Dying embers

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Matt Pearce, formerly of the LA Times, shares the sadness I feel about the calling to which I devoted so much of my life:

One of the odd experiences of this week’s local disaster for me was that it was my first in years where I wasn’t working in a newsroom, a privileged position where information from your colleagues pummels you in the face through nonpublic channels like Slack. This time, I’m a civilian. And this time, the user experience of getting information about a disaster unfolding around me was dogshit.

 

 

Lousy Rio Grande snowpack, but the runoff forecast is not as bad as I thought!

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The January NRCS Rio Grande runoff forecast is lousy: a mid-point forecast of 65 percent of average at Otowi (upstream of Albuquerque) and 37 percent of average at San Marcial (downstream of Albuquerque). Based on the current snowpack, I expected worse. Forecaster Karl Wetlaufer, in the email distributing the numbers, explains:

After a wet start to the water year conditions have become drier as of late in the Rio Grande basin. In general January forecasts are for below normal volumes across much of the basin with the exception of some headwaters points in Colorado. This temporal pattern of moisture accumulation has also led to a large discrepancy between water year precipitation and snowpack, as much of the precipitation for the water year was received before the primary snowpack began to accumulate. Forecast models utilize both precipitation and snowpack for forecast values may be higher than you would anticipate in looking at snowpack alone. Particularly in much of New Mexico. It is worth bearing in mind that early season precipitation adds to the soil moisture which can in turn aid in springtime runoff efficiency.

Wetlaufer also reminds us that there’s a lot of snowpack season ahead of us. The numbers above are the median forecast. The one-in-ten wettest side (10 percent exceedence) is ~115% of average at Otowi, and the one-in-ten dry (90 percent exceedence) is less than 20% of average.

Forecast plots here.

Can “Floating Pools” be the template for future management of the Colorado River?

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By Eric Kuhn and Jack Schmidt

The press coverage of the December 2024 Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) meeting mostly focused on the ongoing stalemate between representatives of the Upper and Lower Division States over their competing proposals for how the Colorado River Systems’ big reservoirs will be operated after the 2007 Interim Guidelines terminate in 2026.  The headlines included words such as “turbulent”, “bitter”, “bluster”, and “spar”. Indeed, there was tension in the air, and the potential for interstate litigation was a topic of much discussion both on the formal agenda and in the hallways where, traditionally, progress is often made between competing interests.

While the press focus on the tension and divisiveness was unavoidable, I believe that there were good reasons for some guarded optimism.

For the ongoing effort to renegotiate the post-2026 operating guidelines, a consortium of seven environmental NGOs has also made a detailed proposal.  Their proposal is referred to as the “Cooperative Conservation” proposal. One of the four action alternatives that Reclamation will analyze, Alternative #3, is patterned after the NGO submittal.  At CRWUA, John Berggren of Western Resource Advocates, who along with Jennifer Pitt and others prepared the proposal, made a presentation on the proposal.  Like the other submitted proposals, the cooperative conservation alternative proposes sophisticated operational rules for Lakes Mead and Powell based on combined system storage and actual hydrology. Where the Cooperative Conservation proposal breaks new ground is the concept of a Conservation Reserve Pool, and this idea could lead the basin toward a practical on-the-ground solution. Indeed, the Gila River Indian Community introduced at CRWUA a similar concept in the form of a Federal Protection Pool made up of stored water in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These proposals, taken separately, together, or in some combined and moderated form, might serve as a catalyst for compromise.

As proposed, both the Conservation Reserve Pool and the Federal Protection Pool would be filled with water conserved by reductions in consumptive use and perhaps augmentation from programs in both basins and this water could be stored anywhere in the system. This water would be “operationally neutral” and thus invisible to the underlying system management operating rules. From an accounting perspective, this Pool would “float” above other water in the reservoirs. Floating Pools operate separately from and above the prior appropriation system of water allocation on the Lower River and are invisible to the rules that dictate annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam. Thus, these proposals impart important operational flexibility.  In many ways, Floating Pools split the baby—they incentivize innovative conservation measures that allow participants to find value they would not have been able to realize under the prior appropriation system—yet they insulate the prior appropriation system and thus are more protective of higher-priority water users than operationally non-neutral ICS.  It’s a stretch to say there is something here for everyone, but there may be enough to kick-start otherwise stalled conversations.

