THAT SUCKING SOUND

OUTSIDE: Bobby, you first ran the Colorado 40 years ago with your family. How different is the river today?

KENNEDY: When we took our trip in '67, Lake Powell was just filling up, so the river was still turbid and warm. There were eight species of native fish—now there are only four. A lot of the mammals that lived near the river then, like the otter and the muskrat, are gone. We went down with a large group and camped on these giant sandbars, and now most of those are gone. The Colorado has been degraded from this monument to America's heritage into a glorified plumbing system that connects these two big reservoirs. It's lost a lot of its natural values. And it's being sucked dry. What's happening to the Colorado is a warning of what's happening to the whole desert West.

DAVIS: There's a historical genesis to all this. The entire western reach of this country was known as the Great American Desert, and many parts are still as dry as the Sahara. But as the frontier moved west, suddenly, instead of speaking about the "desert," we were speaking about the "Great Basin." We thought we could impose this Jeffersonian ideal of each man to a farm on the western landscape. That's what John Wesley Powell found so ridiculous. And if you look at the Grand Canyon from space now, you'll see the Painted Desert and the reservoirs on the river. What you won't see is cultivated farmland. We've ruined every river in the arid West but have only managed to cultivate an area the size of Missouri.

OUTSIDE: And nobody is facing up to this problem?

KENNEDY: I don't see any sign it's being dealt with in ways that are commensurate with the crisis in the West, and particularly the Southwest. There's new sprawl development everywhere.

DAVIS: With the Colorado, you've really got to deal with water rights. The annual flow estimates were made in the 1920s, and we now know that those were unseasonably wet years and that the flow was overestimated by at least three million acre feet when it was partitioned between the states. And now they're all scrambling to maintain their share.

OUTSIDE: How does global warming affect the crisis?

DAVIS: Water is intricately linked to climate change. And all current climate models suggest that we are entering a period of profoundly lower flows in the Colorado. We are not in a drought—drought is a misnomer.

KENNEDY: The hotter it gets, the larger the water crisis is going to become. When you ask people who are promoting development how we can go on, they think we'll end up getting water from Canada, that these huge engineering projects are going to rescue us. That just isn't realistic. If you had to go to Las Vegas and place a bet that we can rely on the Canadians to save us—well, it's not a good bet.

MACGillivray: Some people might not really wake up to change until the water company says, "Folks, you've got to use half as much water, and guess what? We're going to double the cost."

KENNEDY: Or until the water dries up at the Bellagio.