried out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHEGB...
How fucking insane does that sound? It’s like a cartoon! It’s like Ben and Jerry level!
As it turns out, that was really fucking stupid, because the bomb contaminated the gas with tritium, making it volatile and unusable. (Isn’t it shocking that exploding nuclear bombs has side effects?)
Today, there’s a small plaque at the site warning visitors against removing materials from 6000 feet or more (the bomb was detonated at a total of 8400 feet). Because it’s incredibly radioactive. But that didn’t stop good old Uncle Sam! We re-did this experiment no fewer than three more times before finally dropping the madness. The site is still monitored today by the Department of Energy, which claims there’s no radiation on the surface, but then again, they did plan this whole stupid thing, so sue me if I don’t plan my next camping trip in Parachute, Colorado.
Exhibit B:
The Salton Sea, a very large saline lake in California, was created by accident, by humans, in 1905. They were digging a trench to divert water from the Colorado River just south of the Mexican border, and too much snowmelt runoff that year, so it flooded the intended diversion trench and the river created a new path— right into the old, dry lakebed.
It took almost a year for them to re-divert the river back to its original course, and by that time, a huge volume of water was lost from the river and created the Salton Sea. For a few decades, it was the “desert version of Lake Tahoe”—a winter destination with expensive real estate and celebrity patrons.
But then evaporation increased the salinity of the water, which, combined with agricultural runoff from the Imperial Valley and Coachella Valley (yes, that Coachella), made the lake so toxic that fish died in droves. Now it’s a fucking wasteland.
Exhibit C:
Cloud seeding, which I’ve heard about but didn’t really understand before—is INSANE.
Wyoming is doing it to generate more water for their downstream users (like Lake Powell and Lake Mead). They shoot silver iodide from 20 ft tall towers into moist clouds to form ice crystals, which would then fall as snow, eventually melting and running into the river.
“Cloud seeding seems like moving your pocket from your right pocket to your left, since rain that falls in one place can’t fall in another. But, since one of the predicted effects of climate change is a catastrophic increase in precipitation in places that already have more than they need, maybe everything would balance out— assuming, of course, that it can actually be made to work, and that spraying silver iodide into the atmosphere doesn’t turn out to be a terrible idea for some other reason.”
YEAH, ASSUMING. And that’s a big assumption, considering we have a shitty track record of wildly spraying chemicals that we think or claim are totally safe but . . . fucking are not (see also: DDT, Agent Orange, Roundup . . . ).
-----------CONCLUSIONS------------
“The question typically posed by people concerned about climate change is whether we have trhe will, as a nation, to make a sufficiently large investment in renewable energy sources. But the real question is whether we have the will, as a species, to leave a sufficiently large fraction of the earth’s abundant remaining fossil fuels in the ground, forever, entirely untouched. That’s a different question, and it’s one that, in various ways, we all answer no to every day.”
The world is ending, in rivers and mountains and oceans and fields everywhere, every day, in a million little ways, and there’s nothing we can or will do about it, because we’re all very selfish and stupid. Have a nice day!
July 26, 2018
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✱ Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
✱ Water: A Natural History
✱ Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest
✱ Secret Knowledge of Water
✱ Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis
✱ The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
✱ Battle Over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam
✱ Savage Dreams
✱ The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
✱ Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West
✱ The Works: Anatomy of a City
✱ Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
✱ Water: A Natural History
✱ Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest
✱ Secret Knowledge of Water
✱ Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis
✱ The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
✱ Battle Over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam
✱ Savage Dreams
✱ The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
✱ Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West
✱ The Works: Anatomy of a City
June 21, 2019
This book would have been of more interest had I not known quite a lot about the topic. Since I did, and his retelling was just OK, I quit & returned it. He's a visitor to the area, and his knowledge (and writing) seemed pretty shallow. Definitely not my pick for a Colorado River book. Try CADILLAC DESERT instead.
September 4, 2019
A valiant and ultimately successful attempt to make sense of an issue that makes no sense: Water law in the American West.
March 26, 2020
This was nonfiction and it covers exactly what the title says. So given that, I'm not sure what I was expecting with this one, but it turned out to be just okay. It was kind of bland. I live in the area covered in this book and I benefit from the this water so I thought I would be really into this....but I wasn't. There was an important message here so I appreciated that but I was so glad that it was a short book. So 2 stars.
September 7, 2022
By the time I realized I rented the wrong audiobook at the library, I was three hours in and it was too late. This book exacerbated my environmental anxiety as it was basically a personalized tour of all the cities I have lived in running out of water - Carlsbad, Sacramento, and Denver - but apart from that, it was fine and waters nice.
July 9, 2025
WATER ISSUES GMFU SINCE I WAS 16 AND NOW THIS ONE GMFU AT 25
December 16, 2024
4.4
Well-written overview. Addresses key points, but doesn't bog down in legal details. Perfect for a reader who is looking for an intro to the complex problems of distributing water from this major western river.
Why not a rating of 5? Because Owen barely mentions the river's headwaters. Water that should find its way into the little stream that starts in the Never Summer Mountains on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, has been diverted. In fact water is kept from reaching that stream for about its first ten miles. Even so, it manages to become a respectable flow before it leaves the Park.
The problem: In the late 1800s, the 'Grand Ditch' was dug to catch and divert snowmelt water from the west slope to the east to irrigate fields. How much water is diverted? 50%? 90%? I have no idea. Then, too, I wonder, if not diverted, what would have been the impact of the devastating East Troublesome Fire which roared through Grand County in 2020? Would additional moisture have slowed the flames? Or would there have been more vegetation to burn, which could have sped the blaze further and faster along the path of the headwaters? (This book was published in 2017, three years before the fire.)
Another issue: The concrete-lined ditches that apparently are used quite often to redirect water.