In their proposal, the Lower Division States have offered to take up to 1.5 maf/year of mainstem shortages. Where the two basins remain deadlocked is what happens in those years when shortages exceed the amount the Lower Division States are willing to accept.  The Lower Division States have proposed that the two basins share the additional required shortages up to a maximum shortage of 3.9 maf/year.  The Upper Division States have said, “No, because we already suffer large hydrologic shortages in dry years, and we have not used our full compact entitlement; the Lower Division should cover all of the shortages.” In their presentation, however, the Upper Division Commissioners (UCRC members) left the door open for continuing discussions between the two divisions. In his remarks, New Mexico Commissioner Estevan Lopez stated that under what he referred to as “parallel activities”, the Upper Division States might be willing to discuss conserving “100,000, maybe 200,000 acre-feet per year.”

Water in Floating Pools could be used for a variety of purposes including environmental management, fostering binational programs, and supplementing scheduled water deliveries. During his CRWUA presentation, John Berggren mentioned an obvious use for this pool.  Water stored in the Pool by conserved consumptive use programs in the Upper Division States could be used as an Upper Division contribution during years when mainstem shortages to the Lower Division States exceed a negotiated amount.  Of course, the Lower Basin is unlikely to accept Upper Basin creation of Floating Pools made up of water for which there is no current consumptive use. This water is already “system water” and is now being used by existing Lower Basin water agency. Thus, it would be necessary to develop a program to account for and certify savings in the Upper Basin.  Further, the thorny problem of shepherding (legally protecting the conserved water so that it ends up in system storage) needs to be overcome. For a perspective on this issue, see Heather Sacket. Undeveloped Tribal water is a controversial sticking-point in this regard, with strong feelings and strong arguments on all sides.

If the Upper Division States were to conserve 200,000 acre-feet per year for five years and deposit that saved water in a conservation reserve “Floating Pool”, something like 900,000 acre-feet could be available for shortage sharing (after accounting for reservoir evaporation). (We use 900,000 af as an example only, how much water the Upper Division States would have to contribute and maintain in a Floating Pool would have to be negotiated between the two divisions.)  In their presentation, the Lower Division principals pointed out that had their proposal been in place beginning in 2007, there has yet to be a year when shortage sharing would have been required. Note, this conclusion is very sensitive to “initial conditions.” In 2007, total storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell was about 8 maf more than it is today. If the 21st century hydrology continues, shortages greater than 1.5 maf/year are likely to occur.

What would the Upper Division States get in return?  During the term of the new post-2026 operating guidelines (which we all assume will also be “interim”), the Upper Division would benefit by the Lower Division agreeing to remove the threat of litigation over a “compact call.” For a perspective on the potential impacts of a “call” in Colorado see The Risks and Potential Impacts of a Colorado River Compact Curtailment on Colorado River In-Basin and Transmountain Water Rights Within Colorado.

Carefully crafted with appropriate guardrails, Floating Pool concepts can be a catalyst for compromise between the two divisions that give both parties something they need.

How do Floating Pool alternatives fit with the Schmidt, Kuhn, Fleck management approach?  Based on our conversations with the authors of the cooperative conservation proposal, we believe the two approaches agree — that our management proposal fits on top of and complements their proposal quite well.  In my presentation at CRWUA, I emphasized that, like future hydrology, there is great uncertainty in the future needs of the river’s ecosystem and society’s values.  It’s almost a certainty that in the future, prescribed annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam will cause an unacceptable and unanticipated outcome to some river or reservoir resource. When that happens, our flexible management approach and accounting system keeps the basins “whole.”

