Part 3 (1/2)
Visitors can walk across the barrage atop a wide, concrete bridge and gaze down at its nine steel gates, each a hundred feet wide and weighing seventy tons. When rains pound Singapore during low tide, the gates are lowered to release excess water from the reservoir into the sea. When the monsoons. .h.i.t at high tide, the gates stay closed and seven drainage pumps push the water out. Designed for the sinking Netherlands, the super-sized pumps can displace 75,000 gallons of water a second.
The barrage is creating Singaporeas fifteenth reservoir, the first inside the city center. Combined with two more reservoirs now under construction, it will help increase the nationas water-catchment areas from one-half of the island to two-thirds. The Marina Barrage has also brought kayaking, dragon boating, and many other public events back to the mouth of the Singapore River. But, kind of like those kids at Americaas largest water park, kayakers at the barrage donat have to fret over waves or even tidesa”PUBas water controls eliminate them. They donat have to worry much about wildlife, either. The freshwater reservoir is replacing the tidal estuary. Scientists from the National University of Singapore found some thirty fishes that will no longer be able to breed as a result of the barrage, including snapper, Asian sea ba.s.s, and Indo-Pacific tarpon.39 While barrage construction was under way, they also built the islandas first desalination plant, which wrings thirty million gallons of freshwater each day from the sea. PUB officials consider other countriesa desalination wasteful abecause you treat it at great expense, use it once, and return it to the sea,a says Harry Seah. aBut if you are recycling, it can make sense.a40 Indeed, at half the cost of desalination, PUB officials have put their faith primarily in NEWater. They recently unveiled the nationas fifth NEWater plant, bringing the islandas capacity to more than a hundred million gallons a day. Thatas about a third of Singaporeas daily water demand.41 Finally, to capture the main ingredient for all those NEWater plants, Singapore is building a sewage superhighway deep underground. The so-called deep-tunnel sewerage system, 200 feet below the islandas surface, is part of the largest wastewater-treatment project in the history of the world. A ma.s.sive tunnel, larger than those that carry Singaporeas subway trainsa”20 feet in diameter compared with the 19-foot-wide train tunnelsa”runs under the island below the trains.42 This tunnel and a second one planned for the future will replace smaller pipelines, pumping stations, and reclamation plants across the island to free up precious land for other projects. Gravity pulls used water from homes and industries, concentrated in the northern and eastern part of Singapore, through the tunnels and into giant, centralized water-reclamation plants on each end of the island. The first, Changi, at the east side, can treat 176 million gallons of wastewater a day. (Singapore built its fifth NEWater plant on Changias roof.) In the future, PUB plans another such plant on the west side of the island. The scheme allows aevery drop of used water to be collected, treated, and further purified into NEWater,a says Yong Wei Hin, a.s.sistant director of the Changi plant.43 By the last decades of the twentieth century, Singapore was broadly recognized as having the most advanced water-supply technology in the world. But as it turns out, the nation had gotten almost too good at providing water. PUB officials began to notice an unintended irony: water had become so accessible, and its protection and production so invisible, that people were taking it for granteda”at least by Singaporean standards.
Per capita water consumption grew steadily in Singapore during the 1970s, the 1980s, and especially the 1990s. Elaborate aSave Watera campaigns in each of those decades didnat make a drop of difference. Nor did a water-conservation tax in the 1990s that charged more to Singaporeans who used more.44 Ultimately, one strategy has worked best to lower consumption, says Seah and others. The government set out to instill a water ethic in citizens. PUB officials say the effort to build a personal connection to water has spurred more conservation than either publicity campaigns or price incentives. Since the mid-1990s, per capita consumption has declined steadily from nearly fifty gallons a person to forty gallons a person in 2010. The governmentas goal is to hit thirty-six gallons a person by 2030.45 The strategy to abring people closer to water so that they can better appreciate and cherish this precious resourcea was much more than public relations.46 The most ambitious piece was making the Marina Barrage a waterfront public attraction. It is a very successful one, judging by the hordes of children in bathing suits running, jumping, and laughing in its fountain park on a recent hot day. Aside from fountains, sculptures, and gardens, Marina Barrage has a two-story, circular visitor center shaped like a seash.e.l.l. The center houses the pumping station behind gla.s.s walls, a popular Chinese restaurant called the 7th Storey, and the Sustainable Singapore Gallery, with artwork and hands-on exhibits meant to educate the public on environmental and especially water issues. Its roof is a gra.s.s play area as big as four football fields, where families picnic and fly colorful kites.
