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Article Excerpt
Perhaps nowhere in the United States has climate and water resource interaction been more closely observed than in the U.S. Southwest (see, e.g., Austin 1988; Worster 1985; Reisner 1993; Sheridan 2001), and with good reason. Overall, semiarid to arid conditions predominate. These conditions, together with wide variability in temperature and precipitation over time and space, challenge even the most earnest human efforts to sustain livelihoods and communities. Scientific studies and popular literature alike reflect recurrent episodes of overexploitation of natural resources due to inadequate recognition or acceptance of environmental limits such as water availability.
Accretion of local knowledge and experience provides a mechanism for anticipating and adapting to the vicissitudes of variability and change. However, factors such as reliance on faulty heuristics (Nicholls 1999), occurrence of events falling outside the range of local memory, policies that restrict decision options, and narrow focus on immediate economic returns can render such knowledge ineffective at best and destructive at worst. Science-based knowledge and predictive capabilities provide avenues for improving decision processes in the face of interacting environmental and societal stresses. To be accepted and used appropriately, such knowledge needs to be franked in ways that mesh well with local values and practices. Environmental histories that create a contextual account of embedded experience, values, and practices provide insights useful to this task.
Recent extended dry conditions in the U.S. Southwest have prompted efforts by researchers and forecasters to develop climate information products useful at local and regional scales for addressing drought impacts. This paper provides an environmental history of climate and water resource management for the Upper Little Colorado watershed in northeastern Arizona, with a focus on the hundred years between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The study, funded through the NOAA-funded Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) project, provides insight into the experiences, values, knowledge, and practices that have produced conditions existing today. This type of contextual information, if integrated into development of plans, decision processes, and decision tools, holds promise for improving citizens' acceptance of and support for policies aimed at ensuring the sustainability of the watershed's closely coupled human and natural systems.
Based on established historiographic methods, this study aims specifically to uncover how communities and individuals in the watershed have developed and managed water resources in the context of climate variability, especially drought. We present a brief discussion of the precolonial land- and resource-use patterns, and then examine patterns, practices, and events of the past two hundred years. Though we briefly discuss contemporary conditions and trends, we focus on the period between roughly 1850 and 1950. This time period represents early settlement and resource exploitation practices, the more extensive Mormon colonization period of the late nineteenth century, and significant changes that occurred in the ensuing decades. Our analysis considers local experience as well as how local entities have negotiated water shortages in the evolving context of state and national laws and institutions.
As discussed in more detail later, Mormon settlement and agrarian practices are especially important to consider in examining conditions in the watershed today. These first Anglo-American settlements profoundly affected subsequent patterns of population distribution and resource use. The period of population expansion following initial Mormon settlement taxed the water resources available within the basin, and prompted development of local knowledge as well as adoption of successive technologies to address water scarcity problems. Cultural values that emphasized agrarian lifestyles' even while acknowledging that the region was far better suited for animal husbandry and grazing than for farming, strongly influenced the choice of strategies for coping with water resource challenges. Rather than adapting to grazing lifestyles typical of arid areas, residents built dams and introduced groundwater pumping as strategies for supporting crop cultivation. This approach still prevails today.
Post-World War II introduction of mining operations and power-generation facilities into the watershed, combined with rapid growth in tourism and recreation, compounded the stresses on water resources in the basin. By the late twentieth century, water demand throughout the basin combined with recurrent drought led to rising concerns about climate vulnerability. While recognition of local authority over water development and use persists, momentum has grown for introducing institutional mechanisms at the state and federal levels to increase adaptive capacity. Provision of scientific information about climate, hydrology, and resource management and promotion of structured planning processes are among the most prominent contemporary efforts to improve decision making at the watershed and local levels in the U.S. Southwest. In the process, the region's environmental history will be influenced as well.
THE LITTLE COLORADO RIVER BASIN: A CASE STUDY
The evolution of economic, social, and cultural structures and dynamics in the Upper Little Colorado watershed reflects processes unfolding throughout the western United States. Occupied by indigenous peoples when the Spanish explorers first arrived in the early 1600s, southwestern landscapes and livelihoods were significantly transformed by Spanish introduction of livestock grazing and development of towns beginning in the mid-1600s, followed by expansion of farming activities with the arrival of Anglo-American settlers beginning in the mid-1800s and increasing after the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865. Mormons wrought some of the most influential landscape transformations during this era through their extensive efforts to establish farms across the region, wherever growing seasons were long enough and sufficient water was available. The arrival of railroad lines in the late 1800s produced another round of profound socioeconomic changes across the larger region, prompting rapid expansion of livestock herds, introduction of mining operations, and decimation of forests to provide energy for early mining and industrial needs. Cities such as Denver and Phoenix grew rapidly, especially at the end of World War II when families across the nation began moving westward in search of better lives. The growth of these urban areas, together with increased interest across a broad range of the U.S. population in natural-area tourism and recreation, introduced a new dynamic to rural areas: temporary--and often large--influxes of people during the prime months of summer (for hiking, fishing, etc.) and winter (for skiing and other winter sports), as well as growth in the number of cabins and homes owned by residents of the urban centers and, increasingly, by retirees. Innovations in Internet technologies over the past decade and a half have allowed people to work in remote areas, further swelling the number of permanent residents in some towns. These changes, in turn, have fueled growth of rural towns and the number and variety of services offered in these towns. Meanwhile, across the entire time span from the arrival of the Spaniards to the present day, the native peoples of the western United States have sought to sustain their cultures and livelihoods, often under conditions of considerable adversity. They lost large portions of their previous domains and found themselves largely marginalized from the dynamics of the dominant society, yet their lands, practices, and experiences continue to stand as testaments to pre-European ways of knowing and being. These landscapes also testify to the profound disparities in social and economic well-being that exist among many tribal members. The Upper Little Colorado watershed reflects these conditions and dynamics.
Social Constructions and Biophysical Realities
As historian Elliott West maintains, there is always a dissonance between how humans view the world and how they actually fit within it. Humans have the ability to imagine changes in the world even as they confront it: they visualize new connections and relationships that are not yet present (West 1998). The American West is one of the places where imagination has crucially influenced changes to the natural world, producing a series of imagined landscapes (Cronon 1991; Limerick 1987; Morrissey 1997; Nash 1982; Reisner 1993; White 1991; Worster 1985). Here, broad swathes of arid and semiarid landscapes have been transformed into irrigated agricultural landscapes and urban settlements. The Little Colorado River Basin, whose modern settlement patterns grew out of Mormon visions of Zion and its related agrarian landscapes, is a microcosm of social constructions of the arid/semiarid West. The landscapes we see today, indeed, are the products of what historian Mark Fiege calls "vivid metaphor and compelling myths" (Fiege 1999: 8).
The Little Colorado River watershed provides a useful focal point for investigating the environmental history of relationships among climate, natural systems, and human systems: it is characterized by significant climatic and related environmental fluctuations, and it gathers into an identifiable geographical space a coherent narrative of human-environment relationships over time. The watershed, 26,964 square miles in size and ranging in elevation from some 4,200 feet to more than 7,700 feet above sea level, is located in the northeastern corner of Arizona (figure 1). (1) The area is characterized by topographic complexity, including elevational changes that produce spatial variability in temperature and precipitation and related ecological variability. While the area's climate is characterized by high levels of variability over decadal and longer time spans, climate-division data reveal long-term temperature patterns of cold...
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