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In its naked irreverence, the image at the Web site of Save the Colorado, an environmental group, is about as different from the public persona of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as the damp sharp-edged sawgrass of the Everglades is from the snow-clad firs of Glacier National Park.

And the headline posted there — “Thank you, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar!– is not the kind of message that environmental groups are accustomed to sending to the cautious Cabinet official, whose policies on everything from oil drilling on federal lands in the West to wild horses have often set them on edge.

But a series of actions on the Colorado River over the last two months have given Mr. Salazar, a fifth-generation Coloradan, a different profile — at least among those who know the history of the river, which has been poorly understood and misused for more than a century.



Dams and other controls have changed the Colorado’s ecosystem in the cavernous reaches of the Grand Canyon and have helped to dry up its delta in Mexico; misreadings of flow data have routinely ensured that pledges for its contents have been overstated. And all the while, more than 33 million people in the two countries have been drawing on its water supplies as states jostle for greater shares of it.

But Mr. Salazar and his deputy, David Hayes, have recently taken a series of actions that environmental groups believe show an understanding of the ecosystem’s past, and its future.

Under a 1920s compact, the federal interior secretary is the “master” of the lower Colorado River and the ultimate arbiter of its water disputes. But what has happened in the past six weeks has little to do with playing Solomon. Instead, efforts that had been percolating in the Interior Department and its Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that actually handles the job of the river’s management, began to surface and bear fruit.

First came the announcement of an agreement with Mexico to share the impacts of both dry and wet years. The accord includes a pledge to help Mexico with the difficult job of rewatering the river delta.

Taylor Hawes, who directs the Colorado River program of the Nature Conservancy, welcomed the accord as “a model for how we need to be doing water management in the future.”

Shortly thereafter, for the second time in four years, the Bureau of Reclamation, working with the National Park Service, released a large volume of water from the Glen Canyon dam in the hope it would stir up the river bottom and replenish the sand bars worn away since the bureau’s last such experiment.

Most recently, the bureau released a long-awaited study on the Colorado’s future. More than anything, the report affirmed the science-based prediction that the river’s water supplies, never as plentiful as early planners had figured, are likely to diminish as climate change brings more, and more severe, droughts.

However obvious the conclusion seems, the study opened an opportunity for the interior secretary to open an unvarnished discussion on the dimensions of the problem. Mr. Salazar was essentially backing a study that said in so many words, climate change is going to be a big problem for the river’s supplies before long and we need to focus on water conservation.

The group Save the Colorado has been gathering signatures for thank-you petitions ever since. It may not be a turning point in the river’s history, but it is certainly a moment worth noting.