Everyone remembers the scene in Chinatown when Jack Nicholson almost gets his nose sliced off, but many do not recall what the dispute was about. It wasn’t drug smuggling or gun running that got Nicholson’s character slashed. It was water rights. Since the film was released in 1974, the question of who will get the limited water in the American West, particularly the all-important flow of the Colorado River, has grown even more contentious.

DOWNRIVER: INTO THE FUTURE OF WATER IN THE WEST by Heather Hansman University of Chicago Press, 248 pp., $25

Dystopian novels and movies predict a future in which people fight it out for every last drop of water to quench the thirst of expanding cities, parched agriculture, and wasteful suburban grass lawns. But the future is already here. Urban growth in desert cities has ramped up the demand for water while increasing temperatures brought on by climate change have decreased the supply. West of the Mississippi River, water rights—which are both divorced from climate change reality and based on illogically piecemeal legislation—have created an existential crisis.

Heather Hansman’s new book Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West explores the water emergency with remarkable calm and even-handedness. She focuses on a single river, the Green River, where ranchers, frackers, rafters, fishermen, and urbanites all fight for their share of the water, while contending with Byzantine state policies. This one river brings together the range of tensions that currently afflict Western water rights and will affect more and more of us in the coming decades. And not least of the complications here is that fights over water usage have become ideological battles—between those who support the federal coordination of climate change policy and rugged individualists who see government intervention as inherently unjust.



The Green River, a tributary of the Colorado that runs through Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, is a typically acute case. Split between an upper and lower basin, its water is used by seven states. Those upstream in Wyoming attempt to pull out as much water as possible before the hungry downstream cities slurp up their share. The system has strict per-state allocations despite the variable nature of the supply. It runs on a “use it or lose it” policy: Either you take out water annually or your right to it disappears forever. There is no reward for conservation and many western states have no limit on how much water can be taken out of rivers in times of low rainfall, even to guarantee minimum flows for fish. Coordination between agricultural and urban users is almost nonexistent. States enact their own policies rather than joining together to compile a holistic plan, as if complex water systems should obey the arbitrary borderlines of American federalism.

Western states calculated the available water in the Green River at 18 million acre-feet of water per year while the real number is closer to 13 million. Yet, even this does not show the real error of water management: Climate change will dramatically impact freshwater availability through evaporation. Between 2000 and 2014, the inflow to the Colorado River went down by nearly 20 percent and at least one third of that reduction was from global warming. “Between evaporation, reduced inflow, and increased use,” Hansman writes, “the West is sucking itself dry.” Another generation of population growth and current use patterns could make the American West into a quilt of restive water claimants, a sort of Mad Max scenario, though more likely to play out in courts and statehouses rather than among desert vigilantes.