At both the Sustainable Singapore Gallery and the NEWater Factory, hands-on displays are high tech, flashy, and interactive, designed to appeal to young Singaporeansa love for technology. Uniformed schoolchildren wind through the exhibits, many of them filling out cla.s.sroom a.s.signments. PUB works closely with both public and private schools on water curriculum. Beginning in kindergarten, kids learn all about Singaporeas afour national tapsa: the imports from Malaysia, NEWater, desalinated water, and the increasingly important idea of local catchment areas. aWeare not asking them to name every reservoir and the average annual rainfall,a says PUBas Linda Dorothy de Mello. aWe just want them to make the connection.a47 The most direct new connection between Singaporeans and their water is the one that gets them weta”the kayaking at the Marina Barrage, the public park back at Bedok Reservoir and similar projects under way all over the island.
At a public housing neighborhood called Kolam Ayer, nondescript high-rise apartments once overlooked a drab, razor-straight ca.n.a.l. Today, the waterway has been restored with trees and aquatic plants on its banks and a river walk with floating decks and hands-on projects for neighborhood kids. A toddler yanks a giant Archimedes screw meant to teach children an ancient method of moving water. An elderly man enjoys two hobbies at once: as he fishes with a cane pole at the edge of the ca.n.a.l, his songbird hangs in a willow behind him, silent in a tiny, teak cage.
Living in their small, high-rise apartments, well cared for by a government that has convinced them to drink recycled water and celebrate how skillfully their nation captures every drop, the Singaporean people may seem like those songbirds in their lacquered cages. The birds have benevolent caretakers, clean water in hand-painted bowls, beautiful venues for singing.
But itas not quite how youad want to live, if you were a songbird.
Water officials in Singapore like to say theyave closed the water loop: Every river is dammed, with significant impact to fish and other wildlife. Every bit of water is collected, whether rainfall or sewage. Seawater and wastewater alike are squeezed into freshwater.
Singaporeans had no choice but to close the loop. They live on a tiny island with hardly any freshwater supply. They fear reliance on a political rival for their lifeblood. In the United States, this is not the case. Weare blessed with more than 250,000 riversa”3.5 million miles of them. The longest, the Missouri, flows for a stunning 2,500 miles. The largest, the Mississippi, at its mouth gushes 593,000 cubic feet per second.48 Weave got the largest single source of fresh surface water on the planet, the Great Lakes, which hold a fifth of the worldas supply.49 Another 60,000 trillion gallons or so course underground in aquifers, recharging to the tune of about a trillion gallons a day.50 Singaporeans deserve global admiration for the breathtaking turnaround of their economy in just one generation. They deserve deep respect for giving every person in the country access to clean water and sanitation. And they deserve credit for becoming the worldas ultimate water conservationists, reusing every drop on their tiny island.
Some American communities have so overtapped their natural supply that theyare being forced to do the same. But for those that still have options, the best one happens to be the easiest and the cheapest: keeping as much water as possible in natural systemsa”rivers, lakes, and streamsa”and valuing every drop like the treasure that it is.
Singaporeas water lesson is not NEWater, the barrage, or the other technological breakthroughs piling up engineering awards from the United States and other parts of the world. The crucial lesson is that the island nation managed to build an ethic among a citizenry that had stopped caring about water.
Most Americans want to see wild rivers. We want to put up rain barrels and keep chickens in the backyarda”or at least have the right to do so. We donat want to see the raising of pigs and ducks phased out completely. We donat want to be fined for forgetting to flush the toilet. We donat want to be told not to chew gum.
We have the engineering prowess to harness every river. We have the technology to wrest freshwater molecules from sewage. In fact, the semipermeable membranes central to the first step of NEWater come from Pennsylvania-based GE Water and Process Technologies. Continuing to build our way to water supply will certainly enrich the contractors who land the projects. It will further empower our water bureaucracies la Singapore, where no one is allowed a cistern because water managers must capture every drop of rain.
But if we took better care of our abundant water resources, and if we used them wisely, we wouldnat have to.
