Colorado River suit may help thirsty region By Joby Warrick The Washington Post Jan. 13, 2002 EJIDO JOHNSON, Mexico - The Southwest's mightiest river once roared past this desert village, but no longer. By the time the Colorado makes it this far south, the river is literally tapped out: Drained by cities, farms and dams until no fresh water is left. The consequences for this thirsty region are huge. In a generation, the Colorado's delta, the broad plain at the river's mouth, has changed from lush tropical wilderness to a moonscape of sun-baked mud. The mesquite forests and marshes that framed the riverbanks 50 years ago have all but vanished, drying up along with the shrinking river. The wild boars and deer have moved on, and rarer creatures such as the desert pupfish are at risk of dying out altogether. Indian communities that lived off the river's bounty for centuries are dispersing for lack of fish to catch or water for irrigation. "The Colorado ceases to exist here," said Jose Campoy, a Mexican biologist, surveying a barren mud flat 45 miles south of the U.S. border. "Every drop of water has gone for cities, for farms. There is nothing left for nature, nothing for the river itself." That could change, if U.S. and Mexican environmentalists get their way.  Even as booming Western states clamor for bigger shares of the Colorado's water, a coalition of eight wildlife groups is pushing for something unprecedented in five decades of interstate wrangling over water rights: a share of water for nature. Expanding protections A lawsuit that could be settled as early as this month could force U.S. officials to consider the Colorado River's parched delta, and specifically the plight of endangered animals living there, when divvying up the water rights among U.S. cities and farms. If successful, the suit would broaden the scope of the Endangered Species Act to include threatened habitats in border regions outside U.S. territory.  Activists say the United States, which consumes 90 percent of the Colorado's water, has a legal obligation to ensure that at least some fresh water reaches the sea, nourishing wildlife habitats along the way. "The Colorado River is one ecosystem that happens to be in two countries, yet we've manipulated it as though it exists for only one side," said William Snape, a lawyer for Defenders of Wildlife, one of the eight groups that filed suit against the U.S. Interior Department. "We need to make the river whole again." Scientists who study the delta say a relatively small amount of water, perhaps as little as 1 percent of the river's average flow, would go a long way toward reviving the region's wildlife areas. But every additional gallon of water reserved for the delta must first be given up by someone else. The river's entire supply is allocated by treaty among seven U.S. states and Mexico. Even states sympathetic to the delta's plight worry that Mexican farmers would siphon off any additional water that crosses the border. "If any more water were to cross into Mexico, how do you guarantee that it reaches the delta?" asked Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. "There may be ways to find water for the delta, but the solutions aren't going to be simple." Once-verdant area The delta's current bone-dry state represents a stunning transformation of the green landscape travelers and native Indian tribes knew as recently as a half-century ago. This fan-shaped plain the size of Rhode Island, built over eons from the river's silt, then supported a stunningly diverse array of plants and animals. At the river's mouth on the Gulf of California, the daily churning of the tides blended fresh and salty water and created an important spawning ground for sea creatures ranging from the tiny brown shrimp to the giant totoaba fish prized by anglers. The river's main channel was broad and deep enough to support steamships, which regularly ferried passengers from the gulf as far north as Yuma. Travelers on the boats would have witnessed a "bewildering maze of green" along riverbanks teeming with wildlife, according to famed author and conservationist Aldo Leopold, who visited the region in the 1920s. Then came the 1930s and the first of the colossal water-control projects that sought to harness the river's power for humans. Ten dams and thousands of miles of irrigation channels transformed the Colorado into one of the world's most intensely managed rivers, while allowing cities and farms to spring up in the desert. The river today supplies electricity or water to nearly 30 million people. Few would dispute the benefits of the Colorado's taming, but in recent years the environmental downside has become increasingly apparent. The first dams in the 1930s ended the annual flooding that brought fresh sediment and nutrients to the delta. UA study finds decline More recently, rising demand for fresh water has squeezed the river's life-giving flow to a trickle. The region's wildlife has vanished along with the river. A study done by the University of Arizona in December 2000 determined that the delta's biological productivity is barely 5 percent of what it was before the dams were built. Paleontologist Karl Flessa, a co-author of the study, found evidence of  this decline in huge piles of empty clam shells, the remains of a once-thriving  population, just upstream of the river's mouth. Flessa calculated that at least 6 billion clams were alive here at any given time through the 1930s, compared with a handful today. "I had never seen anything like it: The beaches and islands were covered with shells for 40 kilometers (25 miles)," Flessa said, recalling his first visit to the delta. "But when I went out on the tidal flats, I couldn't find a single living individual." The political and economic pressures feeding the demand for water aren't likely to ease soon, environmentalists say, and that's why some look to the courts as the delta's best, and perhaps only, hope.