This is an issue at the headwaters of the Fraser River, a tributary to the Colorado River. The Denver Water Department put in those ditches as soon as they started diverting water to the east slope. I questioned the use of all that concrete in a waterway. Conveniently, I had a friend who worked for the Water Dept in those early years. (He passed away quite a few years ago.) As would be expected, those ditches were death traps. Wildlife couldn't escape once they got into the ditch. It wasn't unusual to find a carcass blocking one of the grates meant to stope large debris from impeding the flow of the water. I believe that the DWD has made changes to minimize the number of deaths.
I marked quite a few passages as I read. This will be a handy reference. Now I should pull my copy of 'Cadillac Desert' (1986) and read it.
Well-written overview. Addresses key points, but doesn't bog down in legal details. Perfect for a reader who is looking for an intro to the complex problems of distributing water from this major western river.
Why not a rating of 5? Because Owen barely mentions the river's headwaters. Water that should find its way into the little stream that starts in the Never Summer Mountains on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, has been diverted. In fact water is kept from reaching that stream for about its first ten miles. Even so, it manages to become a respectable flow before it leaves the Park.
The problem: In the late 1800s, the 'Grand Ditch' was dug to catch and divert snowmelt water from the west slope to the east to irrigate fields. How much water is diverted? 50%? 90%? I have no idea. Then, too, I wonder, if not diverted, what would have been the impact of the devastating East Troublesome Fire which roared through Grand County in 2020? Would additional moisture have slowed the flames? Or would there have been more vegetation to burn, which could have sped the blaze further and faster along the path of the headwaters? (This book was published in 2017, three years before the fire.)
Another issue: The concrete-lined ditches that apparently are used quite often to redirect water.
This is an issue at the headwaters of the Fraser River, a tributary to the Colorado River. The Denver Water Department put in those ditches as soon as they started diverting water to the east slope. I questioned the use of all that concrete in a waterway. Conveniently, I had a friend who worked for the Water Dept in those early years. (He passed away quite a few years ago.) As would be expected, those ditches were death traps. Wildlife couldn't escape once they got into the ditch. It wasn't unusual to find a carcass blocking one of the grates meant to stope large debris from impeding the flow of the water. I believe that the DWD has made changes to minimize the number of deaths.
I marked quite a few passages as I read. This will be a handy reference. Now I should pull my copy of 'Cadillac Desert' (1986) and read it.
June 20, 2018
If you enjoy the high-caliber writing of The New Yorker, then you may enjoy this book, with its stretched-out and leisurely pace from the headwaters to its mouth. Although I enjoy The New Yorker, this book drags through too many side trips and personal anecdotes, reading like a travelogue with facts, figures and information along the way. This book began as an article for The New Yorker.
A hundred years ago, the Colorado River, north of its confluence with the Green in Eastern Utah, was called the Grand, which gave its name to the Grand Valley, Grand Mesa and Grand Junction.
Today the river functions as a fourteen-hundred-mile long canal. Someone owns the legal right to every gallon of the river. The water has been over-allocated for a hundred years, writes David Owen. As it turns out, the water allocation program of the twenties was calculated during a period of unusually heavy snows and water flows. During drier times, little water reaches the mouth.
Most of the Colorado River originates as snowpack in the north part of the watershed while the biggest consumers take water at the far end, around Southern California. Agriculture accounts for eighty percent of the water consumed in the drainage basin of the Colorado River.
This book discusses the Colorado River, in particular, and Western water rights, in general. Three and a half stars. Owen also wrote Green Metropolis, which remains on my to-read shelf.
Although I live as a solid Great Laker in the Upper Midwest the Colorado River flowed through my life in early years:
On one of our family road trips out west, we stopped at Hoover Dam. Dad, an engineer, pointed out the gee-whiz aspects of this mammoth project, supplemented by the official tour of the project.
I lived in Grand Junction for a year as a cub reporter, where I met my wife. Grand Junction is the biggest city between Denver and Salt Lake. We picnicked and partied on the banks of the Colorado River. The Grand Valley occupies a basin roughly twelve miles wide by thirty-six miles long. The valley, with natural protection from harsh weather, grows cherries and the famous Palisades Peaches.
The most beautiful train ride I ever took began at Union Station in Denver. “All Aboard!” One of the few stations where that call sounds like it should. To gain altitude on The Rockies, the train meanders through switchbacks on The Front Range. The morning we took it, in early September, a powder-sugar snow just decorated the aspens, turning to fall gold. Eventually we travel through all the tunnels that made the trip possible ninety years ago. After crossing The Continental Divide, it’s all down hill from there, you might say. But that’s where we align with the Colorado River, running there as a whitewater. The stream becomes a river on the way to Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. The train and the river part ways near the Utah border. If you take this special trip, book it from Denver to Grand Junction. Then book a return trip to enjoy the similar but opposite view going the other way. It is pleasantly surprising how enjoyable that round trip becomes when you see the sights again, but at a one-eighty.
A hundred years ago, the Colorado River, north of its confluence with the Green in Eastern Utah, was called the Grand, which gave its name to the Grand Valley, Grand Mesa and Grand Junction.
Today the river functions as a fourteen-hundred-mile long canal. Someone owns the legal right to every gallon of the river. The water has been over-allocated for a hundred years, writes David Owen. As it turns out, the water allocation program of the twenties was calculated during a period of unusually heavy snows and water flows. During drier times, little water reaches the mouth.
Most of the Colorado River originates as snowpack in the north part of the watershed while the biggest consumers take water at the far end, around Southern California. Agriculture accounts for eighty percent of the water consumed in the drainage basin of the Colorado River.
This book discusses the Colorado River, in particular, and Western water rights, in general. Three and a half stars. Owen also wrote Green Metropolis, which remains on my to-read shelf.