Chapter 8. The Big Dipper.
If the notoriety of a public figure may be measured by the number, range, and sheer juiciness of nicknames bestowed, then Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority for more than two decades, is the most notorious water manager in America.
The New York Times calls her the Vegas Water Czar.1 Her local newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun, anoints her the Chosen One.2 Following that biblical theme, the trustworthy WaterWired blog, produced in Oregon, calls her Mosesa”but actually, itas in honor of Robert Moses, the power broker of New York City who bullied through bridges, tunnels, and parkways in the mid-twentieth century, wiping out urban neighborhoods to shape the modern suburbs.3 Inevitably, s.e.xist monikers cling to a woman in power. Mulroy is reviled as the Water Witch of the West.4 Iave heard her called the Water Czarina, the Alpha Female, and this twist: the Alpha Female with Cojones.
In her Las Vegas home, Mulroy also picked up the nickname Scarlett. Water journalist Emily Green describes this comparison with the aruthless, scheming, tough, histrionic, and beautifula heroine in Gone with the Wind who cries, aAs G.o.d as my witness, I will never be hungry again!a5 Mulroyas job is to make sure Las Vegas, the driest city in the driest state in the nation, will never, ever be thirsty. The reason sheas racked up so many nicknames is because sheas very, very good at it.
No member of Americaas water-industrial complex thinks bigger than Patricia Mulroy. She wears ambition like the signature turned-up collars on her blouses; she has since her twenties, when as an a.s.sistant administrator in Clark County government, she helped fend off annexation of the lucrative Las Vegas Strip by city government. Mentally quick and physically fit, she bounded up the local-government ladder. In less than ten years, she was running the Las Vegas Valley Water District as deputy general manager. Her determination did not go unnoticed by the water-loving Strip. When the water districtas top position opened up, the wizards of illusion who make fountains dance in the desert pushed Mulroy in preference to an archetypal water-management candidate, a former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and a.s.sistant secretary of the interior who was looking to come home to Nevada.6 Las Vegas didnat want a water manager steeped in arcane western water law, accepting of the historic compact that gives Nevada the least water of all the seven states that share the Colorado River. When the river was divvied up in 1922, southern Nevada was nearly deserted; the entire state received 4 percent of the Colorado allocation.7 In the 1990s, Las Vegas became the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country.8 It fancied itself the glittering symbol of the New West. It wanted new ways to find new water.
Mulroy got off to a promising start. She began by taking on the fountaineers themselves. She convinced Steve Wynna”the Stripas best-known resort developer, the conjurer of flamboyant public water shows at the Mirage, the Bellagio, and Treasure Islanda”that he and fellow casino developers would recycle the water in their ch.o.r.eographed fountains, or lose them. She also began to help residents reduce what was then a 350-gallon-a-day water habit, targeting their irrigation of subtropical lawns in the Mojave Desert.9 But Mulroyas job was, and remains, to secure more water so the city can continue growing residents, real estate, and resorts. The new position gave her control over just one of seven rival water companies that serve southern Nevadaas Las Vegas Basin. Almost immediately, she began to work on the other six, trying to convince them to pool their water under a new mega-agency. Her argument: having tapped out Nevadaas original allocation of the Colorado, Vegas must become a bigger player to land more water. By combining resources, the water purveyors could develop regional supplies. They also might be able to win more clout at the negotiating table with the other states vying for water from the Colorado.10 Less than a year into the new job, Mulroy made one of the biggest urban water grabs in western U.S. history. After quietly prospecting to figure out how much groundwater could be pumped up from the rest of Nevada to serve Las Vegas Valley, Mulroyas district filed applications for all the unclaimed groundwater in about half the state. Her local rivals liked what they saw. They agreed to merge into Mulroyas mega-agency. After just three years as head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she was also named general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.11 Ranchers and residents of the rural counties where Vegas made its claim for every last drop of groundwater were furious. They saw Mulroy as aforeclosinga on their future, by tying up all the available water rights in the four huge counties. Their battle cry became aRemember the Owens Valley!a12 The Owens, just east of the Sierra Nevada in California, was once fertile home to orchards, farms, and ranches, but it dried to a near dust bowl after William Mulholland, chief of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power at the turn of the twentieth century, carried out a quiet plan to acquire Owens water and send it by aqueduct 235 miles to LA. The shadowy deal was fictionalized in the 1974 film Chinatown, with a character based on Mulholland named Hollis Mulwray.
