Along the Colorado River’s delta
John Trotter
By exploring what remains of the Colorado River’s delta in northern Mexico I am trying to show what and who have been sacrificed for the dream civilization built in the Western United States with its water – a world of sprawling cities, championship golf courses and cheap produce.
The writer Wallace Stegner once called the arid American West our “Geography of Hope.” Its vast skies and towering mountains promise a future of limitless opportunity. But at what cost have we watered this living mythology? We have compelled a once wild, red, living force – the Colorado River, old enough to have carved the Grand Canyon – to nourish our imprint of the urban/industrial landscapes of Europe and the East on a land of little rain. The Colorado River presently supports over 30 million people in the United States alone. Without it, civilization as we know it in the West would vanish.
El Delta del Rio Colorado, as it is called in Mexico, once spread across 850,000 fertile hectares above the river’s mouth at the Gulf of California. Tule marshes rippled with schools of fish and migrating waterfowl darkened the sky above them. For perhaps one thousand years the Cucapa tribe, whose name for themselves means “people of the river,” (“gente del rio”) hunted, fished and farmed in this paradise, where only two inches of rain fall annually. They were as many as 20,000 and famously friendly when the Spanish arrived in 1539.
Preview
With the construction of Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, Nevada in 1935 that world changed forever. As the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation turned the river into a commodious, regulated plumbing system north of the border, the Delta shrank by 90 percent. Any water from the Colorado remaining after being used for irrigation in the U.S. reentered the river laden with fertilizers, pesticides and salt leached from soil that had once been covered by an ancient sea. Tamarisk, a salt-tolerant, invasive plant brought from Asia as a windbreak and bank stabilizer, swept down the river, each plant capable of producing up to half a million windblown seeds per year. Native cottonwood, willow and mesquite trees were crowded out by its thirsty root system, completely altering the riparian ecology. Fish and bird species vanished. Vast wetlands became empty, salt-encrusted baldios. While Lake Powell filled behind the controversial Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960’s and ‘70’s the river no longer reached the Gulf.
Paralleling the rapid disappearance of the Colorado itself, “the people of the river” now number less than three hundred in Mexico. Allowed only limited fishing rights along the artery that had formed them, the Cucapas are no longer self-sustaining and languish in a desiccated community along a two-lane highway speeding tourists to resorts farther down the Baja California peninsula. They often must fetch water from the polluted river by pickup truck. Like many others in the Mexican Delta, they await a more equitable division of the Rio Colorado. No agua, no vida, they say. No water, no life.
On January 1, after a long political battle, the Bureau of Reclamation cut California off from almost one quarter of the Colorado water it uses annually. Yet, California and the six other states fighting for river water keep growing. The pressure on the river is enormous. This is a story about consequences: Man versus nature, rich versus poor. It is a story about perception and about whose right it is to define what the river itself means.