Although I live as a solid Great Laker in the Upper Midwest the Colorado River flowed through my life in early years:
On one of our family road trips out west, we stopped at Hoover Dam. Dad, an engineer, pointed out the gee-whiz aspects of this mammoth project, supplemented by the official tour of the project.
I lived in Grand Junction for a year as a cub reporter, where I met my wife. Grand Junction is the biggest city between Denver and Salt Lake. We picnicked and partied on the banks of the Colorado River. The Grand Valley occupies a basin roughly twelve miles wide by thirty-six miles long. The valley, with natural protection from harsh weather, grows cherries and the famous Palisades Peaches.
The most beautiful train ride I ever took began at Union Station in Denver. “All Aboard!” One of the few stations where that call sounds like it should. To gain altitude on The Rockies, the train meanders through switchbacks on The Front Range. The morning we took it, in early September, a powder-sugar snow just decorated the aspens, turning to fall gold. Eventually we travel through all the tunnels that made the trip possible ninety years ago. After crossing The Continental Divide, it’s all down hill from there, you might say. But that’s where we align with the Colorado River, running there as a whitewater. The stream becomes a river on the way to Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. The train and the river part ways near the Utah border. If you take this special trip, book it from Denver to Grand Junction. Then book a return trip to enjoy the similar but opposite view going the other way. It is pleasantly surprising how enjoyable that round trip becomes when you see the sights again, but at a one-eighty.
August 2, 2017
This is such a fascinating look at the strength and fragility of the Colorado river and how it's used as it flows from the mountains to Mexico. I learned so much, and have had most of my basic assumptions about water conservation turned upside down.
A few things I would like to have learned more about:
-the impact of oil and gas on our western water supply. It's mentioned briefly in passing, but not much information. Maybe this should be another book.
-I would have liked to have learned more about the flow and uses by the upper basin states. Most of the book focuses on Nevada, Arizona, and California. Rightfully so, but I wanted the other states discussed in more detail.
A few things I would like to have learned more about:
-the impact of oil and gas on our western water supply. It's mentioned briefly in passing, but not much information. Maybe this should be another book.
-I would have liked to have learned more about the flow and uses by the upper basin states. Most of the book focuses on Nevada, Arizona, and California. Rightfully so, but I wanted the other states discussed in more detail.
December 29, 2023
An accessible invitation to modern Colorado River issues! Yes, invitation, not introduction. The book is told in travelogue form (the author follows the river's flow by car) and its focus is more on interesting, counterintuitive observations than on providing a comprehensive introduction. This works well to keep the reader engaged, but piecing together the important milestones (and their chronology) requires some work. Don't worry, I made a cheat sheet for you at the end!
Few other quibbles. The author interjects himself into the narrative pretty often. This is usually just mildly annoying, but his tirade against efficiency and conservation seems to contradict the experts he quotes and seems to be a case of over-extrapolating from his argument in a previous book, The Conundrum. Colorado River issues are also so quickly evolving that some parts of the book are already out of date (early retirement of Navajo Generation Station, Colorado River declared shortage for the first time in 2021, etc.).
Still readability is king. I imagine there aren't a ton of easy-to-read books about the Colorado River given its complexity. I particularly enjoyed reading about the Central Arizona Project (and Arizona's dry lots and animosity towards California), the Salton Sea, and the pulse flow. The Salton Sea I've read several articles about before and never felt I got the general gist until reading the relevant chapter in this book. While reading, I went down a lot of fun Google rabbit-holes and even watched the movie Chinatown, which he cites.
I think the infrastructure projects along the Colorado River are probably the best recentish examples of the US building big things, so I found it somewhat hopeful from an energy transition perspective. The difficulties climate change is causing and will continue to cause the Colorado River system are truly daunting though. I'm optimistic that commonsense will prevail and the worst effects will be mitigated.
Major Agreements/Projects
-Salton Sea created by engineering accident! 1904
-Colorado River Compact (brokered by Hoover dividing states into Upper Basin and Lower Basin) 1922
-Boulder Canyon Project Act (authorizes Hoover Dam/Lake Mead (NV/AZ) and All-American Canal in CA) 1928 completed in 1935/1940
-Colorado Big-Thompson Water Project authorized 1930
-Parker Dam/Lake Havasu (AZ/CA) complete 1938
-Mexican Treaty 1944
-Upper Colorado River Basin Compact (AZ, CO, NM, UT, WY) 1948
-Colorado River Storage Project authorizes Glen Canyon/Lake Powell and others(AZ/UT) 1956 completed in 1963
-Arizona v California SCOTUS decision 1963
-Colorado River Basin Project Act authorizes Central Arizona Project and others 1968 completed in 1993
-Quantification Settlement Agreement (CA) 2003
-US-Mexico agreement "Minute 319" authorizes pulse flow and other stuff in 2012 flow in 2014
Few other quibbles. The author interjects himself into the narrative pretty often. This is usually just mildly annoying, but his tirade against efficiency and conservation seems to contradict the experts he quotes and seems to be a case of over-extrapolating from his argument in a previous book, The Conundrum. Colorado River issues are also so quickly evolving that some parts of the book are already out of date (early retirement of Navajo Generation Station, Colorado River declared shortage for the first time in 2021, etc.).
Still readability is king. I imagine there aren't a ton of easy-to-read books about the Colorado River given its complexity. I particularly enjoyed reading about the Central Arizona Project (and Arizona's dry lots and animosity towards California), the Salton Sea, and the pulse flow. The Salton Sea I've read several articles about before and never felt I got the general gist until reading the relevant chapter in this book. While reading, I went down a lot of fun Google rabbit-holes and even watched the movie Chinatown, which he cites.