In 1992, when the late environmental writer Marc Reisner updated his cla.s.sic book on western water, Cadillac Desert, head recently come across the aforcefula Patricia Mulroy, and he wrote about her in the promising context of urban water alliances taking shape in the New West. But in either a Freudian slip or a sly nod to her potential, Reisner referred to her as Patricia Mulwray, using the last name of the Chinatown character.
The new nickname may turn out to be the most apt of them all. For the woman who definitely had the cojones to forge a bold, new path for water in the New West instead has become the nationas most ardent champion of the old.
Mulroy has indeed helped redirect the flow of Colorado River water for the good of her city. Sheas prevailed in her argument that Las Vegas, with its $60 billion economic output, is at least as valuable as the 400 farms in Californiaas Imperial Valley that were getting as much Colorado River water as all of Nevada and Arizona combined.13 In 2001, Mulroy negotiated water-banking agreements with Arizona and California that let Nevada pay to store water in those states, then pull extra from Lake Mead. In 2007, when the Colorado River Basin states agreed to a new pact for how the river should be divvied when it runs low, they also let Mulroyas agency build a $172 million reservoir in California to store any Colorado River water unclaimed by U.S. agricultural users (say, in case it rains and the farmers donat need it) to keep it from flowing to Mexico. Again, the deal lets Nevada withdraw more than its meager allocation from the Colorado.14 (Mexico is allocated 1.5 million acre-feet of the Colorado under a 1944 treaty with the United States in which Mexico agreed to send water the other direction from six tributaries that feed into the Rio Grande. Mulroy also has proposed funding desalination plants for Mexico in exchange for some of the countryas allocation.) And despite her crusade for freshwater sources, Mulroy has declared war on waste. Sheas championed water-wise housing developments and landscaping. She started a cash-for-gra.s.s program that pays homeowners $1.50 a square foot to tear out their lawns. That and other initiatives helped Las Vegas pinch off 20 percent of its water use between 2001 and 2008, even as the metropolitan area added 482,000 new residents in those years to reach the milestone of two million in population.15 aThe future, foundational ethic of water agencies has to be weaning the community of wasteful water use,a says Mulroy. aSome of this is easya”weare not asking you to carry your urn to Lake Mead. Weare talking about, if youare going to live in the desert, live as if itas a desert, not with Kentucky bluegra.s.s.a16 But in some ways, Las Vegas has made water too easy. Despite rate increases during Mulroyas tenure, Las Vegas families still enjoy some of the lowest water prices in the nation. An a.n.a.lysis by the water-reporting consortium Circle of Blue in 2010 found that a family of four in the water-scarce city has an average $32.93 monthly water bill, while a family using the same amount must sh.e.l.l out $72.95 a month in Atlanta, which receives ten times Vegasas rainfall.17 When I interviewed Mulroy in fall 2010, Las Vegas residents could still water their lawns with this inexpensive water three times a week.
This disconnect between cost and scarcity is part of the problem with the ma.s.sive groundwater project to tap the aquifers beneath the Great Basin of eastern Nevada, which would pull water from under the rural Nevada counties as well as some in western Utah. Itas not that rural Nevadans or next-door neighbors in Utah donat recognize the need to share the regionas most important resource. But they donat want to see it siphoned to keep water cheap in Las Vegas at the expense of their own economy and ecosystems.
Mulroy argues that the Southern Nevada Water Authority has a legal right to tap water that belongs to Nevada. But say the groundwater project makes it through the courts. The country is full of water projects and compacts that were perfectly legala”or made so by state legislatures or Congressa”but one hardly needs to query Ask the Ethicist to figure out if they were right.
