Join Eric Kuhn for a talk entitled “The Perfect Ingredients for a Colorado River Crisis, A 21st Century Climate, 20th Century Infrastructure, and 19th Century Laws.”

The Colorado River is in crisis. The river has  long been legally overallocated. Now climate change is further reducing the available water supply. The river is facing significant hydrologic, legal, and management challenges. Solutions will require new ways of conserving and allocating the available water supply and a new era of cooperation among all users of the river. Overcoming the politics may be the biggest hurdle.

Eric Kuhn is the retired General Manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District and co author with John Fleck of Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, University of Arizona Press, 2019. Eric started employment with the Colorado River District in 1981 as Assistant Secretary-Engineer. In 1996 he was appointed General Manager, a position he held until his retirement in 2018.

Eric and John’s book, Science Be Dammed, is about Colorado River hydrology, what we knew, when we knew it, and how we used it to shape the over-allocation of the river under the 1922 compact, the other major provisions of the law-of-the-river, and the projects we have in place today.