Water planning after the age of infrastructure

From Planetizen, an article on that begins with the early history of the Colorado River, and continues:

” … As the Homestead Act was pushing farmers westward and checkerboarding the uninhabited territories, Powell compiled his experiences exploring the rivers and lands of the western U.S. into a report and presented it to Congress in 1875. He advised an almost complete halt to the settlement of the West, suggesting that the western U.S. wouldn’t be able to support agriculture without extensive irrigation, and that without a more scientifically-based distribution of water rights, any further settlement would lead to devastation. Watersheds, he said, should define the location and extent of land settlement. Congress summarily dismissed his suggestions.

Instead, the country was taken into a century-long binge of engineering projects to command and control the rivers of the Western United States – corralling and contorting wild rivers to meet the needs of the growing west and, in many cases, dictating how and where it would grow.

But those days are over.

“You will never see another federal dam,” U.S. Department of the Interior Deputy Assistant Secretary Deanna Archuleta said at a recent symposium on water and land use in the West, hosted by the Urban Land Institute in partnership with the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Sustainable Sites Initiative, and Ernst & Young. Conspicuously held in Las Vegas, the event drew together a spectrum of developers, policymakers and academics to explore the role of water in the future of development in the arid region. As resources dry up and sustainability issues take a bigger place in the spotlight, many attendees concede that something has to change. … “

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