There’s a saying used in Washington to describe the woes of conserving large sums of Colorado River water amid one of the worst droughts in the history of the Western United States. It was supposedly coined by the man who oversees Nevada’s largest water agency. “Here’s the fundamental problem: We have a 19th-century law and 20th-century infrastructure in a 21st-century climate,” says John Entsminger, the general manager at the Southern Nevada Water Authority. It’s a phrase he and others began to use throughout negotiations between the seven states dependent on the Colorado River for its water before they reached a tentative deal in May to conserve roughly 3 million acre-feet of water through 2026.

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