FLAMING GORGE RESERVOIR, Utah — By now, most of us have come to understand that dams and reservoirs are a way of life — a necessary evil, some might say, not unlike interstate highways and airport security checks. In a word, progress.
While their impacts on the surrounding ecosystem are widely known, they’re justified in the form of municipal water storage, agricultural benefits, even recreation. Our society has evolved around them.
The funny thing about progress is that it just can’t stand still. Just when we get used to taking off our belts to catch an airplane, suddenly we’re asked to remove our shoes. And now that we’ve become accustomed to fishing for trout on the formerly warm waters of the Green River below Flaming Gorge Reservoir, someone wants to take the water away.
In the grand scheme of progress and water projects, it’s difficult to know the full impact of Fort Collins entrepreneur Aaron Million’s Flaming Gorge Pipeline proposal. But at face value, the 580-mile long pipeline he envisions transporting 250,000 acre feet of water a year between Flaming Gorge and Pueblo seems overly ambitious at best and, some say, an unnecessary evil at worst.
Million claims the water is there and Colorado needs it. Critics say the price is too high and that such diversions would degrade water quality, destroy important habitat for both endangered and sport fish and potentially interfere with water rights downstream. Multiple Wyoming and Utah counties insist such use of upper Colorado Basin water resources simply cannot be sustained.
The so-called “Million” pipeline is back in the news this week after the Million Conservation Resource Group reconfigured it as a hydropower project and shifted the review process from the Army Corps of Engineers to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. As proposed, the project would generate 70 megawatts of hydropower from in-line storage and another 500 to 1,000 megawatts from pumped storage.
Still, the anticipated impacts remain.
Selfishly, perhaps, I view the project from the perspective of an outdoorsman, although the benefits I receive from Flaming Gorge Reservoir and the tailwater below it are minimal in comparison to those who make their livings in the recreation economy of the rural region.
I consider it both treat and tradition to visit the Green River for an annual float through a spectacular gorge offering some of the absolute finest cold-water fishing in the nation. Like so many others, I take comfort in the knowledge that there will be water enough to sustain it.
But a disturbing addition to the debate emerged in a new study published out of Million’s alma mater at Colorado State this week indicating that climate change has potential to cut trout habitat in the Western U.S. in half over the next 70 years.
The report funded in part by the U.S. Forest Service predicts native cutthroat throughout the West could decline by as much as 58 percent and introduced brook trout could decline by as much as 77 percent. Rainbow and brown trout populations would decline by an estimated 35 percent and 48 percent, respectively.
“The impending loss of trout habitat is both startling and depressing,” said co-author Kurt Fausch, professor in CSU’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology and an expert on trout ecology and management.
Seth Wenger, the paper’s lead author, notes that there is some hope. By restoring and reconnecting coldwater drainages and by protecting existing healthy habitat largely located on public lands in the West, some of the decline in trout populations might be avoided.
“Trout Unlimited is working to protect remaining strongholds and restore degraded habitat — exactly the kind of things that need to be done to reduce the impact of a changing climate on coldwater fisheries in the West,” Wenger said.
Sure, 70 years is a long time. Meanwhile, we might sit back, kick our shoes off and consider the notion of progress along the way.
Scott Willoughby: 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com
