The Ruling Class’s Ongoing Destruction of Nature in Colorado, a Sign of the Times

Phil Doe

May 7, 2026

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Bar sign, Durango, Colorado. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

On April 21 managing engineers at Denver Water announced they were going to drain Antero Reservoir, the first water body in that public agency’s chain of reservoirs comprising its massive mountain storage system. The system serves about 1.5 million customers in the Denver area and is the state’s largest domestic water purveyor.

But numbers and system descriptions are merely Gradgrindian fact mongering. What is most important is that this agency’s proposed actions will destroy a body of water that is a place of stark and irreplaceable natural beauty. It belongs to everyone and everything. It satisfies Thoreau’s definition of wildness.

Denver Water announced it was going to drain this high mountain reservoir so as to eliminate the reservoir’s annual evaporation loss of about 5,000 acre-feet in a time of drought.   The destruction, it said, would begin on May 1, thus foreclosing on any public discussion about reasonable alternatives, moral limits, and folly.

The public has every right to demand this kind of discussion since the surface water in this state belongs to the people. The state was denied ownership by the framers, people of a pronounced populist bent, who feared the state would more willingly give it away to the high and mighty. Neither does Denver Water, and other users own it. Still, they all have very strong use rights, but they don’t have absolute dominion.

In fact, in this state the test of beneficial use must be demonstrated before the state, acting on behalf of the people, can issue a water use right. So given these legal realities, a very serious issue arises: can destruction of a public water resource of almost unique beauty and affection be willfully destroyed, turned into a mudflat, and still be deemed a beneficial use of public water? Let us look now at other issues that begin to surface with this question.First, while it is true this proposed action would result in the agency having “new” water for sale, not by building a new reservoir, in a region of rapidly diminishing snow pack and rainfall, but by destroying one, and thereby, in the mythic serpent-like way, starting to eat itself.  This in turn begins to expose the law of limits relentlessly imposing its will.

Denver Water reportedly charges its users about $2,000 to $3,000 for an acre-foot of water. By destroying Antero it will have realized a very dicey and exaggerated one-time savings to its revenue stream of about $15 million.. Moreover, this is a primitive form of problem solving and a hopelessly incomplete estimate of the economic impacts since it completely zeros out the intrinsic value of this water body from a wildlife, esthetic, and societal standpoint.

For example, the planned destruction and announced economic benefits do not take into account the increased transportation losses as the water stored in Antero is shunted 40 direct-air-miles downstream in the Platte River drainage to be reregulated at the much deeper and narrower Chessman Reservoir. (With its many twists and turns, the actual river miles are much greater.)

Neither does it account for evaporation loss at Chessman. It is sure to be less, as they assert, but it will be something and not incidental to this engineering fix. Clearly, between transportation loss and evaporation at Chessman, the net savings is going to be something less than 5,000 acre-feet.

More puzzling is Denver Water’s promise that it can and will, with godlike impudence, undo the destruction of Antero by quickly refilling it, probably beginning next year. This promise is built on a very questionable, if not absurd, assumption: that the future will look like the past when it comes to the west’s water. Indeed stasis is the last refuge of the ruling elite, which, of course, includes and increasingly serves the super rich. They preach the sophistry that there will always be a technological fix and that there are no limits in nature. Denver Water is a significant member of this consortium.

The consensus in the scientific world is the opposite: that there are, in act, real limits, and that continued and unrestrained exploitation in defiance of those limits will not change the laws governing them, only hasten their impact. And as a result of this stasis-serving defiance, the earth continues to grow hotter, dryer, and more Hobbesian. Thus, it may not surprise some to learn that last March was the driest March in this nation’s 132 years of climate record keeping.

Nevertheless, adopting, for the sake of the argument, the agency’s promised refill of Antero, it would still take 3 to 4 years to restore that which it took only a month or two to destroy. After all, this ham-fisted experiment in the destruction and resurrection of Antero has been done in the past to partially manage system shortfalls. But several years of at least average snow pack were always required for refilling. It can’t be done overnight. Still, that was then, and this is now. Climate change is now undeniably controlling. It is relentless and gaining, yet completely ignored in this Band-Aid solution laced with poison.

Moreover, from a social license standpoint, it’s very questionable whether the agency has the authority to convert the Platte River into its own private plumbing system, with Antero serving as a toilet bowl in its plumbing system that the agency can flush with impunity because it claims ownership.