I think the infrastructure projects along the Colorado River are probably the best recentish examples of the US building big things, so I found it somewhat hopeful from an energy transition perspective. The difficulties climate change is causing and will continue to cause the Colorado River system are truly daunting though. I'm optimistic that commonsense will prevail and the worst effects will be mitigated.
Major Agreements/Projects
-Salton Sea created by engineering accident! 1904
-Colorado River Compact (brokered by Hoover dividing states into Upper Basin and Lower Basin) 1922
-Boulder Canyon Project Act (authorizes Hoover Dam/Lake Mead (NV/AZ) and All-American Canal in CA) 1928 completed in 1935/1940
-Colorado Big-Thompson Water Project authorized 1930
-Parker Dam/Lake Havasu (AZ/CA) complete 1938
-Mexican Treaty 1944
-Upper Colorado River Basin Compact (AZ, CO, NM, UT, WY) 1948
-Colorado River Storage Project authorizes Glen Canyon/Lake Powell and others(AZ/UT) 1956 completed in 1963
-Arizona v California SCOTUS decision 1963
-Colorado River Basin Project Act authorizes Central Arizona Project and others 1968 completed in 1993
-Quantification Settlement Agreement (CA) 2003
-US-Mexico agreement "Minute 319" authorizes pulse flow and other stuff in 2012 flow in 2014
April 17, 2022
The Colorado River, originally known as the Grand River (hence the names "Grand Canyon" and "Grand Junction"!), is an important water source for a large part of the United States. In Where the Water Goes, Owen discusses water shortage problems stemming from the river and how they are not as simple as turning off outdoors fountains, stopping selling hay, banning golf, or cutting down trees. Digging into the water laws of Colorado and the surrounding states, and analyzing the history around those laws' creation, this book is an essential read for any Coloradoan hoping to better understand the state of water.
September 9, 2019
A fun travelogue and discussion of the history of water regulation and water rights along the Colorado River Basin. While it identifies key concerns about future water security, the book is at times superficial, especially about river science, and lacks helpful visuals and endnotes/citations.
August 15, 2019
I revere the Colorado River as a god, and the Colorado Plateau and its accompanying geologic wonders as its temples, so this was the opposite of the kind of book I would love, but still interesting if you care about water in the West, and I do. I knew, moving here, that I was stressing out an arid, sere environment that is wholly dependent on snow pack and abundant precipitation, but it is home now. My nomad heart found its home, and I hope I can give back to my now home. I do miss the lush green of my New England and sometimes dreams of a greener place, but I also crave the sunshine and open skies and mountains and city and location. I love the lyrics to I’m not from here by James McMurtry:
We can't help it
We just keep moving
It's been that way since long ago
Since the Stone Age, chasing the great herds
We mostly go where we have to go
Onto some bright future somewhere
Down the road to points unknown
But this is me:
Eighty percent of Colorado’s precipitation falls on the western half of the state, yet eighty- five percent of the population lives to the east, in the mountains’ “rain shadow.” If transporting water from one side to the other were impossible, most of the people who live and farm on the eastern side of the mountains would have to move.
The author spends a lot of time in small planes tracing the course of the river, and it is a mere trickle compared to the Mississippi and other gargantuan rivers, but still mighty. A great description of its small size: “if you were to spread a full year’s worth of its entire flow evenly over a surface the size of its drainage basin, roughly 250,000 square miles, the water would cover it to a depth of only about an inch.” There are a lot of amazing facts that show the depth and breadth of what this river means to the West, including being the source of water to more than 36 million people (Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Salt Lake, Albuquerque, Vegas, and Phoenix.
There was a lot of explication of water laws, and the industry and use of the River, and little “life and death” the title promises, and I sense the author, while mentioning outdoor activities, is not an avid nature lover since nature is barely mentioned but there are long riffs on mines and plants and RV’s. I have always had a sense of regret at how controlled it is now, that the Grand Canyon’s already minute progress deep and deeper towards the center of the earth is now slowed to an infinitesimally slow rate by human control, but I know I benefit from it, so am pragmatic about it.
“The Colorado has helped to shape some of the most otherworldly landforms on earth— the Grand Canyon, of course, and also the Vermilion Cliffs, in northern Arizona, and the eerily striated buttes and mazelike sandstone meanders of Canyonlands National Park, in southeastern Utah— yet even within those seemingly wild landscapes its flow is so altered and controlled that in many ways the river functions more like a fourteen- hundred- mile- long canal. The legal right to use every gallon is owned or claimed by someone— in fact, more than every gallon, since theoretical rights to the Colorado’s flow, known to water lawyers as “paper water,” greatly exceed its actual flow, known as “wet water.”
Our snowpack is dismally low this year, and now I can understand some of the jargon some articles throw around about water rights, senior and junior, priority dates, and what it means to farmland and irrigation. The Shoshone hydroelectric plant near Glenwood Springs “has a priority date of 1902, making it the oldest large water right on the river. It’s entitled to take its entire allotment before any junior holder, including metropolitan Denver, gets any, and for that reason it has been called “the most powerful water right on the Colorado River.” It is not a consumptive plant, it actually releases all the water back to the river, which makes it interesting.
There is a thread of connection that the author reiterates throughout, and I have lived in LA and Phoenix and now Denver not even realizing the connections. It has been my immersion into the landscape, into the raw, bare places that makes me cherish water, and I think it is important to know how connected we are, and how global warming could make any of these places inhabitable. He wrote at the beginning, the one thing that is a truth, not a theory is that water is necessary for life, and it can run out in moment’s time, whatever the politicians say about golabal warming. “We may be citizens of a community, and a state, and a country, but we are also citizens of a basin…What happens in Denver matters in L.A. What happens in Phoenix matters in Salt Lake. It’s a web, and if you cut one strand the whole thing begins to unravel. If you think there can be a winner in something like that, you are nuts. Either we all win, or we all lose. And we certainly don’t have time to go to court.”
