How Dry We Are: Colorado's Thirsty New Normal
In his latest essay, Peter Moore turns a reporter's eye and a poet's ear to the one fact Coloradans can no longer ignore: how dry we are. Moore's piece is less a warning than a mirror, reflecting a state that has long marketed itself through snowcapped peaks and rushing rivers while quietly rationing every drop. His central observation—that dryness is not an anomaly but the baseline—cuts through the seasonal panic of fire bans and reservoir levels to ask a harder question: what does it mean to build a civilization on borrowed moisture?
Moore's strength has always been his refusal to moralize, and this essay is no exception. He traces the ways aridity has shaped not just the landscape but the culture—from the irrigation ditches that still carve the Front Range to the lawn ordinances that now govern suburbia. The piece lingers on the quiet rituals of conservation: the shortened showers, the xeriscaped yards, the farmers who watch the sky with a farmer's particular dread. In Moore's telling, these are not sacrifices but adaptations, the slow work of a people learning to live within their means.
Water as the West's Unwritten Constitution
What elevates Moore's analysis is his insistence that water is the region's true governing document. Seniority rights, compact obligations, and the quiet bargaining between cities and farms—these are the real politics of the West, more consequential than any legislative session. Moore reminds us that Colorado's future will not be decided in ballot boxes alone but in the allocation of a finite resource, where every choice carries a hidden cost. His essay is a call to treat water not as a utility but as a shared inheritance, one that demands both humility and foresight.
Ultimately, "How dry we are" is an invitation to stop pretending otherwise. Moore does not offer easy solutions, and he is right not to. Instead, he gives Coloradans a vocabulary for their unease—a way to name the tension between the state's mythic abundance and its actual scarcity. In doing so, he performs the most valuable service a writer can: he makes the invisible visible, and he makes the hard conversation a little easier to begin.