Rivers are hard to understand. I grew up in southern New Mexico about a mile from the Rio Grande. As a child, I didn’t think about where the river came from or where it was going. There were many ditches in my town, a capillary system branching off from the river, and it never occurred to me that it was anything less than an unmitigated good to drain a river for irrigation. The infrastructure of hydraulic engineering was so ubiquitous that it created significant distortions in my ability to...
