Allocating scarcity: Water in the desert viewed by Spanish padres and the Animas-La Plata Project

This thesis will illuminate patterns of modern attitudes toward nature that originate two hundred years in the past. It compares and contrasts 18th century Spanish views of nature in the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States with modern environmental values as exemplified by the proposed and controversial Animas-La Plata river diversion project near Durango, Colorado.;This thesis tries to unravel the current knot of competing values toward the environment, and water in particular, to see the individual strands held by ranchers, municipalities, and the Ute Indians of southern Colorado. These strands of competing values toward the natural world lead back at least two hundred years to the Spanish missions of New Mexico and their water practices in the late 18th century.;When viewed as a template, the 1776 expedition of Fray Atanasio Dominguez and Fray Silvestre de Escalante crisscrossed a startling number of modern water storage projects, the most notable being Glen Canyon Dam, the most controversial being the proposed Animas-La Plata. The Franciscan's trek surveyed the West's driest lands which in less than two hundred years would become the scene for some of the world's largest dam and reservoir projects. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).