In his book Escaping Platoas Cave, the four-decade a.s.sociated Press correspondent Mort Rosenblum writes about the pathetic remnants of native villages in California and Mexico that once thrived on the banks of the Colorado River near where it flowed into the Sea of Cortez. In the early 1960s, the Colorado River treaty left Mexico with so little water that the riveras lush delta ecosystem shrank to a lifeless, salt-flat wasteland.18 In the community of Al Mayor in Baja California, a Cucapa Indian chief told Rosenblum, aOur river is gone. No more fis.h.i.+ng. Trees are dead. No one plants. The wells are dry.a The villagers can use the riveras salty trickle for was.h.i.+ng. But for drinking and cooking, they are forced to buy their water in 5-gallon jugs from a traveling water salesman.19 It was not until 1974 that the United States agreed to include water quality in its promise of Colorado River water to Mexico.
Local leaders in Utah worry that southern Nevadaas pipeline will prevent them from growing in the way their communities envision.20 Scientists who study Snake Valley, at the Nevada-Utah border, speculate that the project could dry up desert vegetation, not only wiping out wildlife habitat but also creating dust storms to rival those of the 1930s.21 History bears out the need to listen carefully to these warnings, and come up with a new, ethical framework for moving water around U.S. regions. But Mulroy doesnat see it. Even as she fas.h.i.+ons herself the new, green water manager for the twenty-first century, challenging the conservative mind-set of the men who divvied up the Colorado River, sheas dreaming of a bigger water grab than those guys ever imagined.22 In 2009, as Congress debated the nearly $800 billion federal stimulus bill, Mulroy served up her most audacious suggestion for how to spend the money: if the federal government really wanted to pump up job growth and stimulate the economy, she suggested, perhaps it should consider the largest water-diversion project in American history. What if the nation decided to capture floodwater from the Mississippi River and use it to recharge the ma.s.sive aquifer being sucked dry underneath Americaas Great Plains?23 Mississippi floods are a menace. Meanwhile, to the west, weare depleting the High Plains Aquifer. Could the problems cancel each other out?
Mulroy envisions a scheme that would dwarf the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams, take a decade or more to build, create tens of thousands of jobs, and inject billions of dollars into the economy. Engineering firms CH2M Hill and Black & Veatch floated the idea as part of a nothing-off-the-table contract with the Southern Nevada Water Authority as drought sunk the level in Lake Mead. In their 2008 report, the firms looked at all sorts of options for bolstering the flow of water in the Colorado River. They included building a pipeline from the Columbia River on the border of Was.h.i.+ngton and Oregon, even s.h.i.+pping water down from Alaska. But the Mississippi plan is the one that sparked Mulroyas imagination.24 In public appearances and in interviews, she often seems to be working on the argument. She points out that athe West is growing dryer and the East is growing wettera under the specter of climate change.
s.h.i.+pping water from the wetter eastern United States to quench the arid West is not a new concept. In the 1960s, Texas politicians hatched the outsized Texas Water Plan to capture Mississippi River water and replenish their overtapped plains.25 In the 1970s, Congress authorized a $6 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study on the feasibility of transporting water west to the High Plains.26 In the early 1980s, Jonathan Bulkley, a former water-policy professor of mine at the University of Michigan, conducted the last serious study of the question, to show how much it would cost to connect the Great Lakes to the Missouri to move water to the High Plains. The Rocky Mountains are the roadblock. Transporting water around, through, or over them makes moving water from the eastern to the western half of the country ma.s.sively expensive, Bulkley says. He couldnat see the taxpayers going for it. Building the infrastructure only as far as South Dakota, he found, would cost $20 billion (in 1982 dollars). That doesnat include the energy costs to hoist the water up and pump it hundreds of miles west, which he calculated at another $7 billion.27 But, like a bottled-water genius on Madison Avenue, Mulroy has taken a water project long considered flat and has carbonated and sweetened it to appeal to a new generation. Mississippi water could refill the High Plains Aquifer as the first in a chain of infrastructure projects and exchanges from east to west. Suburbanites in Denver and farmers across the eastern flank of the Rockies could then tap into the Mississippi water, relinquis.h.i.+ng Colorado River water they now pump across the Continental Divide. That would leave more water in the Coloradoa”and more for Las Vegas.28 Las Vegas has invested deeply in conservation under Mulroy, who paid her customers more than $100 million to remove gra.s.s and replace it with desert vegetation. Still, the arid oasis lives so far beyond its water means that it also comes up flat in the search for a water ethic for America.
