Vanishing Colorado’s goal is to move beyond conventional conservation narratives which pit users versus nature or city folks versus rural farmers. Instead we begin by presenting a current picture of our dwindling reservoirs, growing population and seemingly irrational legal structure and ask, how did we get into this situation in the first place. This leads to a brief history of the entire Colorado River Basin from geologic time, to various Indigenous Peoples and their relationships with water, to John Wesley Powell, his survey and finally the Bureau of Reclamation’s monumental 20th Century projects that allowed our civilization to expand to its current state. Finally we take viewers into the future, starting with a worst case scenario where Federal and State Governments, bankrupt from decades of mismanagement and increasingly brutal natural disasters caused by climate change, unravel leaving each citizen to fend for themselves in a dystopian nightmare where the powerful subjugate the weak and poor.  And just like Ebenezer Scrooge, we are left with the chance to make changes. We conclude by exploring the ways to avoid collapse both by conserving water and by creating new water (aka augmentation). The documentary focuses on actual quantities of acre-feet of water to help put a unifying perspective on all of the ways that change could happen. It exists in nine distinct parts which makes it a simple matter to transform this concept from a feature length documentary into a series.