Water Conservation and Use in the Western United States

Catherine Coopers speaks with Bob Crifasi about cultural and technological approaches to water conservation and use in the Western United States.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with ... Bob Crifasi: Bob Crifasi. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. Bob Crifasi: Yes, thanks for having me. Catherine Cooper: What first interested you about water in the West? Bob Crifasi: I've always been interested in doing things like backpacking and rafting and canoeing. Ever since I started visiting various desert canyons many years ago, I just became fascinated by it. I also have undergraduate degrees in geology and chemistry and masters degrees in geology and environmental science. One of the things as part of all of that is I became really interested in geomorphology, and really geology is what brought me out to the West so that I could learn about and see things. I went to school at University of Colorado in Boulder and Denver and started traveling all across the region and became very interested in rivers, geomorphology, everything that's associated with that. And the more I learned, the more interested in all of the different arcane aspects of water I became. Catherine Cooper: In the Western United States water is so crucially important. Could you describe that importance to the various cultures in the West and how people approach water differently? Bob Crifasi: Well, the first thing I'd have to say is that in the Western states, water is existential. We need it for everything. Really, our basic survival for any human requires water. In the West, it's another level because you can't necessarily obtain water without manipulating it in some fashion. In the Eastern states, wetter regions, there's ample rainfall, there's rivers, there's lakes that provide relatively easy access to water. Once we pass what's roughly the hundredth meridian, so Central Kansas and going West, the amount of natural rainfall drops pretty substantially, and in certain regions it's very low. Without having supplemental water or adding water to irrigate and grow crops, you just don't have a society or have any ability to have a viable culture. You really need to have water. The Native Americans are really the original savants with using water in the West. They had so many remarkable adaptations to live in this area. In the rainier areas where there were rivers, they built diversions. They started to build reservoirs, check dams. They had remarkable innovations for utilizing the entire landscape for accessing and manipulating water. They would carefully look at the landscape to see which plants should be planted where on the hillsides and in the valley bottoms to take the best advantage of the moisture. And so they were really were some of the original people, with well over 10,000 years of experience, changing and manipulating water. Not only that, but they adapted their plants, corn, and other crops to the water resources that were available to them. They were really integral in paving the way for anyone who came later as to how you use the water. The Spanish came in first in Mexico with Cortes, but then they had the Coronado expedition that came up for conquest in 1540s. And then the Spaniards settled. They brought some irrigation technologies from the Iberian Peninsula, and they started to build ditches that they called acequias. The word acequia itself comes from the Arabic al-sakiya, which means water conveyance. And so they had learned from the Moors of North Africa, also desert people, how to manage water in dry regions. Once the Spaniards were in New Mexico, they watched how the indigenous people were using their water, and their water systems merged in many ways with the pre-existing Indian cultures. They appropriated and took for themselves the Indian ditches and then transformed them. They used some of the processes of cooperation that they saw the