In her weekly column, Water Lines, Hannah Holm discusses the speech that Pat Mulroy, former general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, made at the Colorado Water Congress Summer Meeting. The crux of Mulroy’s speech was a call to expand our view of citizenship to encompass the entire Colorado River Basin, instead of just our individual towns and states. Such a view would allow us to better acknowledge how circumstances in one area affect the rest of the basin and would break us from the myopic view of water supply risk as belonging only to one part or region.
Mulroy’s recent comments echo ones that she made in an interview given just before she retired from SNWA, when she discussed her remarkable vision of the Colorado River Basin as a holistic system and advised water managers to stop thinking state by state when it comes to managing this resource, and are a natural follow-on to her keynote address at the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual meeting last year, where she discussed the basin’s move from a culture on conflict to one of cooperation.
Read Water Lines: water czar calls for basin-wide citizenship
Written by Marta Weismann