Is using the concept of Floating Pools as a catalyst to break the stalemate between the two basins without warts? – of course not.  There are important considerations regarding the use of undeveloped water—Tribal or otherwise, and the devil is in the details when it comes to developing appropriate guardrails for annual and total accumulation in such a Pool, the number and type of participants, annual debits, and other important qualifications. Even conserving 100,000 acre-feet per year in the Upper Division States, with acceptable verification, could be a stretch, especially if there is less federal money in the future, as there almost certainly will be.  Finally, it might put off addressing fundamental problems with the law of the river until the new post-2026 operating rules again expire. When they do, the 1922 Compact and 1944 Treaty with Mexico will still be in place, and these agreements collectively allocate 17.5 maf/year of consumptive use on a river that is only producing 13-13.5 maf/year of water at the international boundary (and runoff continues to decline).  What the Floating Pool concept might accomplish is to significantly reduce the temptation and threat of unpredictable interstate litigation, keep the basin’s stakeholders talking to each other, and give us time to move toward more foundational change in how the river is managed.

“the sensation of vastness”

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Desert scrub landscape in the foreground with a ridge of dark mountains in the distance, a blue sky, and a barely visible crescent moon.

The Sandia Mountains, seen from Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Jan. 5, 2025, by John Fleck

We took the New Mexico Rail Runner train north for yesterday’s bike ride to Bernalillo, crossed over the Rio Grande, and worked our way down through the weird neighborhoods of Rio Rancho, New Mexico. The homes in that part of Rio Rancho are scattered one-offs, with a lot of unpaved roads wrapping their way up and down, in and out of arroyos where water has sculpted a desert mesa.

On every one of the ups – every one – were were gifted with these amazing views of a desert valley and the Sandia mountains and their alluvial fans.

Kyle Paoletta has a marvelous description in his terrific new book American Oasis of what it’s like being a westerner living on the east coast.

The only setting I’ve found that can approximate the sensation of vastness bestowed by cresting a ridge in the desert and then watching the titanic bowl of an arid valley extend out the other side is the Cape Cod National Seashore.

We felt that “sensation of vastness” approximately umpty times yesterday as we topped one rise after another. It never gets old.

(Kyle’s book will be out next week, I strongly recommend it, I’ve got an advance reader copy, and I’ll be having a conversation with Kyle Jan. 23 at Bookworks in Albuquerque if you’re in this particular town.)

2024 on the bike

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Large red dinosaur sculpture surrounded by a low fence with a bicycle leaning against the fence and the shadow of the photographer poking into the bottom right corner of the picture.

Shadow selfie with dinosaur and bike.

My usual Sunday riding buddy was gone last week, so I took my road bike out for a longer-than-usual spin, out past the dinosaur sculpture I call “My Red Friend.” I got the requisite Blake’s breakfast burrito early (they’re the right shape to fit in a bike shirt pocket, and properly nibbled over time can fuel four or five hours on the bike, which is as much as I’m capable of).

Most of my long Sunday rides these days are on my e-bike, a happy accommodation for my age. But I’d been riding the road bike lately for my around-town rides, and it’s so much fun – light, playful.

I’ve been riding since forever, raced a bit (and poorly) when I was younger, but it’s only been in the last decade, in my crazy new life as an academic, that I’ve had the work life flexibility to ride as much as I want. This year, that was an average of an hour a day (364 total hours on the bike through Dec. 29), and it’s a very important hour.

I read an essay (I can’t find it, sorry.) a few years back by a neuroscientist who also was a cyclist and meditated, about cycling and flow. Flow, popularized by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the experience of being so connected with an activity that everything else slips away. At its best, cycling offers that up for me, as I move through space and my mind is fully enveloped in the space I’m moving through, and the activity of moving through it. Part of it I suppose is the rhythmic nature of the pedaling. Part of it is feeling one with the bike, like it’s an extension of my body. (The road bike above, my All-City, does that. The e-bike less so – it’s big and demands my body’s attention to muscle it in a way that the road bike doesn’t. I have to think more on the e-bike.)

The bike rides over the last five years became an integral part of the research for our book, which is about Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande. There were some specific “book research” rides, to see specific places and things we were writing about. But the more important connection was the sense of the relationship between the human and natural landscape that came from moving across that landscape over and over again on a bike – the feel I got for the geography, the intuitions about how the pieces of our community fit together.