Eons ago, this are of the Colorado Plateau and watershed was under shallow seas as the continents were in different places on the globe, where magnetic north changed, where time was eternal. When I read this, part of my heart breaks since it almost seems to describe such a deep time change, but was just 50 years ago: “In his book The Great Divide, which was published in 2015, Stephen Grace writes, “The Colorado River Delta, once one of the planet’s great wetland ecosystems, formed a maze of green lagoons that teemed with fish and was prowled by jaguars. Waterfowl filled the skies in such abundance that daylight dimmed as processions of wings passed before the sun.” This was still true not much more than half a century ago. Pitt said, “The first real drying occurred around 1966.:
So. What to do. There are things the author states that I don’t agree with, such as how the environment is destroyed more by people who love wild places and overuse them than by people who don’t visit them: that is a simplistic version of it. Yes, some recreation like ATV’s do destroy nature, but those people can’t be said to love wild places, they love their selfish recreation. And the decisions made by politicians to protect or exploit areas have a much more powerful effect on air quality, etc. This perspective is new to me, and very interesting, although it is more economics-focused than scientific, AC has harmful effects also: “...from a broader environmental point of view desert regions are by no means terrible places for people to live. Cooling rooms from 110 degrees to 75 degrees requires less energy than heating them from minus 25 to 68; solar exposure in deserts is often high year-round, making all forms of solar-energy harvesting more attractive; the daily solar peak in deserts roughly coincides with the daily peak in human energy demand in those same areas, something that often isn’t the case in other environments; and deserts impose absolute limits on some kinds of development-related environmental damage, assuming that residents can be prevented from growing too much grass on sand. With good land-use management, water scarcity can even be a useful tool for containing the heedless sprawl of human habitation.”
About moving the people around, not a great idea: “If New York City could somehow be dismantled and its residents dispersed across the state at the density of Pierson’s current hometown, what remains today of pastoral New York State would vanish under a tide of asphalt. Similarly, if you demolished all of Colorado’s dams, aqueducts, and water tunnels, and spread the 4.5 million current residents of the East Slope across the state thinly enough to accommodate everyone’s water needs with local streams and groundwater, you’d have an environmentally disastrous mess: the suburbs of Houston or Atlanta smeared across the Rocky Mountains. It’s big, thirsty, densely populated cities that make sparsely inhabited wild places possible—a package deal.”
To end, I really appreciate the humor of this, but its cynicism can’t mar one of my most holy experiences of hiking and bathing in the water of a small spring fed tributary in Utah near Moab, knowing this water joins the Colorado and flows down through the temples and holy places that are more alive than the masses can appreciate.
Some of its southern reaches attract so many transient residents during the winter that you could almost believe it had overflowed its banks and left dense alluvial deposits of motorboats, Jet Skis, dirt bikes, golf carts, all- terrain vehicles, RVs, mobile homes, fifth wheels, and people with gray hair.
We can't help it
We just keep moving
It's been that way since long ago
Since the Stone Age, chasing the great herds
We mostly go where we have to go
Onto some bright future somewhere
Down the road to points unknown
But this is me:
Eighty percent of Colorado’s precipitation falls on the western half of the state, yet eighty- five percent of the population lives to the east, in the mountains’ “rain shadow.” If transporting water from one side to the other were impossible, most of the people who live and farm on the eastern side of the mountains would have to move.
The author spends a lot of time in small planes tracing the course of the river, and it is a mere trickle compared to the Mississippi and other gargantuan rivers, but still mighty. A great description of its small size: “if you were to spread a full year’s worth of its entire flow evenly over a surface the size of its drainage basin, roughly 250,000 square miles, the water would cover it to a depth of only about an inch.” There are a lot of amazing facts that show the depth and breadth of what this river means to the West, including being the source of water to more than 36 million people (Denver, Colorado Springs, Boulder, Salt Lake, Albuquerque, Vegas, and Phoenix.
There was a lot of explication of water laws, and the industry and use of the River, and little “life and death” the title promises, and I sense the author, while mentioning outdoor activities, is not an avid nature lover since nature is barely mentioned but there are long riffs on mines and plants and RV’s. I have always had a sense of regret at how controlled it is now, that the Grand Canyon’s already minute progress deep and deeper towards the center of the earth is now slowed to an infinitesimally slow rate by human control, but I know I benefit from it, so am pragmatic about it.
“The Colorado has helped to shape some of the most otherworldly landforms on earth— the Grand Canyon, of course, and also the Vermilion Cliffs, in northern Arizona, and the eerily striated buttes and mazelike sandstone meanders of Canyonlands National Park, in southeastern Utah— yet even within those seemingly wild landscapes its flow is so altered and controlled that in many ways the river functions more like a fourteen- hundred- mile- long canal. The legal right to use every gallon is owned or claimed by someone— in fact, more than every gallon, since theoretical rights to the Colorado’s flow, known to water lawyers as “paper water,” greatly exceed its actual flow, known as “wet water.”
Our snowpack is dismally low this year, and now I can understand some of the jargon some articles throw around about water rights, senior and junior, priority dates, and what it means to farmland and irrigation. The Shoshone hydroelectric plant near Glenwood Springs “has a priority date of 1902, making it the oldest large water right on the river. It’s entitled to take its entire allotment before any junior holder, including metropolitan Denver, gets any, and for that reason it has been called “the most powerful water right on the Colorado River.” It is not a consumptive plant, it actually releases all the water back to the river, which makes it interesting.
