"We thought we could engineer nature… huge mistake," the general manager of the Colorado River District says
I think one big difference is that it all happens on a much smaller scale in a much more densely populated country. What happens 'upstream' outside of the borders of NL could well have massive effect.
For example: https://www.vnsc.eu/over-de-vnsc/scheldeverdragen-en-memoran...
The two big problems with the management of the Colorado River water are big disincentives not to lose legal water rights, resulting in farmers growing water-hungry crops in the desert just to preserve those rights; and water allocations that were larger than even optimistic Colorado River flow rates during a very wet season in the 1930s. In order to preserve the river basin and reservoirs, both of those issues have to be addressed, concurrently, and there are a lot of stakeholders that are going to be very angry about whatever solution is proposed to them (or imposed on them very soon, out of necessity, to keep the lights on.)
In the Mid West USA the requirement for civilised behaviour (listening to reason, getting along with your neighbours, compromise) was much less.
There are groups experimenting with reestablishing beavers on tributaries of the Columbia river, with positive results. We really need to be doing these on the upper reaches of the Colorado.
As someone living in the West, we have another reason to dislike dams: loss of salmon breeding grounds.
There are technology available to alleviate this problem. Not easy, but solvable
So yes, keeping water in the system longer doesn’t magically increase the rate you can draw it down… unless it does.
We're gonna have to do a lot more engineering of SOME sort soon.
I think that the manager was speaking specifically about the Central Arizona Project, in the context that the negative impact of the project was already predicted.
"We thought we'd had smarter officials in place." - me
How many people would the river basin have supported without damming and irrigation? Far fewer than 40M. In other words, the engineers clearly engineered nature and made it much more hospitable to human life in the arid West.
Sounds like they might have overshot and can't meet tomorrow's demand, but even so, the status quo is certainly far superior to an un-engineered Colorado River Basin.
Making an uninhabitable area, habitable, at the cost of a total destruction of natural resources does not seem like its "far superior".
Do you justify things in terms of human life? Conversely, is your standard that nature should be left untouched?
As for me, I would say that flooding the valleys that are now Lake Mead and Lake Powell, enabling tens of millions of people to live, is worth far more than whichever critters and plants were displaced.
Besides, the issue here is not "total destruction" it is over-allocation. We have not destroyed the Colorado River. Rather, it seems like we just have too much demand for its supply. Did I misread that?
> Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.
That quote is oft-posted, and cliche at this point, but it has a ring of truth to it. Life in an area that cannot sustain in long term (1000+ years?), in balance with nature, is not really life but an exploitation of the environment for short term gain. Why? Because what happens when, in your own (terribly chosen, btw) words, we run out of supply? What happens to those people? Do they die? or do they move on, like locusts, elsewhere? What's the endgame there?
Good managers are honest about their ability to address a problem given the tools at their disposal.