Key Takeaways: * “Right now, the Lower Basin uses over 10 million acre-feet a year, while the Upper Basin uses under 5 million acre-feet,” says Rebecca Mitchel

Key Takeaways: * “Right now, the Lower Basin uses over 10 million acre-feet a year, while the Upper Basin uses under 5 million acre-feet,” says Rebecca Mitchell, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board * I’m thrilled to death we have infrastructure in place that allows us to use the water when it’s available.” > Utah has the right to use about 1.7 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado, but it cannot collect from Lake Powell (its major aqueduct, the Central Utah Project, connects only Salt Lake City with the river’s tributaries) * > Colorado River Compact > The fundamental flaw of this compact is that it was signed at a time of unprecedented rain and snowfall in the basin, which led its original framers to assume that 15 million acre-feet of water flowed through the Colorado every year * “If the last 30 years repeats itself, the Lower Basin will have to cut its use by about 1 million acre-feet,” says Hasencamp * The writer Marc Reisner described the Colorado as the “American Nile.” The Hualapai call it Hakataya, “the backbone.” > Colorado River > described > Hualapai > Starting in the early 20th century, much of the Colorado’s natural majesty was corralled into a system of reservoirs, canals, and dams that now provides drinking water for 40 million people, irrigation for 5 million acres of farmland, and sufficient power to light up a city the size of Houston * Currently, the Upper Basin uses only about 4.5 million acre-feet of water every year, leaving roughly 2 million acre-feet that the four states are theoretically entitled to as they keep adding population * While the explosive population growth of Arizona and Nevada originally put pressure on California to draw down its use in the 1990s, now the Upper Basin states of Utah and Colorado — each of which added over a half-million residents in the past decade — are adding strain to the system * John Fleck has authored several books on the Colorado and serves as a writer-in-residence at the University of New Mexico; he says the tension between the two basins was palpable at the Stegner conference, with many Lower Basin negotiators expressing their frustration with those from the Upper Basin seeming to cast the current crisis as one that California, Arizona, and Nevada have created and are responsible for solving * But that framework is set to expire in 2026, giving officials in the seven states through which the Colorado and its tributaries flow — along with their peers in Mexico and the 29 tribes whose ancestors have depended on the river for millennia — an alarmingly narrow window to come to a consensus on how to share a river that’s already flowing with one-fifth less water than it did in the 20th century