Water in the American West: Bob Crifasi on Its History and Its Future

In episode 151 of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT), Catherine Cooper spoke with Bob Crifasi, author of Western Water, A to Z, about how people in the American West have used and conserved water. What follows summarizes the conversation in our own words.

The episode: "Water Conservation and Use in the Western United States", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

A geologist drawn to rivers

Crifasi's interest began with backpacking, rafting and canoeing in desert canyons. With degrees in geology, chemistry and environmental science, and studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder and Denver, he became fascinated by rivers and geomorphology — and the more he learned, the more he wanted to know about water's many obscure corners.

Why water is existential in the West

East of roughly the hundredth meridian — around central Kansas — rain, rivers and lakes make water relatively easy to get. West of it, rainfall drops sharply, and in places is very low. Without adding water to grow crops, Crifasi says, a society simply can't sustain itself; in the West, getting water almost always means manipulating it.

Layers of know-how

Native Americans were the original experts, with well over 10,000 years of experience. Where there were rivers they built diversions, reservoirs and check dams; they read the land to decide which crops to plant on hillsides and which in valley bottoms to make the most of moisture; and they adapted corn and other crops to the water available.

The Spanish — after Cortés in Mexico and the Coronado expedition of the 1540s — brought irrigation techniques from the Iberian Peninsula, learned from the Moors of North Africa. Their ditches were called acequias, from the Arabic al-sakiya, "water conveyance." In New Mexico they took over and transformed Native ditches and borrowed Native practices of cooperation. Acequia cultures remain important today, especially for small communities in New Mexico, parts of Arizona, southern California and parts of Texas.

Euro-Americans, arriving with the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, learned from Native and Hispanic water systems. That knowledge shaped the California gold rush, Mormon irrigation around Salt Lake, and the ditches of gold miners and farmers on Colorado's Front Range.

A layered landscape

There's a saying that the present is the key to the past; Crifasi likes to turn it around: the past is the key to the present. Earlier generations made rational choices based on how rivers ran, where terraces lay and how streamside land sat. On the Front Range, the first settlers dug ditches in the valley bottoms, where it took the least work. Latecomers had to run ditches up onto the terraces; later still, when mining polluted the water, people piped it from the mountains. Each generation layered new uses on the old, producing a tangled but logical system.

Conservation, then and now

The West is now hitting natural limits as never before. Its rivers and lakes are fully claimed, reservoirs have been built for 150 years, and climate change is cutting the water available. The challenge, Crifasi says, is no longer developing new supplies but reallocating and using existing ones more efficiently.

The meaning of conservation has changed with it. In the early 20th century, conservation meant big dams: Hoover Dam was built as a conservation project, to hold water before it ran downhill and out of the state. Today it means maximizing soil moisture, finding clever ways to reuse water, and even cleaning wastewater for irrigation or, in some cases, household use.

What's still missing

In Western Water, A to Z, Crifasi set out to give Native and Hispanic water cultures the voice many water histories — which tend to begin after the Civil War — had denied them. He would like to see more research on:

• gender — Western water history is told largely through white men, but it was never only theirs;
• environmental justice — wealthy communities tend to get good water and wastewater systems, while poor and racially marginalized communities face more pollution and poorer access;
• African American water use in the West — for example, in farming communities such as Deerfield in eastern Colorado, a subject he found little written about.

Sources

• National Park Service, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training: "Podcast 151: Water Conservation and Use in the Western United States," Preservation Technology Podcast, with Bob Crifasi, hosted by Catherine Cooper. The guest's remarks are summarized here, not quoted.
• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.