Revenue Streams - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 124

the earth's population will shrink to about 400 million. To prepare for the coming apo-
calypse, she decided to build a seed bank in her basement and turn San Luis Valley,
which she calls a “birthplace of ancient souls,” into a repository of world knowledge. In
1998, Hanne established the Manitou Foundation , which funds various religious orders.
Today, Tibetan Buddhist monks, Carmelite nuns, Hindu gurus, humanists, an alternat-
ive community, a camp for Native Americans, wiccans, shamans, and a few stray cow-
boys (including a Japanese bison herder) have established themselves around Crestone,
a former ghost town that now boasts a health food store, organic farms, and a bar. It is
an unlikely seeming place for a water war.
At about 8,000 feet above sea level, the San Luis Valley is hot and dry, with grassy flat-
lands, caldera mounds, sagebrush, yucca, juniper, and scrub pine. The average rainfall is
only seven and a half inches a year. Rising majestically from the desert floor are a set of
enormous tan waves that undulate against the cerulean sky. These are the Great Dunes,
the tallest sand dunes in North America, some peaking at 750 feet high. The sand here
originated hundreds of miles away, on the Rio Grande and in the San Juan Mountains.
It was lifted by winds and swept across the Rockies, then trapped here by the Sangre de
Cristo Mountains. The water underlying the sandy landscape nurtures the dunes and
keeps them stable. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover declared them the Great Sand
Dunes National Monument.
Maurice Strong planned to pump up some of the Baca's water—twenty-five thousand
to two hundred thousand acre-feet per year—and send it through a fifty-mile pipeline to
a river that would carry it north to Denver and its suburbs. Annual revenues for AWDI
were projected to be $175 million to $1.4 billion.
Though the San Luis Valley is one of the poorest regions in Colorado, farmers there
had some eighty thousand acres of potatoes and carrots under cultivation. They feared
AWDI's pumping would lower the water table. Greg Gosar , an organic farmer, pre-
dicted, “They're going to dry up this valley … and make obscene amounts of money
doing it…. Unfortunately, greed isn't illegal in America.” The Rio Grande Water Conser-
vation District, the largely tax-funded entity responsible for managing the valley's wa-
ter, sued AWDI in state water court. Environmental groups joined the opposition. Ad-
mirers of the Great Dunes feared that drying up the valley would hurt the sandy waves.
A group called Citizens for San Luis Valley Water held bake sales to raise funds to fight
Strong's plan. Cars in the valley, even the police cars, wore anti-AWDI bumper stick-
ers. A videotape was handed around, accusing Strong of being part of an “international
conspiracy” to take over the world, and of warehousing millions of dollars' worth of US
currency in Canada to prepare for a new global order. Then the National Park Service
objected to Strong's planned water pipe.