Robert A Brenner
In 2026, the American West is running out of water. Lake Powell sits at 23 percent of capacity. Colorado’s snowpack is the worst since records began in 1941. The Colorado River compact governing water allocation for 40 million people expires October 1, 2026 with no agreed replacement framework.Western Water Resilience: A Regenerative Infrastructure Doctrine for the American West proposes the Western Water Coalition - a state-led, tribally co-governed, self-financing regional water authority modeled on a 96-year-old non-federal agency that has successfully protected the Tennessee Valley rivers for nearly 100 years.Built on seven founding principles and where costs are off-set by five self-sustaining revenue streams, the coalition addresses the six structural mismatches that have made every previous western water governance framework insufficient: scale, jurisdiction, timeframe, financing, framing, and federal dependency.Every technology proposed in this framework operates at commercial scale today. The gap between what exists and what is deployed is governance and investment, not engineering. This paper proposes the scaled governance architecture that closes that gap - before it is too late, 'Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink.' 6
