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The Colorado Basin, then, is a few years away from permanent drought, and it will have to make do with whatever nature decrees the flow shall be. If the shortages were to be shared equally among the basin states, then things might not be so bad for Arizona. But this will obviously not be the case; there is that fateful clause stipulating that California shall always receive its full 4.4-million-acre-foot entitlement before Phoenix and Tucson receive a single drop. What began as an Olympian division of one river’s waters emerged, after fifty years of brokering, tinkering, and fine-tuning according to the dictates of political reality, as an ultimate testament to the West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.
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