EVERY FORK IN THE TRAIL

JAMES EKLUND - with greater awareness comes opportunity.

Climate change has not exactly snuck up on us, but it can no longer be denied. With greater awareness comes opportunity.

Where do we go from here?

Policymakers, stakeholders, innovators and advocates in the battle against climate changes impacts are working all the angles. James Eklund brings all those perspectives. He describes himself as a “ranching water lawyer,” and there is no better way to put it. His defining moments came as a little kid, riding horseback on the Norse Sky Ranch with his grandfather, learning a basic of successful ranching; water management. Five generations ago, in 1888, intrepid Norwegians Ole and Mary Gunderson, immigrated to that Rocky Mountains homestead in Plateau Valley in western Colorado. While their descendants grew it to more than 8,000 acres, its legacy of grass-fed beef and land stewardship endured.

Remaining true to those roots, a Stetson-wearing Eklund is still riding the range, and is not surprised to find himself at the Epicenter one of the world’s biggest water crises. He spent years working in the public sector, as legal counsel to former Governor John Hickenlooper and assistant attorney general, specializing in interstate and international water issues. Appointed director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, he oversaw writing of the Colorado Water Plan, a framework to provide resources for a collaboration of projects around water development and conservation.

It has been hailed as the “gold standard” for others to follow.

Colorado is in a tricky position. Its namesake river’s headwaters are just north of Denver in the Continental Divide, but the demand for its water and the power produced from it increases dramatically in the massive watershed to the southwest and into Mexico. It feeds Lake Powell in Arizona and Lake Mead in Nevada, and sustains 40 million people in seven states and 50 Native American tribes……