Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

that has driven civilization to exist in a place like this. So it is in many ways our
central organizing principle is how to handle our water supply. It continues to be
sort of the most broadly held social consensus we have is, we need more water
than we have, we’ll use all we can get and we’re going to keep it away from the
enemy. It’s a tribal commodity. We define our tribe as the people with whom we
share our water and that means the people of Arizona in this case. There is
some inter-tribe squabbling of course. But Arizona is our tribe and that’s who we
share water with. The enemy is California or Nevada, who are trying to take our
water from us. So we are always thinking about that so it’s remarkable, whatever
your word was, but it’s not surprising. It’s a historical imperative.
Q. One of the things we’ve been talking about it the 1922 Colorado River Compact
and that was . . .
A. Well, we thought that it was a plot. We didn’t like it. We didn’t ratify it for years
and years. We were the one hold-out state that thought we’d gotten screwed in
the Colorado River Compact because, I mean as I’ve understood the story, I
don’t know if this is right or not, I was not around, my father would have been
around but I [don’t] know if he knew anything about it or not. We initially began
with the position that we should get the same amount of water that California was
getting in the Compact and that wasn’t how it worked. So we thought, we and
California should split it equally. Our argument was the Colorado River runs
through Arizona for four hundred miles before it ever forms a common border
with California. There are no tributaries flowing out of California into the
Interview with Grady Gammage
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