The immediate impact of what’s being called the most severe mega-drought in 1,200 years, has been sharp cuts in the allocation of water to downstream users, with southern Nevada’s take slashed by seven billion gallons. Then there’s the fear that if Lake Mead’s water levels continue to fall, it may not be able to generate the power it now supplies to 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona and California.

Yet the diminished reservoirs tell another tale about the Colorado River, one of the world’s great plumbing systems, which enables downstream agriculture and sends potable water to an estimated 40 million residents. The story is that just where the river ends, at the Gulf of California, it has been slowly coming alive.

For decades, the United States sucked so much water from the Colorado that only a trickle, if that much, ever reached its desiccated, sprawling delta in Mexico. Once covering 9,650 square miles, the delta has shrunk to less than one percent of its original expanse. Human diversions wrung it dry.

It wasn’t always that way. In 1922, conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote about paddling a canoe through the delta’s green lagoons and marveling as “cormorants drove their black prows in quest of skittering mullets” and “mallards, widgeons, and teal sprang skyward in alarm.” When a troop of egrets settled on a far green willow, Leopold said they looked like a “premature snowstorm.”

Leopold’s lyrical vision had the misfortune a century ago of coinciding with the signing of the Colorado Compact, which sealed the delta’s fate. Approved by Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California, the compact quantified the Colorado’s annual flow and set up the seven states to contend with one another to protect, if not expand, their individual shares. The compact turned the delta into a dust bowl.

For decades, environmental and tribal activists and nonprofit organizations protested the devastation that massive diversions to fill the Powell and Mead reservoirs produced in the delta’s once-flourishing human and biological communities. They pushed hard for remedies from both the U.S. and Mexican governments and the river-hugging state legislatures.

It wasn’t until 1993, when Bruce Babbitt became Secretary of the Interior under President Bill Clinton, that the political dynamic changed. Babbitt argued that the states must demonstrate how they intended to operate within their apportioned amount. If they failed to do so, he said, he would not approve surplus water, a threat particularly aimed at California, which routinely commandeered any surplus flow the other states didn’t use.

River activists immediately demanded that some of the water savings should head down to the delta. They got nowhere until 2014, when Mexico and the United States acted on their earlier commitment to sluice more water into the delta’s riparian habitats.

Since then, the two countries have periodically released water to mimic historic seasonal flooding. These tiny pulses of liquid energy, which constitute less than one percent of Los Angeles’ total annual water consumption, have had an outsized impact.

With restoration ecologists to guide the process, some wetlands have revived, small woodlands have flourished and native plants and animals have taken hold. Remote-sensing cameras recently spotted beavers gnawing on cottonwoods.

We don’t know how current drought-management solutions might cripple these recent interventions that brought the tail end of the river to life. Meanwhile, let’s recall Leopold visiting the delta where he watched burbling sandhill cranes circling overhead. The sight brought him joy as it made him feel he was joined with them in the “remote vastness of space and time.”

That’s a compelling affirmation that the Colorado River must be kept alive to its very end.

Char Miller is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is an environmental historian at Pomona College; his upcoming book is Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril.

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 Without irrigation, think high desert. Without irrigation in this time of extended drought, less late water will be there for fish, birds and other riparian-dependent species. Wildlife habitat would be traded for urban growth if groups like Western Watersheds and the Center for Biological Diversity have their way.

 How can this be when the drumbeat narrative says that without cattle or irrigated crops such as hay, the stressed river could recover? If you believe The Guardian newspaper, “U.S. rivers and lakes are shrinking for a surprising reason: cows.”  Another British publication, Nature, wrote that in the Western United States, cattle are responsible for 23 percent of water use — or 32 percent, depending on the article — and more than 50 percent in the Colorado River basin.

 Reputable scientists disagree. Leonard Bull, animal science professor at North Carolina State University, says, “The question that needs answered is how much water is used? And how do you ‘charge’ that water use if it falls on grazing land that is not suitable for alternative food production?

 “Livestock consume water, excrete most of it, and meat has about 72 percent water in the lean portion. Does the water excreted in exhaled breath, urine and manure get a credit for recycling against consumed? This is sort of like chasing carbon,” he said (from personal interview with Dr. Bull on July 9, 2020).

 Irrigation is likewise under attack. In reality, irrigation in the Western river valleys plays a key role in sustaining wetlands and riparian areas season-long. The green ribbons of irrigated pasture and hay land provide important habitat connectivity for sandhill cranes and other birds on their epic annual migrations. These agriculturally sustained wetlands also provide habitat for many other wildlife species.

 Migratory birds are the true canary in the “buy and dry,” or just “dry” schemes proposed by the anti-cow vigilantes. Though an assessment reported in Science blames habitat reduction for the loss of nearly 3 billion birds in the last 50 years, how much more would be lost if irrigated lands become ephemeral streams?

 If irrigation is eliminated, a cascade of negative events could result. Instead of flooded fields recharging underlying aquifers, a dry landscape would hold no water. No longer would groundwater feed springs and discharge water in the late season when fish and other riparian species need it most. Early water left in the river does not necessarily benefit fish, as that water flows away with the snow runoff, which climate change is bringing earlier in spring. Most of the early flows would end up in Lake Mead and Lake Powell for storage.

 And that is the real point of Babbitt’s proposal to buy up some irrigation rights and fallow lands primarily in western Colorado. That “new” water would go to growing cities.

 Cities and industry have real needs, but agriculture should not be sacrificed for either one. Food production and food security are critical to this country, something we became very aware of during the virus pandemic.

 Somehow a narrative has become accepted that if more people — especially Americans – stop eating meat, the planet will magically improve. This is a false narrative. In the Rocky Mountain West, as elsewhere, it is ranchers and farmers who hold the landscape together, who provide open space and beauty, and for wildlife, crucial habitat.

 Raising cattle has value in its own right. Eighty-five percent of grazing lands — think sagebrush steppe or high desert landscapes — are not suitable for any other type of food production. The much-maligned hay and alfalfa grown to feed beef cattle and dairy cows provide us with high-quality protein and nutritious dairy products. With inputs of grass, sunshine and water, we receive steaks, hamburgers, milk, cheese, yogurt and a long list of other byproducts.

 Before you buy that impossible meat substitute, with its lower-quality protein, remember that you might consume a weird concoction, dependent on chemicals and ingredients imported from China, with its own environmental costs.

 Let’s never forget the wisdom of ecologist Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

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