If water is what will unlock the door to species survival, Frampton holds the key. And, as in other parts of Interior Department policy, it is seldom a matter of representative debate about the outcome. Such promises of water for irrigation brought people West at the beginning of the 20th century. Probably the most common issue at the heart of most disputes in the West today are over rights still held to that water. In an ever-growing West it is ever more the most valuable commodity.
Water is power.
More than the land, the government wants the water. That is the bottom line. Never like the East, of course, water in the West has always been more scarce and more at issue over who should control its use. Rainfall in the 17 western states is typically 30 to 50 percent of what it is in the East. Today, some 31 million people in the West rely in one way or another on the more than 300 dams and reservoirs built by the Bureau of Reclamation to provide water to more than nine million acres of farmland since 1902.