There is a thread of connection that the author reiterates throughout, and I have lived in LA and Phoenix and now Denver not even realizing the connections. It has been my immersion into the landscape, into the raw, bare places that makes me cherish water, and I think it is important to know how connected we are, and how global warming could make any of these places inhabitable. He wrote at the beginning, the one thing that is a truth, not a theory is that water is necessary for life, and it can run out in moment’s time, whatever the politicians say about golabal warming. “We may be citizens of a community, and a state, and a country, but we are also citizens of a basin…What happens in Denver matters in L.A. What happens in Phoenix matters in Salt Lake. It’s a web, and if you cut one strand the whole thing begins to unravel. If you think there can be a winner in something like that, you are nuts. Either we all win, or we all lose. And we certainly don’t have time to go to court.”
Eons ago, this are of the Colorado Plateau and watershed was under shallow seas as the continents were in different places on the globe, where magnetic north changed, where time was eternal. When I read this, part of my heart breaks since it almost seems to describe such a deep time change, but was just 50 years ago: “In his book The Great Divide, which was published in 2015, Stephen Grace writes, “The Colorado River Delta, once one of the planet’s great wetland ecosystems, formed a maze of green lagoons that teemed with fish and was prowled by jaguars. Waterfowl filled the skies in such abundance that daylight dimmed as processions of wings passed before the sun.” This was still true not much more than half a century ago. Pitt said, “The first real drying occurred around 1966.:
So. What to do. There are things the author states that I don’t agree with, such as how the environment is destroyed more by people who love wild places and overuse them than by people who don’t visit them: that is a simplistic version of it. Yes, some recreation like ATV’s do destroy nature, but those people can’t be said to love wild places, they love their selfish recreation. And the decisions made by politicians to protect or exploit areas have a much more powerful effect on air quality, etc. This perspective is new to me, and very interesting, although it is more economics-focused than scientific, AC has harmful effects also: “...from a broader environmental point of view desert regions are by no means terrible places for people to live. Cooling rooms from 110 degrees to 75 degrees requires less energy than heating them from minus 25 to 68; solar exposure in deserts is often high year-round, making all forms of solar-energy harvesting more attractive; the daily solar peak in deserts roughly coincides with the daily peak in human energy demand in those same areas, something that often isn’t the case in other environments; and deserts impose absolute limits on some kinds of development-related environmental damage, assuming that residents can be prevented from growing too much grass on sand. With good land-use management, water scarcity can even be a useful tool for containing the heedless sprawl of human habitation.”
About moving the people around, not a great idea: “If New York City could somehow be dismantled and its residents dispersed across the state at the density of Pierson’s current hometown, what remains today of pastoral New York State would vanish under a tide of asphalt. Similarly, if you demolished all of Colorado’s dams, aqueducts, and water tunnels, and spread the 4.5 million current residents of the East Slope across the state thinly enough to accommodate everyone’s water needs with local streams and groundwater, you’d have an environmentally disastrous mess: the suburbs of Houston or Atlanta smeared across the Rocky Mountains. It’s big, thirsty, densely populated cities that make sparsely inhabited wild places possible—a package deal.”
To end, I really appreciate the humor of this, but its cynicism can’t mar one of my most holy experiences of hiking and bathing in the water of a small spring fed tributary in Utah near Moab, knowing this water joins the Colorado and flows down through the temples and holy places that are more alive than the masses can appreciate.
Some of its southern reaches attract so many transient residents during the winter that you could almost believe it had overflowed its banks and left dense alluvial deposits of motorboats, Jet Skis, dirt bikes, golf carts, all- terrain vehicles, RVs, mobile homes, fifth wheels, and people with gray hair.
September 24, 2021
Wish more people would read this!
August 21, 2018
This book starts strong enough, with sobering lines like: "Eighty percent of Colorado’s precipitation falls on the western half of the state, yet eighty-five percent of the population lives to the east, in the mountains’ 'rain shadow.' If transporting water from one side to the other were impossible, most of the people who live and farm on the eastern side of the mountains would have to move."
And: "'Even people who describe themselves as worried environmentalists usually have no idea where their water comes from.'"
And: "The Colorado suffers from the same kinds of overuse and environmental degradation that increasingly threaten freshwater sources all over the world, as the global population rises toward its projected mid-century level of nine or ten billion, and as changes in weather play havoc with accustomed precipitation patterns. ('Climate change is water change,' a scientist told me.)"
And: "In the 1920s, 'conserving' river water meant extracting as much profit from it as possible before it flowed into the sea. The fact that a natural resource might have value for species other than our own, or even that it might have aesthetic, spiritual, or recreational value for us, was not a consideration." (See also: how too many of our rivers are still managed today.)
The biggest problem with this book is the fact that the author is:
a) a lifelong east-coaster;
b) an avid golfer, contributing editor for Golf Digest, and author of four books about golf;
c) not any kind of water expert/water conservationist;
d) ALL OF THE ABOVE.
One apt review I read said this: "And a few paragraphs later, the author revealed himself to be a golfer. The last thing we need in the West is to be lectured on water by golfers." (YES! Exactly.)
I'd take that last sentence a step further and say the last thing we need in the West is golfers.
What's my problem with an avid golfer talking about water (mis)use in the West? WATER-RELATED GOLFING TANGENT AHEAD—FORE!
Imagine for a mere sixty seconds how much water a golf course uses every day, every month, every year. If that's too much trouble, try imagining how much water a single fairway uses. It's a seriously disgusting and irresponsible amount of water. (Especially when considering the sheer number of people in this country (and this world), and the subsequent lack of livable space coupled with not nearly enough conservable space.)
Which is one of myriad reasons I think golfing in and out itself is selfish, ridiculous, and a waste of perfectly good land that could (and should!) be better utilized for conservation, wildlife habitat, or (wait for it...) affordable housing.
Imagine all the different (see also: better) ways we could be utilizing land (and so much water) used for golf courses around the country (and the world), and then read A River Lost and Cadillac Desert instead of this book.
[Two stars for so much potential but not nearly enough self-awareness.]