As you can see from the map below, I ride everywhere.

Bernalillo to Belen

Map of Central New Mexico with colored square tiles along the Rio Grande from top to bottom.

2024 on the bike

The combination of the Rail Runner (New Mexico’s commuter train) and the e-bike made it possible again this year to cover the Rio Grande Valley from Bernalillo on the north to Jarales on the south, more than 50 miles of river valley (Not all at once!). We GPS all our rides, and a “tile” (squares a bit more than a mile on a side) is colored if I visited it over the course of the year.

Without meaning too, it seems I rode nearly all of urbanized Albuquerque, short a few neighborhoods in the far northwest and out on the edges of Rio Rancho. Goal for 2025!

Of special note on this map are those scattered squares up in the mountains east of town. Those are hikes. Between my bad knee and arthritic feet, I’d resigned myself to never hiking again, but diligent physical therapy and ridiculously expensive marathon shoes have opened up a new kind of flow. (I cannot run a marathon. I can barely run across a street if a car is coming. But the carbon fiber plates in fancy marathon shoes really help my feet.)

One of the games we play is Wandrer. You feed it your GPS traces and Wandrer’s elves figure out which roads you’ve ridden, and which roads you haven’t. It’s a hoot (“Number go up!”), encouraging me to visit new places. I’ve been riding in weirdly wandering ways for so long that there are fewer and fewer roads in Albuquerque I haven’t ridden, but I’ll never run out. Between that and the tiling games (that’s “tiling” on the map on the right) there is endless gamification of the bike ride, even for an old guy for whom going fast is no longer an option.

Final 2024 stats

With two days to go, including all my hikes and walks and such:

  • Total distance: 3,581 miles
  • Total tiles: 355
  • Total time: 574 hours
  • Total new Wandrer miles, Bernalillo County: 252
  • Eddington number (the largest value for “n” such that I’ve gone “n” miles on “n” days this year): 31 miles, 43 km

Inkstain 2024 – y’all really like Eric Kuhn’s writing

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If traffic to this blog is an indicator, y’all are really interested in thoughtful independent analysis of the standard talking points in the Colorado River negotiations. Also, the work of my longtime collaborator Eric Kuhn (which is unsurprising, I’ve long been really interested in Eric’s work).

Three of the four most-read Inkstain posts this year were Eric’s (one of the three a double-byline piece with me):

  1. No Simple Disputes, Eric’s explanation of the problems posed by the failure to define “consumptive use,” and how that failure weakens the Upper Basin’s argument about Lower Basin tributary use. (Eric’s version is wonky, I came back a day later to de-wonkify it for Inkstain readers, though Eric’s technical version got way more reads.)
  2. The Compact Tripwire, a post Eric and I wrote together on the risk of total Upper Basin deliveries past Lee Ferry dropping below 82.5 million acre feet over a ten-year period, and the risk of Compact litigation that sets up.
  3. What happens if there is no agreement on post-2026 Colorado River Management is Eric’s dive into the rules that would apply if we don’t have any agreement or federal intervention – Eric’s version of the “no action alternative.”

(The fourth was a weird riff on the Russian anarchist thinker from the late 1800s-early 1900s Peter Kropotkin, a pair of wire cutters, and a pedestrian alley behind the gas station by my house. It had a bit of a viral moment, though my efforts to think through the connection between Kropotkin and Colorado River governance failed.)

The Rio Grande cutthroat trout and the Endangered Species Act

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Map showing former habitat of Rio Grande cutthroat trout in blue, spread across the mountains of Northern New Mexico and Colorado, and current habitat in red, much smaller.

Courtesy New Mexico Department of Game and Fish

The US Fish and Wildlife Service earlier this month (December 2024) once again declined to list the Rio Grande cutthroat trout as “endangered.”

It’s a native species endangered (in the colloquial sense, not the legal sense) by both anthropogenic habitat changes (warm temperatures, less water, dams and stuff) and non-native immigrant species.

