ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-2720-8
1998 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved.
FIRST EDITION
Printed and bound in the United States of America
ISBN-13: 978-0-8263-1859-6
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 2345678
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Rivera, Jos A., 1944
Acequia culture: water, land, and community in the Southwest / Jos A. Rivera.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8263-1858-4 (cloth). ISBN 0-8263-1859-2 (pbk.)
1. Water resources developmentEconomic aspectsRio Grande WatershedHistory
2. Watershed managementRio Grande WatershedHistory.
3. Land useRio Grande WatershedHistory
4. Rio Grande WatershedEconomic conditions.
5. Rio Grande WatershedSocial conditions.
6. Rio Grande WatershedEnvironmental conditionsHistory
1. Title.
HD1694.A3 1998
33391'15097644dc21 | 9823877
CIP |
Preface
Water-resources planning is attracting unparalleled attention around the globe from local, national, and international bodies aware that a sustainable supply of water is crucial to meet growing demands today as well as the projected needs of future generations. Concern over water-management policies and practices is especially critical in arid and semiarid territories, which comprise approximately one-third of the earths land surface. In the western United States, municipal, industrial, commercial agricultural, and other users increasingly look to new technologies and improved management practices as the means to recycle wastewater or to reduce consumption altogether.
At the same time, the era of large-scale water development, meant to harvest and channel water destined for urbanizing regions or to reclaim desert lands for agricultural production, is rapidly ending. In its place, a new conservation ethic is taking root across the spectrum of users and advocates, from computer-chip manufacturers to mayors of sunbelt cities. Conservation programs extol new water-conserving techniques and urge facilities managers, contractors, farmers, residential consumers, agency employees, and schoolchildren to modify wasteful behaviors. There is growing appreciation that while water is crucial to the survival of communities, it is also renewable, if managed conservatively.
In the long run, however, sustainability of water quantity and quality may depend more on democratic and social processes than on technological or regulatory fixes, particularly when incorporating regions of the world with diverse cultures and equally different, often conflictive, views of water. Past efforts by public officials to impose mandatory conservation Who better to conserve life-sustaining resources than land-based peoples and their communal institutions that depend on renewable natural resources?
Around the world, however, the traditional and political rights of land-based peoples are increasingly threatened by demands placed on the limited resource base and life support systems critical to continued survival. From region to region, sectors of the dominant economic and political order encroach on the grazing lands, river and irrigation-canal systems, forests, wildlife areas, fisheries, and other common-pool resources that have sustained local cultures over many generations. For the most part, these resources have been renewable precisely because of human adaptation strategies that evolved at the time of initial appropriation, coupled with a strong conservation ethic to manage the resources not only for present needs, but for the livelihoods of heirs already born as well as those yet to come. Many of these traditional communities continue to eke out an existence in rather harsh environments where human life had not previously existed, such as the arid and semiarid climatic zones found throughout the world.
The 1992 Ro de Janeiro Declaration and subsequent studies of environment and development have created renewed interest in traditional management systems that have withstood the test of time, regardless of differences in climate, topography, physiographic barriers, or other limitations on human survival.
Numerous field-research and case studies have documented that sustainability of earths resources means more than the preservation of biodiversity. In the Southern Hemisphere of the Americas, for example, Redclift and Sage found that rural people who live closest to or in the midst of a valuable natural resource have the least to gain from practices that would exploit and consume the environment around them.
Yet in many parts of the world the fragile social ecology of traditional communities is under siege as market and other development pressures encroach on the resource base that has sustained a way of life for hundreds of years or longer. In market economies, the values of water resources are well understood and can readily be expressed in quantified economic terms such as cost-to-benefit ratios. Among competing values, economic values are the most often asserted, are most easily quantified, and have been the most subsidized. An example of such subsidization is the large public expenditure for hydropower infrastructure in the western United States to supply the huge amounts of energy required for industrial development, municipal expansion, and agribusiness welfare.
Next in the order of quantification are ecologic and environmental values. Most often, in the United States, these values are expressed in the promulgation of stringent controls against water pollution, protective measures to safeguard water habitats necessary for plant and wildlife species, and other similar environmental-protection initiatives. These programs are still growing in scope and enforcement resources, notably the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the Endangered Species Act. At the state level, most western states have enacted statutes requiring a minimum amount of instream flows designed to support ecologic values by keeping water conveyance channels, rivers and streams, wet and flowing year round. In turn, these policies expand receational and leisure uses for the more affluent consumers such as urban devotees of fishing, rafting, and other water sports.
In contrast, social, cultural, and historic values in American water policy and law are much more complex and the least quantifiable, if at all. In many settings, the perspectives, beliefs, preferences, and values of traditional people are not understood or appreciated by other water stakeholders. Often, the traditional uses of water are viewed as obstacles to development and economic progress. What may be a wholesome rural culture lifestyle to one group may be seen as a pocket of persistent rural poverty to another. At best, the agricultural practices of indigenous societies are measured as subsistence-level production with marginal or no potential for growth outside of the local community. These supposed lower use yields then become prime targets for conversion through one process or another.