And: "'Even people who describe themselves as worried environmentalists usually have no idea where their water comes from.'"
And: "The Colorado suffers from the same kinds of overuse and environmental degradation that increasingly threaten freshwater sources all over the world, as the global population rises toward its projected mid-century level of nine or ten billion, and as changes in weather play havoc with accustomed precipitation patterns. ('Climate change is water change,' a scientist told me.)"
And: "In the 1920s, 'conserving' river water meant extracting as much profit from it as possible before it flowed into the sea. The fact that a natural resource might have value for species other than our own, or even that it might have aesthetic, spiritual, or recreational value for us, was not a consideration." (See also: how too many of our rivers are still managed today.)
The biggest problem with this book is the fact that the author is:
a) a lifelong east-coaster;
b) an avid golfer, contributing editor for Golf Digest, and author of four books about golf;
c) not any kind of water expert/water conservationist;
d) ALL OF THE ABOVE.
One apt review I read said this: "And a few paragraphs later, the author revealed himself to be a golfer. The last thing we need in the West is to be lectured on water by golfers." (YES! Exactly.)
I'd take that last sentence a step further and say the last thing we need in the West is golfers.
What's my problem with an avid golfer talking about water (mis)use in the West? WATER-RELATED GOLFING TANGENT AHEAD—FORE!
Imagine for a mere sixty seconds how much water a golf course uses every day, every month, every year. If that's too much trouble, try imagining how much water a single fairway uses. It's a seriously disgusting and irresponsible amount of water. (Especially when considering the sheer number of people in this country (and this world), and the subsequent lack of livable space coupled with not nearly enough conservable space.)
Which is one of myriad reasons I think golfing in and out itself is selfish, ridiculous, and a waste of perfectly good land that could (and should!) be better utilized for conservation, wildlife habitat, or (wait for it...) affordable housing.
Imagine all the different (see also: better) ways we could be utilizing land (and so much water) used for golf courses around the country (and the world), and then read A River Lost and Cadillac Desert instead of this book.
[Two stars for so much potential but not nearly enough self-awareness.]
April 29, 2019
This book is a complicated combination of general science, ecology, law and sociology. I learned a lot about how the water of the Colorado River is used, reused, diverted and abused. It's not a simple story of good and evil. Somtimes it turns out that waste causes unexpected ancillary benefits or that seemingly greedy uses cause little damage as they return most of their water back to the system. Generally good practices have good results, so you can't use the anecdotal stories about good coming from bad and bad coming from good to justify bad behavior, but water uses are interrelated in curious and sometimes unexpected ways that need to be carefully analyzed in making water policy decisions, whether your goal is serving industry, saving the environment or satisfying the thirst of crops or cities.
My favorite part of this book was my introduction to the idea of The Law of the River, which is a sort of super common law consisting of precedent, norms, traditions and might making right that come together in an unwritten code known only by the initiated that decides much of what happens with the water of the river. The Law of the River isn't always clear, but Owen would have us believe that may be one of its chief virtues since any blind application of fixed rules in the fluid environment of water policy is likely to produce wrong results much of the time.
I was saddened by the story of the shrinkage of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, a trend that is likely to get worse over time since water allocations for the river were set in the 20s, a time which we now know was an era of record high rain and snow. Even if you agree with The Monkey Wrench Gang that the Glen Canyon Dam is an abomination, it won't do much good to blow it up if all that is left over at the end is a trickle after all of the limited water is sucked up by the upstream users with senior rights to take fixed allocations of water. It's a mess. Owen has a very evenhanded view of the problem, though he doesn't give us much hope or a program for long term solutions.
My favorite part of this book was my introduction to the idea of The Law of the River, which is a sort of super common law consisting of precedent, norms, traditions and might making right that come together in an unwritten code known only by the initiated that decides much of what happens with the water of the river. The Law of the River isn't always clear, but Owen would have us believe that may be one of its chief virtues since any blind application of fixed rules in the fluid environment of water policy is likely to produce wrong results much of the time.
I was saddened by the story of the shrinkage of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, a trend that is likely to get worse over time since water allocations for the river were set in the 20s, a time which we now know was an era of record high rain and snow. Even if you agree with The Monkey Wrench Gang that the Glen Canyon Dam is an abomination, it won't do much good to blow it up if all that is left over at the end is a trickle after all of the limited water is sucked up by the upstream users with senior rights to take fixed allocations of water. It's a mess. Owen has a very evenhanded view of the problem, though he doesn't give us much hope or a program for long term solutions.
January 18, 2018
I live in Phoenix, and though I’ve come into contact with the Colorado River at many different points along its flow, I knew embarrassingly little about the status of the river (spoiler: its over-allocated) and the journey it takes, even though I use water from it every day. I’ve driven through the Hoover Dam dozens of times and never cared, and after reading this book, I can’t wait to drive to Las Vegas again so I can take a tour of it. I learned so much reading this. It was a brilliant idea for Owens to organize the book following the physical river, beginning with its headwaters, and ending with its terminus in Mexico. He injected juicy little anecdotes and historical narratives into the book that made it entertaining. And it answered so many questions I didn’t know I had. (For example, in college, a friend and I went on a road trip through Southern California and took a detour to Salvation Mountain. On our way back to the main highway, we saw an enormous “sea” on Google Maps right by us, and decided to go check it out. We drove up to a parking lot by the shore, opened the windows, and there was this horrible, rancid smell, and twenty or thirty flies flew into our car before we got away. I finally found out what the Salton Sea is and why it exists in one of the most interesting chapters of this book.) Finally, this book turned all my preconceptions about what is good or bad for the environment upside down — one of the most important of these being the concept of consumptive vs non-consumptive use of water. I highly recommend this book, especially if you live in a state that sources its water from the Colorado.