USFWS identified non-native hybridization and competition as the most significant threat, and concluded that collective action by a collaborative effort including federal, state, and tribal governments, along with NGOs, has successfully stabilized the fish’s population since discussion about possible listing first began a quarter century ago.

The 119 populations are distributed across a wide geographic area, providing sufficient redundancy to reduce the likelihood of large-scale extirpation due to a single catastrophic event. Furthermore, the Rio Grande cutthroat trout Conservation Team has a demonstrated track record of responding to negative events to protect and even expand populations in the aftermath of large-scale changes to streams. Populations cover the breadth of the historical range, ensuring retention of adaptive capacity (i.e., representation) to promote short-term adaption to environmental change. The SSA report describes the uncertainties associated with potential threats and the subspecies’ response to these potential threats, but the best available information indicates the risk of extinction is low. Therefore, we conclude that the Rio Grande cutthroat trout is not in danger of extinction throughout all of its range and does not meet the definition of an endangered species.

ESA questions

I’ve not followed the Rio Grande cutthroat trout saga closely. My primary interest is in its value in highlighting broader issues around the ESA that my Utton Center colleagues and I have been discussing of late.

Collective action

Collective action by a broad coalition of stakeholders before ESA listing seems to have been key in protecting what’s left of the species and avoiding listing.

Question: Is this driven by a societal environmental value (We love this fish and the ecosystems on which it depends, and want to protect them!) or a desire to avoid the messiness of ESA listing and the resulting land and water management craziness that would result therefrom?

In the new book, we note a clear distinction between these two types of cases in the history of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande: environmental actions growing out of collective community values, and environmental actions driven by statutory (in this case ESA) mandates.

Charisma

Trout, with red behind its gills and pinkish side body.

Charismatic?

We know that charismatic species get more societal love. (Woe is our diminutive Rio Grande silvery minnow.) The Rio Grande cutthroat trout is charismatically beloved. Does this help explain the energetic collective action we’ve seen?

Loper Bright for the “foreseeable future”

Reading the USFW federal register notice in light of the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision, is interesting. IANAL, but my shorthand for the decision is that the courts no longer must defer to an implementing agency’s interpretation of ambiguous statutory provisions. Here’s USFWS in the cutthroat trout decision:

The Act does not define the term “foreseeable future,” which appears in the statutory definition of “threatened species.” Our implementing regulations … set forth a framework for evaluating the foreseeable future on a case-by-case basis…. The foreseeable future extends as far into the future as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service (hereafter, the Services) can make reasonably reliable predictions about the threats to the species and the species’ responses to those threats. We need not identify the foreseeable future in terms of a specific period of time. We will describe the foreseeable future on a case-by-case basis, using the best available data and taking into account considerations such as the species’ life-history characteristics, threat projection timeframes, and environmental variability. In other words, the foreseeable future is the period of time over which we can make reasonably reliable predictions. “Reliable” does not mean “certain”; it means sufficient to provide a reasonable degree of confidence in the prediction, in light of the conservation purposes of the Act.

Maybe language like that was always included in USFW Federal register notices? I expect a lot more post-Loper Bright debates about what Congress intended.

Ruscha and Wittgenstein

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A board for the game Scrabble with the words “emu” and “mug” spelled out with game tiles.

A fine word.

 

We had a round of holiday Scrabble this afternoon after first feast. I got “emu,” which is a fine word.

I never really got Ludwig Wittgenstein when I was studying philosophy in college. A lost opportunity. I’ve always been interested in words as objects, since I was a kid scribbling in notebooks, before my first typewriter.

Magical – written words on a page, objects, little vessels of meaning.

Ed Ruscha

It might have been the Spam.

In 2003, the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles showed a group of photographs taken in 1961 by the artist Ed Ruscha. Among them was a photograph of a can of Spam. Here is the Ruscha scholar Lisa Turvey:

Each Product Still Life features a single consumer item-Oxydol bleach, Sherwin-Williams turpentine, Wax Seal car polish-on what appears to be a shelf, shot frontally in black and white against a solid backdrop. As exhibited, these works foretold the photographic practice treated in the rest of the small show: Ruscha went on to use such artless viewpoints to picture vernacular subjects, stripped of affect, in artist’s books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations(1962) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965).

