A farm worker adjusts sprinkler heads spraying water that comes from the Colorado River, near El Centro, Calif. | David McNew/Getty Images

By ANNIE SNIDER

12/12/2023 05:00 AM EST

EL CENTRO, California — When the highest stakes water negotiations in a century opened this fall, the largest, most powerful state — California — was represented by the youngest person at the table, a 27-year-old named John Brooks Hamby, who graduated from college barely four years ago.

In the short time since then, Hamby — who goes by J.B. — has risen from recent Stanford grad to candidate for his hometown irrigation district to chair of the Colorado River Board of California, a position that makes him the state’s lead negotiator for its rights to the West’s most important river.

With climate change dramatically shrinking the waterway’s flows, the seven states that share the river must now decide how to allocate deep, painful cuts in water use that will determine the future of communities across a huge swath of the country. Whether Hamby can navigate the reflexive defensiveness of this region’s hardened farmers matters not just to his own political future. It could determine the fate of a broad swath of the American West.

To the waterway’s power players and intelligentsia, whose annual meeting convenes Wednesday in Las Vegas, Hamby has come to represent the hope for a new way to resolve the generations-deep conflicts over the Colorado River.

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