A CHALLENGE FOR THE 27th WATER WORKSHOP
George Sibley, Workshop Coordinator
The concept of 'reclamation,' for Western Civilization, began in Europe where
it mostly involved making land fit for cultivation by removing water from it, as
was done for much of The Netherlands, which is about 40 percent below sea level.
For people from those humid climates, and later from the humid eastern part of North
America, the idea of aridity over much of the western half of the continent was so
alien that they simply refused to believe it, until aridity had driven thousands
of homesteaders off the land in Western America.
So the evolution of the idea of reclamation in America began with the realization
that, to make land fit for cultivation, it was necessary to put water on it. This
began primarily as a local agrarian phenomenon: a farmer would lead water out of
a stream to irrigate a piece of bottomland, and other farmers downstream might enlarge
and extend that ditch. Then groups of settlers established ditch companies to bring
water from ever greater distances to irrigate mesas and other uplands that were fertile
but dry. Sometimes these companies bit off a little more than they could chew, and
their projects languished.
The federal Reclamation Service came into being in 1902 in large part as a progressive
effort to encourage the settlement of small farmers on western lands as a deliberate
effort to counter the growing power of ever larger corporations in an urbanizing
and industrializing society, and most of the Service's early projects reflected that,
picking up some troubled projects like the Gunnison Tunnel just downstream from here,
and creating other local projects. This 'agrarian thrust' has remained an important
thread in the weave of western reclamation.
But the urbanizing industrializing society also had needs - rather than spreading
the water out onto the land, more along the lines of concentrating water, energy
and food resources in centers. And by the time the 'Reclamation Service' had become
the 'Bureau of Reclamation', this work also became a federal matter as the Bureau
enlarged its scope to meet those needs, beginning with the boulder Canyon Project
in 1928 that, by the beginning of World War II, had established the regional infrastructure
for the phenomenon of Southern California.
After World War II, it became evident that large-scale reclamation work was also
providing recreational 'byproductrs' for the growing urban masses as well as the
infrastructure for a working society. Many Americans began to look at the remaining
'unreclaimed' West more for its natural qualities than for whatever resources remained
to be developed there, and both protecting and restoring natural systems becamse
the reclamation challenge of the last quarter of the 20th century - in some placed,
like th eGrand Canyon, the Bureau has been challenged to 'reclaim nature' form the
earlier exuberance of reclamation.
The challenge for this Water Workshop is to try to imagine and envision what reclamation
will be in the future of the West. We have learned too much about the consequences
of engineering streams and rivers for a relatively narrow set of human needs and
desires to ever proceed again with the naïve exuberance of the first two-thirds
of the past century. But it seems equally naïve to think that a still-growing
West, whose population grew from around 10 million to 90 million over the century
just past, can step away from the idea of reclamation and 'the engineered environment.
One thing we might all try to take out of this conference is a more comprehensive
and 'evolved' definition of reclamation that truly reflects the challenge of keeping
a society of 90 million westerners healthy without consuming the ecological and aesthetic
attributes that make the West a desirable place to live.