As to the economic value of the reservoir itself, this the reader should know. It is a valuable destination point for birdwatchers, botanists, and fisherman, generating millions in revenue for local businesses and government in Park County, which are themselves heavily dependent on tourism dollars.

Abundant sunlight and the reservoir’s relative shallowness have combined to create aquatic fecundity and the building blocks for one of the best brown trout fisheries in the state, if not the nation. It is a destination fishery and as such has tremendous public, as well as economic value.

In this regard, some fishery biologists estimate there may be as many as 5 million fish in Antero.   And remember refilling, if it really does occur, will take 3 to 4 years. All in all, it would take at least 4 to 5 years for the reservoir to begin resembling the fishery it was before Denver Water decided to destroy it and create a mudflat. And of course with refilling, the evaporation losses the agency is now attempting to eliminate become a certainty once again.

Denver Water says it will, with the aid of the state, transfer as many of Antero’s fish as it can to other reservoirs, with a success rate and at a cost unknown. They are less forthcoming about avian life that will be displaced by the reservoir’s destruction. Maybe like the fish they can just find another reservoir with lots of rooms for rent.

In 2015, the last time Denver Water drained Anterior, the declared purpose was to raise the dam so that water depth in the reservoir could be raised and thereby fish winterkill, that had been recurrent at this reservoir in the past, could be substantially eliminated to the benefit of the fishery and the public. The agency estimated those rehab costs at between $17 and $20 million. It was completed in 2016 with refilling taking 3 years.

For those unsure or unfamiliar with river formation and flow in Colorado, the following might be of use. The Rocky Mountains run down the middle of the state. Running north to south, the spine of the Rockies, called the continental divide, determines the direction of water flow. Rivers formed on the west side of the divide flow westerly toward the Pacific Ocean. Those formed on the east side, such as the Platte River, flow eastward, eventually meeting the Missouri River and finally the Gulf of Mexico.

There is hardly anyone alive, except for a few notables in D.C.’s black-tie set, that doesn’t know the Colorado River system is in crisis, that some atmospheric scientists predict the annual flow in the river could diminish by 40 percent in this century, thus jeopardizing the domestic safety of the 40 million in western states that rely on the river for their drinking water. We can add to this that the retirement of millions of acres of irrigated farmland in the west are also probable. Some of this land can be measured among the most productive on earth. Few can bear to think that even these projections may be optimistic.

The Platte River and tiny Antero Reservoir are on the flip side of this crisis, indeed the drier side of the continental divide. Thus, predictably, the only real future differences will be those of scale, one is regional, one is local, but the impact on the social collective will be horrific and alike in quality.

Still, very few of the ruling elite in Colorado, those on the east side of the divide, the Platte River side, are sounding the alarm. In fact, Denver Water’s draining of Antero and its vacuous promise that it will soon restore it, suggest it is totally clueless. That there has been little to no objection from the state’s ruling elite suggests cluelessness may be endemic to this small, wealth-worshiping group as well.

The American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote, “the perception of beauty is a moral test.” He also said, that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” Thoreau is lost on the mighty managers at Denver Water. They fail his test. They don’t see Antero as an example of wildness, a thing existing in nature that should create delight and wonderment in the beholder. Clearly, they don’t think this experience can bring about the realization that we are a part of things, not outside them, and that with this realization we bear some moral responsibility for their preservation.

For Denver Water and too many in the ruling class and uber-rich, Antero is simply a commodity to be sold and even destroyed if thereby it can be used to disguise momentarily the coming crisis. They’ve put a price tag on its destruction as something less than $15 million. Large estates in uber-rich Denver enclaves sell for more.

The Never-Ending Nightmare of the Border Wall

William deBuys

 May 4, 2026

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Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it’s still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.

The media’s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one’s journalistic cup runneth over.

The meta-story of the U.S. government’s comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism’s political collaterals, including the “created equal” credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds distinctly irritating. There is simply too much to report on as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its palace under renovation, the king’s signature being prepared to grace the currency, and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.

So, dear reader, it’s not just logical but inevitable that Donald Trump’s border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world’s least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.

Spend Now, Think Later

Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there’s no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4th, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.

Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all-out on all three tactical approaches at the U.S.-Mexico border — patrol, surveillance, and a wall — simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.

