Film Premier of A Land Made from Water

New video celebrates Boulder’s ditches as vital infrastructure

“Infrastructure” is a word that conjures up images of roads, electric wires, sewers and other human-built accoutrements underlying the superstructure of buildings, houses, and businesses that constitutes a community. But we don’t often think of the “natural” beauty of a place as also having a human-built infrastructure. Boulder author and retired water manager Robert Crifasi would have us think more deeply about the beauty of the Lower Boulder Creek Valley, and the human-built infrastructure of that beauty – the valley’s system of irrigation ditches.

Crifasi wrote a book, A Land Made from Water, about that human-made infrastructure of the valley’s beauty – and also of a diversified set of healthy ecological systems on what had been called by early explorers “The Great American Desert.” 

Now Boulder filmmaker Len Aitken has made Crifasi’s book the basis for a half-hour video of the same name. The new film will be shown at the Dairy Arts Center Monday evening July 24, at 6:00- p.m., with Crifasi, Aitken, and scriptwriter George Sibley present. 

Many Boulderites are not aware of the system of irrigation ditches that flow through city neighborhoods. Yet there are many miles of ditches in the city serving farms downstream and some serving the growing crop of Boulder “urban farmers” who supply the farmers' markets and CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture.) Other ditches flow into the city’s water treatment plants, providing around 30 percent of the drinking water. Raw water from the ditches irrigates many of the parks and all of the Open Space around the city.

Crifasi, in the book and on the film, points out that most of the estimated 650,000 trees in Boulder’s urban forest would not be here were it not for the ditches; instead the valley would look much like the Rocky Flats area just south of the city. He wonders, in the book, why the creators of the ditches back in the 19th century chose to call them by such a pedestrian name – why not ‘canals’ or a word comparable to the Spanish acequia, with its “mental connotations of villages having deep community roots that one sees across New Mexico.” 

Len Aitken's new film to be shown July 24, like Crifasi’s book, celebrates the vital infrastructure of the Boulder Valley’s “land made from water.”

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