Dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America, the Center supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Agenda-Defining Article on Water in the West
"Measuring the Sustainability of Western Water Systems"
By Jon Christensen, Barton H. "Buzz" Thompson, and David M. Kennedy
Rural Connections, May 2010
An article co-written by the Center's Jon Christensen and David Kennedy together with Barton H. "Buzz" Thompson of the Woods Institute for the Environment and Stanford Law School has been published in the journal Rural Connections. In the article, Christensen, Kennedy and Thompson lay out critical issues for water management in the West, starting with an urgent need to bring those systems into the 21st Century.
"Our water systems in the American West are old-fashioned hybrids. Combinations of natural and engineered systems, they are largely the products of archaic political and institutional structures, some dating back centuries, late nineteenth-century scientific assumptions, and mid-twentieth-century engineering technologies. All of these foundational fixtures of the West’s water system are showing severe signs of obsolescing rapidly."– "Measuring the Sustainability of Western Water Systems"
The authors go on to describe a water management industry that is not prepared to grapple with the challenges of the future, posed by growth, infrastructure breakdown, overuse and the potential effects of global warming.
Few water managers, moreover, are able to think beyond their basins or operate with a regional or watershed-wide mandate. The West’s astonishingly fragmented water management systems – numbering more than 1,100 water districts, as well as hundreds of mutual water companies and other entities – have never been well articulated and are now approaching intolerable incoherence. Entrenched jurisdictional deadlocks chronically frustrate attempts to allocate and manage water efficiently and price it rationally. Everywhere challenges arise from the age-old competition among agricultural and urban users, but also from new threats like aging water infrastructure, soaring population growth, intra-regional population shifts, growing local and global demand for food, unanticipated climate change, and the increasingly compelling claims of aquatic ecosystems.
Policy makers desperately seek new water sources, even as they struggle with inadequate tools for assessing risk and uncertainty, surprising ignorance of one another’s practices, lack of public or even scientific consensus regarding health and safety standards, scant understanding of how to put a value on “natural capital” or “ecosystem services” to balance human and environmental water needs, and virtually no capacity to integrate the management of groundwater and surface water. Few, if any problems are more important to the future of the West than solving this formidable accumulation of water problems.
To read the rest of this article, download the PDF here.
To learn more about our joint program on Water in the West with the Woods Institute for the Environment click here.
