How does the Colorado river enrich the lives of millions of people ?

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Loud concerts, power tools, construction work - they're affecting people's hearing. Hearing loss isn't just a problem for older people. In a few minutes, we're going to talk about some of the new high-tech ways of dealing with it. That's the subject of the latest New Yorker article by my guest, David Owen, who is a staff writer for the magazine. He's also a contributing editor at Golf Digest, which is how he got to play golf with Donald Trump. We'll talk about that, too.

But we're going to start with the subject of Owen's new book, "Where The Water Goes," about the Colorado River. The river and its tributaries supply water to over 36 million people in seven states - Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California - and irrigates close to 6 million acres of farmland. Owen writes about the engineering feats that make all that possible and the legal and environmental battles surrounding the river. The Colorado River is so overtaxed that by the time it reaches the U.S.-Mexico border it's dry.

David Owen, welcome to FRESH AIR. So can you give us a kind of overview sense of the manmade things that have been done to control and disseminate water from the Colorado through the West?

DAVID OWEN: When you look at the Colorado River, it's not a big river. It's done these amazing things. It carved the Grand Canyon. But it's not - it's not broad. It's not like the Mississippi. The Mississippi is 1,000 miles longer, and the entire annual flow of the Colorado River flows down the Mississippi every couple of weeks. And yet in the western United States, it's incredibly important, in seven states. It supplies water to something like 26 million people. It irrigates 6 million acres of agriculture. And most of those 6 million acres are land that the river itself deposited, silt from, you know, what's missing from the Grand Canyon. It spread out across Arizona and California.

So there's this enormous network of canals and irrigation ditches and tunnels that draw water from that river and take it in some cases hundreds of miles away, you know, 300 miles to the west to Los Angeles, you know, 300 miles to the east to Phoenix and Tucson, hundreds of miles across deserts into reservoirs and canal systems. And it's governed by its own - its own laws that determine who gets to pull that water and use it and what they get to use it for.

GROSS: The plan for dividing the water among the seven river states - Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California - that was written up in 1922. You seem to think it's a pretty bad agreement. What makes it so bad?

OWEN: Everybody thinks it's both a bad agreement and a good agreement. It's bad because it divided up the river at a time when people thought the river contained a lot more water than it actually does. It's one of these great sort of ironies of history that in the 19 - the 1920s were some of the wettest years in that part of the country since the 1400s. So the river at that time was carrying more water than ever. And so when the states divided up the river, they were dividing up - actually water that didn't exist. On the other side, the good side is that, well, it's almost a century later and that compact, the agreement among those states, still exists.

GROSS: So how has the world and how has the population in the West changed since 1922 in ways that might make that agreement kind of out-of-date?

OWEN: Well, in lots of ways. There are many more people than anybody imagined in 1922. Some of the biggest, fastest-growing cities in the country are cities that depend on water from that river. Some of the most productive agricultural land draws water from that river. You know, for a long time the fact that they had divided up water that wasn't there didn't make any difference because nobody figured out how to use up all the water anyway. But now we've gotten much better at it and we use it up. So we stretch it farther than people did in those days.

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