Does adjudication have its own environmental history?

I am about to attend the 2010 meetings of the American Society for Environmental History in Portland, Oregon, this coming week (March 10-14). One notion that has seemed both appealing and perplexing is whether there is an environmental history to adjudication in New Mexico. Is this possible? Can a river basin lawsuit have its own environmental history and unintended consequences? What changes in land cover (vegetation, crops) and land use (residential, agricultural, etc..) are provoked by getting sued over water rights?

There are some fantastic water sessions at this year's ASEH whose theme is "currents of change." And I'll be torn three ways, between Southwest water content, East Asian water themes, and European water governance sessions.

One of the real, palpable, observations made in New Mexico on adjudication was how it provoked irrigators to be quite vigilant over their fields. This is old news to irrigators, of course, but nevertheless a good human equivalent to the so-called Hawthorne principle in experimental sciences (sort of): You cannot measure something without affecting that something in the process. Metering of flows, roughly translated, is a form of social policy - people change their behaviors. If farmers had fallowed, or not irrigated, a field intermittently, the presence of (or threat of) adjudication tended to favor aggressive irrigation tactics. Although this blog has already discussed how challenging it is to get a declaration of abandonment or forfeiture of water rights, it is nevertheless a real concern for parciantes and irrigators around the state who fear losing out on their water rights if they don't keep using their rights at least once every five years or so. There are statutes in place that do tie land and water together, but since water is also a commodity in the 1907 code, these have more to do with injury and impairment. So, an interesting hypothesis to test in the future is whether on-going adjudications actually increase water usage in a river basin because of the presence of field surveys, attorneys, hydrologists (etc).

Or as the ancient Egyptian farmers may have reasoned: "Quick, look busy, here comes the Pharaoh!"

(Figure 2 from Water Encyclopedia 2002, frieze depicting irrigators along the Nile River in Egypt)