Last week, we took a look at Boulder’s contentious relationship with growth.

We put forward the notion that, for a variety of reasons, Boulder should embrace the necessity of growth so that we can approach it collectively and ensure it doesn’t overwhelm us.

In the week since, several Boulderites have reached out to raise the very legitimate issue of the West’s diminishing water supply, asking how Boulder can be expected to grow when we are facing such an existential crisis.

The news, after all, is rather bleak. The seven basin states have been struggling to come to an agreement on how to reduce the 2 million acre-feet of usage required to properly address our depleting resource. Six states recently released a draft proposal that suggested spreading out the burden and sharing responsibility for the required cuts. Instead of signing onto that proposal, California — the world’s fifth largest economy and producer of $51 billion of agricultural products in 2021 — released its own draft that proposed more gradual reductions.

Pair this inability to find common ground with the ever-looming climate crisis that seems to get more dire every day and it is easy to feel overwhelmed. It is easy to start to see everything through the lens of vanishing resources. It is easy to be confronted with a proposal for growth and to assume it would be another willfully ignorant money grab that serves to bleed dry the beating heart of the Southwest.

While the particulars of our water situation are more complicated than they may seem from the surface, the passion that so many Boulderites have for the environment should not be dismissed or taken for granted. The ongoing fight to curb climate change and preserve our natural resources will be long and tiring and will require great passion.

To hold onto passion, though, requires some sense of optimism. This means it is important to recognize that the battle has not already been lost.

“I think the situation for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River needs to be taken seriously,” Bart Miller, Western Resource Advocates’ Healthy Rivers Program director, said in a phone interview. “And the states are starting to take it seriously.”

Miller, who is based in Western Resource Advocates’ Boulder office, pointed to the recent draft proposals from the basin states as a sign that the powers that be are willing to compromise and work together. And when asked about California’s desire to maintain the status quo — and its status as America’s largest economy — Miller remained cautiously optimistic.

“Twenty years ago, California was using more than its share, so they had to scale back to the volume that was allowed under the Colorado River Compact,” Miller said. “And they did that through paying folks to consume less water.”

That remains an option for California — and the rest of the upper and lower basin states — today. But more generally, Miller pushed the point that the burden of the necessary usage cuts should be shared so that no state has to suffer especially dramatic reductions.

And there is certainly plenty that Colorado can do to reduce our share of use. Consider, for instance, that more than 86% of Colorado’s water usage is delivered to agriculture. One program gaining support among conservationists is paying farmers to irrigate less.

“It is a looming crisis,” Miller said. “We are in a very different situation than we were five or ten years ago, so we do have to take it seriously, but I think we have ways to make it out of this, it’s not an impasse or a dead end.”

Still, it is easy to look at this state- and federal-level battle and feel powerless to determine the fate of our local resources.

Thankfully, Boulder is in good shape, even as we look to continue growing, according to Kim Hutton, the city’s water resources manager.

“Based on the projected growth in population and employment,” Hutton explained in a phone interview, “we are in a very comfortable position to meet future demands with our water supply.”

And while the current planning documents haven’t yet been updated to take into account the ongoing conversations surrounding the Colorado River, Hutton said the city is confident in its drought planning.

“We are concerned enough that we are paying attention,” Hutton said, “but we’ve got enough buffer in our system that we can weather some rough years.”

It is in all of our best interests, though, to work to avoid those rough years. This means all of us — individuals, cities, counties and the compact states — should be doing everything we can to get more efficient with how we use our water.

Which is possible, even as we grow.

“We need to move away from this narrative that reasonable levels of population growth must equate to new water supplies,” Lindsay Rogers, a water policy analyst with Western Resource Advocates, said in a phone interview.

According to Rogers, between 2000 and 2015, Denver grew by 17% and reduced its water use by 28%. More impressively, Colorado Springs has grown by 92% since the mid-1980s, but today it still uses the same amount of water as it did then.

Individually, we can contact Resource Central and explore the variety of options available to transition away from water-greedy lawns toward more environmentally friendly landscapes. The same can be done communitywide, by business owners and the city — nonfunctional turf is often only used by the people who maintain it. Then, of course, there are land use codes that put water at the forefront and programs that provide financial incentives to reduce use.

“I don’t want individuals to lose their sense of ownership around the need to be good water stewards,” Rogers said, “because it really will take everyone at all levels for us to make the kind of demand reductions we need to see across the state in the coming years, given climate change and aridification and drought.”

As we look toward the future of Boulder, it makes sense to be concerned about our water supply. But as it stands, Boulder is well-positioned to continue thriving.

This, though, is not a call to bleed our rivers empty. We are not advocating for the consumption of every last drop, an explosion of development or the careless squandering of resources. And we are certainly not encouraging complacency.

A very real catastrophe is upon us. But it is a catastrophe we can conquer.

Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board