In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump told Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, “You’re loaded up on the border.” He essentially admitted that the bill’s munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, “We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built.” The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.

Notwithstanding Trump’s comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void — the most extensive waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also waived more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all — illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed plunged — the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.

Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the norm and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile, or almost $8,000 per foot. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol’s terminally bored agents (giving new meaning to bored-er) sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.

The Non-Monetary Costs Are No Less Astronomical

It’s easy to think of the mostly arid U.S.-Mexico border zone as empty, but biologically it’s a busy place. The grasslands of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, for instance, are home to 17 threatened and endangered species.  For years, existing vehicle barriers, bolstered by remote detection technology, have allowed jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, mule deer, and other wildlife to move back and forth across the valley’s 30 miles of border and disperse according to their ancient ways. A network of 60 remote cameras along that stretch, monitored by the Sky Island Alliance, recorded just one possible migrant per camera every 20 months. Besides being easily patrolled, the valley is also heart-stoppingly beautiful. Nonetheless, DHS intends to double-wall all of it. In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity. And for nothing, save symbolism, bragging rights, and contractor profits.

No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: in cooperation with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, are now engaged in “the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in U.S. territorial history.” “C-wire,” or “razor wire,” is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.

Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it’s now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls — a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity. Someone should explain this deployment to the bighorn sheep of California’s Jacumba Mountains, which are now separated from their key Mexican waterhole by thickets of the nasty stuff, which will become ever more camouflaged and treacherous as grass and brush grow through it.

Buoy, Oh, Buoy, What a Wall!

For treachery, however, it’s hard to top CBP’s plans to “secure” 536 miles of the border in Texas by mooring a chain of cylindrical buoys, linked end to end, down the middle of the Rio Grande. Once in place, the array will look like an orange sausage, five feet in diameter, floating on the river. The anchors and mooring lines, of course, will be invisible. What could possibly go wrong?

This ill-conceived plan offers a retro-snapshot of American life before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law in 1970, back when strip mines and other land-wrecking ventures could be launched with no evaluation of their impact, no public involvement, and no second opinions as to their necessity. The waiver of NEPA and every other environmental constraint means that no modeling of the “Buoy Wall’s” hydrodynamics (that is, its reaction to flooding), if any exists, has been made public.

The Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo, Texas, however, commissioned its own study. The results are unequivocal. The Buoy Wall will be a debris trap during floods, as when a hurricane lodges over the region. It will redirect flows of water and raise water levels, especially in places where it’s paired with river-crowding segments of the wall. And if a section of buoys should break loose from the sandy, unstable riverbed, the likelihood of disaster will soar.

Geomorphologist Mark Tompkins, who authored the report, concludes, “Failures will cause catastrophic flooding, damage and destruction to property, and risks to the health and safety of people near the river corridor.” Thousands of people living adjacent to the river in Laredo and other communities in both Mexico and the U.S. will be put at risk.

Conflicts Brewed and Brewing

Walls have their place. They can be effective in urban areas. But DHS startled more than a few onlookers with plans to build a wall among the cliffs and arid wildlands of Big Bend National Park. Even the sheriffs of West Texas, one of the reddest regions in the country, got riled up. Although DHS may yet fall back to a more sensible “detection technology” alternative for the national park, it has failed to communicate a clear decision, while nearby private lands and Big Bend Ranch State Park remain at risk.

Even worse uncertainty may be brewing in Arizona, where the lands of the Tohono O’odham people, whose presence predates the border by many centuries, are spread on either side of the line. The tribe’s exemplary cooperation with border authorities includes tribal enforcement teams that have helped keep illegal crossings at a historic low. But the rigid minds and hungry contractors of the “CBP industrial complex” remain unsatisfied. The agency’s “smart wall map” indicates that it aims to build a double wall across the Tohono O’odham reservation, splitting apart families, clans, and longstanding webs of relationship.

And then there’s the unhappy Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, which serves Sunland Park, New Mexico. Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. However, there is an unwalled gap at Monte Cristo Rey, a steep-sided peak long considered impractical for barrier construction. Not now, though. Blasting for the Border Wall began on Cristo Rey in March, in time to appall the thousands of Holy Week pilgrims who visit the statue of Christ the King on the mountain’s summit.