Among the pictures at the Gagosian in 2003 was a photograph of a can of spam. It was a sketch of sorts of Ruscha’s later painting Actual Size, which has “SPAM” in big type, the typeface from the can, and an actual size can of spam flying through space. It’s hilarious. It’s hard for me to place what I first saw when and where, but I likely saw Ruscha’s Spam can at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the 1970s as a teenager, along with other artists who were playing with words and type – Jasper Johns I’m pretty sure among them. (I would normally give you an image, but I haven’t found any that I’m confident are freely shareable.)

I’m done with revisions to the new book, so I’ve let my brain off leash for the first time in a while and it’s been over sniffing at the art.

Ruscha’s L.A., so my roots, and also a goofball. In 1966 he mounted a camera in the bed of a pickup truck, photographed every building on the Sunset Strip, and published them all as a 25-foot-long foldout book. “Pop” or maybe “conceptual artist,” whatever, I’m not here to pick a fight. It’s his words that interest me.

Ruscha, who worked briefly in advertising (a handy explanation?) plucked words out of language and hung them on gallery walls.

Spam.

Later Wittgenstein

The key to later Wittgenstein (there were sorta two of him) is his oft-quoted linguistic bon mot – “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.” I love this, because it recognizes language as a fundamentally social thing – it’s us, in conversation, iterating as we sort out meaning, a rejection of an “essentialist” notion of meaning in favor of looking at how we actually use language.

This is what’s so intriguing about Ruscha’s use of words in his art. He would make these big paintings of a word – “OOF,” “SPAM,” “HONK,” or his later work when he expanded to whole sentences! “ALL WE HAVE IS NOW.”

I stand there. I look. I bring my language to the exchange, and try to understand Ruscha’s. Is it an exchange? Does it matter what the artist *meant* when he picked *that* word?

Wittgenstein defines the meaning concept with something he calls “language-games” – the contextual frame around the type of communication we’re involved in when we’re using words in a particular way. Ruscha made a new language-game, and treated it like an actual *game*. Rip a word out of its context and hang it on a gallery wall!

This is the magic of Scrabble. It’s like an afternoon at a Ruscha retrospective, words ripped one at a time from their context, an aesthetic built around game play but also the intricate relationships of text and meaning. “Emu!”

Lousy start to the Colorado/Rio Grande 2024-25 snowpack season

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Evaporative Demand Drought Index map for four weeks beginning Dec. 21, 2024, showing high risk of drying across the Rio Grande and Colorado River headwaters.

Falling behind.

I was talking to Eric Kuhn Thursday (write a book together – bonded for life) who pointed out that the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center has started running its models for 2025 runoff. They don’t look good.

It’s way too early to think of this as a “forecast.” But they provide a feel for where we’re at now: Do we have a good head start? Are we already behind? The error bars are still huge, with a lot of upside potential, but we are already behind – 1.4 million acre feet below median for Lake Powell inflow.

The current climate forecast headlights, which can at least dimly illuminate the next month for us, don’t look good. The US Drought Monitor folks publish an experimental forecast tool called the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI).

EDDI uses the federal Climate Forecast System model, an operational model to help gauge conditions over the coming months. CFS is then coupled with tools to estimate evaporative demand – not simply how much snow we’re going to get, but how rain and snow interact with temperature and atmospheric moisture, all of which play roles in the system that sends water from the snowpack in the Rockies to headgates and kitchen taps across the West.

EDDI says that over the next month, we should expect the CBRFC’s runoff forecast to go down, not up. We’re falling behind.

Why this matters

The obvious reason this matters is its direct relationship with this year’s water management. Will Powell and Mead go up or down? What does that mean for near term water supply?

But we’re also all playing multiple games of four-dimensional chess trying to anticipate how the near term runoff scenarios influence long term negotiations over Post-26 river management. One of my little projects right now is to step back from my normative angst (where “normative angst” == John’s super pissed off about the negotiators’ abject failure) to think about the deeper negotiation theory stuff going on.