I wanted to find a more holistic way of thinking about the ethica”beyond using less on our lawns and in our fountains, toward a shared respect for water, ecosystems, and people. I consulted a spectrum of philosophical readings, many of them conflicting. They ranged from eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who famously believed that nature held no moral standing at all, to Albert Schweitzer and his beautiful areverence for lifea ideas.29 I found academic tomes that tackled the promise of a water ethic, but so densely that the average person would no more read them than Newtonas Principia. But perhaps, with some 85 percent of Americans identifying with a religious faitha”nearly 80 percent with a Christian denomination30a”I could find some common ground for a water ethic in the Bible and other religious texts.
The arid deserts of the Middle East, birthplace of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, gave water utmost importance in the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah.31 Like the flood myths, the theme of water as giver of life and cleanser of sin repeats again and again. The Quran considers water the most precious creation after humankind.32 In the Torah and in the Bibleas Old Testament, the world is created from water, which symbolizes the primordial ocean from where all life flows.33 The Bible mentions water more than any other element, and G.o.das care for people is often revealed with the gift of water. aHe watereth the hills from his chambers,a says Psalm 104. aThe earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works.a34 Outside the desert of the Israelites, there was an obvious place to look for Christian views on water: the U.S. Bible Belta”specifically, the section where water has become most famously linked to prayer, Atlanta, Georgia. Most eastern cities sit atop ma.s.sive aquifers that supply groundwater to urbanites, or theyare close to major surface-water supplies such as lakes. Atlanta is not one of them. The Chattahoochee River, or the Hooch, as it is affectionately known by locals, is the smallest river in the nation to supply water to a major metro area. More than five million people in and around Atlanta rely on the Chattahoocheeas Lake Sidney Lanier for all their water needs.
Lake Lanier is actually a reservoir, created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s as it dammed the Chattahoochee. The real Sidney Lanier, a Georgia-born poet who wrote lyrically of the Chattahoocheeas rapids, likely would have been appalled by the impoundmentas christening. The river can no longer ahurry amain to reach the plain,a as Lanier wrote in his 1877 poem aSong of the Chattahoochee.a35 It is stretched too thin by Atlantaas lawn irrigation (the cityas biggest residential water use), toilet flus.h.i.+ng (the second biggest), and other household water demandsa”not to mention fourteen dams, sixteen power plants, and countless industrial draws, including the Hooch-filled bottles of Dasani that roll off Coca-Colaas production line in Marietta.36 Downstream, the Chattahoochee also brings life to south Georgia, as well as Alabama and Florida, where its basin helps irrigate 780,000 acres of corn, cotton, peanut, and other crops each year. In Floridaas Panhandle, the Hooch joins another Georgia river, the Flint, to become the powerful Apalachicola, which carries sixteen billion gallons of freshwater a day to the Gulf of Mexico, there creating one of the last unspoiled brackish bays in the Southeast.
During a devastating drought in 1988, federal environmental officials declared Apalachicola Bay a disaster area when diminished Chattahoochee flow killed the bayas nationally known oyster harvesta”the mainstay of the local economy. But the Corps of Engineersas allegiance stuck with Atlanta sprinklers rather than Apalachicola sh.e.l.lfish. In 1989, the Corps came up with a new dam-and-reservoir plan to harness even more of the Chattahoochee in dry times. A year later, Alabama, worried that a dwindled flow would hamper the stateas ability to grow and develop, filed a lawsuit to stop the dam. Florida joined the suit, arguing that further upstream withdrawals would destroy Apalachicola Bay and the regionas signature seafood industry.
Those were the opening jabs in a water fight that has slogged on for twenty years. In 1998, Congress pa.s.sed a celebrated truce: a water compact for the three states. But tristate officials failed so miserably in negotiating the compacta”they missed fourteen deadlinesa”that it was terminated five years later. The fight then moved on to courthouses in Birmingham, Jacksonville, Atlanta, and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The lawyers fared no better than the politicians in figuring out how to share the Hooch. But in just the past decade, theyave managed to bill the statesa taxpayers more than $30 million in legal fees.37 This is the problem with Americaas water wars, be they among cities, regions, or states: the conflicts put each combatant in the defensive mode of figuring out how to get more and more water, rather than working together to use less. They cost citizens millions of dollars in legal fees without the first drop of anewa water. And they take attention away from whatas really important: working to keep as much water as possible in stream, and learning to live within our water means.