The clock is ticking for Wyoming and other Colorado River Basin states to decide how to split up shrinking water supplies, and some conservationists are reconsidering a centuries-old water distribution tradition at work across the arid American West.
As historian and Member of the Hispanic Conservation Leadership Council Nick Saenz explained, each spring farmers are in a race against time to water crops before snowmelt disappears.
In the tradition known as acequia, decisions are made democratically, and irrigation priorities benefit entire communities over any individual user. Saenz said acequia offers a blueprint for how to share a scarce resource.
"That’s going to require us all working together," said Saenz. "That’s going to require some concessions and some compromise, and trying to envision how as a group we can make decisions about our collective future."
Decades of drought, exacerbated by a warming climate, has greatly reduced water supplies for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River.
And under existing rules, agriculture and other users are already allocated more water than the river can deliver. If Wyoming and other basin states can’t come up with a new plan by October 1 of next year, the federal government would step in.
The headwaters of the Rio Grande, which makes its way south to the U.S.-Mexico border and into the Gulf of Mexico, are in the San Luis Mountains.
Because some Colorado River water is diverted to places such as the Front Range, Saenz said the future of the two rivers are connected.
He noted that farmers across multiple states, and cities like Albuquerque and El Paso all depend on the Rio Grande.
"If we get to a point where we need to be thinking about cutting off some of those trans-basin diversions," said Saenz, "that has implications for the amount of water in the Rio Grande and the life that has been built along that riverway."
Sprawling cities with lawns and golf courses built on arid landscapes are often cited as examples of poor water stewardship.
But alfalfa grown to feed beef livestock, with much of it sold overseas, uses more water than all cities and industries in the entire Colorado River Basin.
Saenz said he believes the acequia tradition gives all stakeholders a pathway to make difficult decisions.
"The acequia model gives us a democratically based mode for determining the outcome of all these water challenges," said Saenz, "a way for thinking about community decision-making around water."