The land available to CBP, however, is not sufficient to finish the job on Cristo Rey, and the adjacent landowner, the Catholic Church, refuses to sell. CBP claims it may assert the right of eminent domain, while the church has said it will fight, although its best tool for resistance, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has predictably been among the many laws waived by DHS.

Orgasms for Birders

On a recent trip to the border, I visited one of the most exquisite places in the entire Southwest. To get to it, I drove 40 miles on dirt roads across broken, arroyo-carved desert. The Border Wall was almost always in sight.

Apart from the roadway itself, the commonest evidence of a human presence were signs at the approach to each arroyo: DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, which is good advice in an area where flash floods from local thunderstorms can sweep away a heavy truck. All the arroyos that the road crosses are also crossed by the Border Wall. Floods pile tons of debris against the wall and sometimes the accumulated weight is enough to push the structure down. CBP continues to experiment with designs for swinging water gates, but a durable solution remains unproven.

Between a pair of “lay-bys” — bulldozed flats where the wall contractor has assembled fleets of eighteen-wheelers, excavators, scrapers, dumpers, pickups, bulldozers, loaders, and cement trucks — I veered down a rough track to a steel gate and let myself in. A little way beyond that, I stopped my car beside a lazy creek at the bottom of a canyon. White-barked sycamores and cottonwoods, just coming into leaf, towered overhead. Amid their shadows, the air smelled of duff and wet sand. The birds were not just singing, they were yelling. When I opened a birding app on my phone, the bird-call IDs scrolled by like movie credits.

The canyon has a perfectly good name, but I’ll call it Paradox Canyon in recognition of the contrast between the vigorous life it contains and the brutalist-walled horizon looming above it. During the first Trump administration, the nearest mountain peak was cleaved open like a watermelon, leaving the landscape not just scarred but grotesquely amputated.

The current contractor, Fisher Industries, is no stranger to disassembling and rearranging mountains. Besides installing the standard bollard wall, Fisher is pouring a concrete patrol road at the foot of the wall, portions of which, rising above Paradox Canyon, are so steep that, absent the paving, no wheeled vehicle can climb it.

The next mountain, however, is too steep even for a patrol road. The previous contractor’s employees dubbed the peak “Widow Maker,” and the zigzag scars of switchbacks and ledges by which they gained access to the path of the wall make it easy to understand why.

Fisher is the largest player in the wall-building business. Based in North Dakota, it was the contractor for “We Build the Wall,” a crowd-funded enterprise that got its promoters, including Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally, convicted for fraud. “We Build the Wall” funded Fisher to build 3.5 miles of wall on private land beside the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas. The Department of Justice and the International Boundary Waters Commission subsequently sued Fisher for shoddy work and violation of the boundary treaty with Mexico. The suit has since been settled, with Fisher having agreed to make immediate repairs and carry out future repairs subject to the forfeit of a $3-million bond.

The Paradox Canyon rancher whom I came to visit is philosophical about the wall. The assault on his land began at the end of Trump I and, after a Biden-era pause, has resumed at full strength. The “shock and awe” accompanying Trump’s resumption of office, he says, left no room for negotiating a more sensible path forward. He believes that the symbolism of the wall is its real power, as it channels the fears of the MAGA faithful. The wall, he says, stands for more than shutting out migrants and narcos. It stands for shutting out other complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.

Making War at Home and Abroad

My rancher friend feels that his present task is to weather the storm of wall-building and await a time when wiser heads prevail, when the rush to spend and build might yield to thoughtful redesign, when gaps for wildlife might be installed and properly monitored, and when the wall’s proponents and its enemies might find a “third path.”

Meanwhile, the excavators, scrapers, bulldozers, and haulers carry on. From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power. Both were conceived with disdain for the complexities of the real world. Both serve rhetorical as much as tangible purposes.

The war with Iran has confounded Trump’s expectation of a quick victory. Thousands of gravestones will be its monument. The Border Wall, in its own slow way, will provide another sort of monument. It won’t be the graves of those who died crossing it or flanking it by sea, for they will rarely be marked at all. And it won’t be the local extinctions of plants or animals, for they will simply vanish. It will instead be a tottering, linear, soulless version of Stonehenge — think of it as America’s Steelhenge — built on sand and made of haste, fear, and avarice.

It will memorialize Trump’s success in making America less and less great.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.