September 7, 2017
An interesting look at water issues, particularly as they relate to the Colorado River and the Southwest US. Most of the book feels like more of a travelogue than an in-depth look at the environment, science, or cultural history. And all those elements are combined with Owen's travels and stories of the people he met or places he saw while researching the book, although it sometimes felt a little tedious to me. The strongest part is probably the final chapter, "What is to be done?", where he looks at the various issues, such as the mind-boggling "Over-Allocation" of actual water, "Desalination," "Agriculture," etc. And I especially appreciated that Owen isn't blind to the many sides to every story or argument. He is especially good at pointing out the flaws in many seemingly simple and common-sense arguments, as well as illustrating the complexity of every idea or solution. Maybe not as focused on the river itself as I'd have liked it to be, but an interesting book nonetheless. (And I REALLY LOVE the cover, which reminded me of the Road Runner and Wiley Coyote cartoons that were my favorite as a child.)
August 15, 2019
As a resident of Arizona for 25 years now I have often heard "well you people in Az. are using all of our water from the Colorado River to water your lawns and fill your pools."
Well I read the book and I am here to say it AIN'T so!
In 1922 an agreement was made by the powers to be that the water from the Colorado Rivers flow should be allotted to the seven states it flowed through. The Upper Basin states were Wyo. Colorado, Utah and New Mexico getting the larger portions; the Lower Basin states were Nevada, Arizona and California getting smaller shares. As you may realize now none of these states had the populations that now exist. It was even decided Mexico should share in the water. This was all a tremendous mistake. Back then the weather wasn't affected by "climate change." Populations weren't what they are now and they didn't even consider that Dams like Hoover; lakes like Meade and Powell and smaller dams like Dillion and so on would stop the natural flow of the water. Eastern Colorado's water supply was fed by the rains and snow falls on The Western slopes. But that proved to be problematic. Even though farms don't use as much water as in the past; The Imperial Valley in Calif. does. We are all so conscious of organic growing etc. that we don't realize the impact on our water supplies. we don't grow cotton in Az. like we did; but countries like China, India and Bangladesh do and their water is almost non existent.
Its really freighting how fast our world is using our water tables and supplies.
P.S. This will be a Christmas gift to some of the blamers.
Well I read the book and I am here to say it AIN'T so!
In 1922 an agreement was made by the powers to be that the water from the Colorado Rivers flow should be allotted to the seven states it flowed through. The Upper Basin states were Wyo. Colorado, Utah and New Mexico getting the larger portions; the Lower Basin states were Nevada, Arizona and California getting smaller shares. As you may realize now none of these states had the populations that now exist. It was even decided Mexico should share in the water. This was all a tremendous mistake. Back then the weather wasn't affected by "climate change." Populations weren't what they are now and they didn't even consider that Dams like Hoover; lakes like Meade and Powell and smaller dams like Dillion and so on would stop the natural flow of the water. Eastern Colorado's water supply was fed by the rains and snow falls on The Western slopes. But that proved to be problematic. Even though farms don't use as much water as in the past; The Imperial Valley in Calif. does. We are all so conscious of organic growing etc. that we don't realize the impact on our water supplies. we don't grow cotton in Az. like we did; but countries like China, India and Bangladesh do and their water is almost non existent.
Its really freighting how fast our world is using our water tables and supplies.
P.S. This will be a Christmas gift to some of the blamers.
January 14, 2019
The Colorado River feeds the ground and economy of much of the western United States. And more than every ounce of it is spoken for. The use of the river is based on an almost 100 year old document, The Colorado River Compact. This compact allocates use among 7 states in the Colorado River Basin, and is based on what we now know to be unusually high water and rainfall levels. Add to that the booming population of the western United States in the last 100 years and we find ourselves on the verge of a water disaster. Mr. Owen travels the path of the Colorado and some of its many tributaries, and examines what life dependent on this over-taxed river looks like. There are no easy answers.
I have only lived in the front range for a short time, but I already understand the importance of rain and snow. I don't complain when we get snow storms or rain, as much as I may bitch about drivers.
I have only lived in the front range for a short time, but I already understand the importance of rain and snow. I don't complain when we get snow storms or rain, as much as I may bitch about drivers.
July 21, 2020
Mostly for the novice interested rivers. A bit shallow, pardon the pun. We who live in Colorado harbor a secret distaste for all those water grabbing states to our west. I want to yell: "get your own water."
July 25, 2024
Learned a lot reading this. Got a bit lost in some of the side stories, but overall I really enjoyed learning about the usage of the Colorado river along with the opportunity costs for different methods of water management in the Western half of the US.
October 25, 2024
As someone living in Colorado, water is always on my mind. The obsession with snow pack is practically a family sport. But I now know how little I knew! Who knew the Lake Dillon in Silverthorn is a reservoir for Denver Water? That Denver Water, the utility that serves a quarter of the state’s population only counts for 2% of state’s annual consumption? But more importantly, I had no idea how complex and interdependent water issues are regionally, nationally and globally, and that there is no facile solution. Good intentions and seemingly similar goals often push for different solutions - even amongst environmentalists or drill babies - at each other’s throat. Oh and we are in a crisis! That was a lot to chew, and now I need to think. A must read for everyone.
July 1, 2022
Fantastic discussion of the baffling and fascinating issues surrounding the Colorado River. I thought much of this would be a review for me, but was pleased to learn a lot of new facts and tidbits throughout. I'm definitely going to be returning to this in the future when I discuss the Colorado River in my intro to environmental science course.
September 10, 2022
A well written, sobering story of The Colorado River and it’s importance of water in the West. Even though our water status is much dire now than when this book was written,
it explains water laws that make no sense and the history of water diversion in the West.
it explains water laws that make no sense and the history of water diversion in the West.
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