This is another compelling graph, with its diving supply and ever more voracious demand.  It is tempting to look at the bend in the demand curve around 2005 onward as a conservation success story (See that!  we are not using as much) when in fact, it mostly represents the inability to deliver the water that it customarily did. This breaking point represents a dead Colorado River estuary and its inability to support millions of migratory birds. It represents bankrupt farmers in the Yuma , Imperial and Mexicali valleys, source of over 90% of America's winter vegetables. It represents cutting the delivery of water to thirsty Phoenix and Tucson in half. It represenst desperate efforts to further mine already depleted groundwater sources that are finite in nature. This is the very essence of the commonly heard term, unsustainability, further manifest in the weekly news feeds describing near deadpool status of Lakes Mead and Powell. It portends water shortages and power outages affecting the Colorado River Basin's 40 million supported people.

The snowpack is failing. Forests, mountain meadows, streams, beaver dams, rivers...     now simply shed water.  The watersheds are collapsing into a hydrophobic and burnt-out ecosystem.

U of U Botanist Walter Cottam delivered a centenniel address in 1947 contemplating the effects of Utah's settlers on the once rich ecology within Utah.  The first few pages are filled with eyewitness reports quite the opposite of the dead, sagebrush filled valleys of our imagination that only we, the settlers, could make blossom like a rose. Instead, the mountains were full of slow streams dammed by multitudes of beaver colonies, saturating the ground with moisture that makes for strong, fire-resilient forests and slow water movement whereby mountain snowpack and precipitation descend lazily to the lakes through surface and groundwater paths. Cottam offers many quotes describing the streams descending from the Wasatch foothills into fresh, grassy depressions surrounded by then-dry level areas of healthy bunchgrass. More descriptions follow of lush, green valleys (including Tooele, Mountain Meadows, Pleasant Valley (near the Utah/Nevada border) that are now barren.

Cottam's prescient treatise, entitled "Is Utah Sahara Bound?" forces us to contend with the realization that the trappers and settlers destroyed our mountain watersheds. The destruction of the Beaver colonies sped the water on its way downhill before it could benefit the mountain valleys. Cottam continually points to sheep overgrazing for denuding the mountain landscapes of the vegetation and root systems that break up, aerate, and condition soil to reduce compaction, increase porosity, and enhance the soil's capacity to absorb moisture. Wildfire and drought compact the unprotected soil, rendering it hydrophobic.  Historical floods from the overgrazed mountains killed people and destroyed communities in the early 1900's, leading to the protection of these delicate slopes and even the CCC intervention in some cases (Davis County's Farmington Canyon) to sculpt the mountainside in attempts to prevent future flash floods.

Our watersheds have not recovered. It is not a new concept that vast western immigration, water diversion and irrigation was a terrible idea for the amount of water available. Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert (Viking Press, 1986) has a very readable account of John Wesley Powell's Colorado River expedition and his conviction against the massively overallocated "development" of water resources; and even a particular modern reservoir the very name of which makes him turn in his grave.