Two years ago, when the level of Lake Mead was hovering near elevation 1,040, my artist wife Lissa Heineman and I drove out over UNM’s fall break to see it for ourselves.

Out beyond the old Boulder Harbor, we walked a half mile across mud flats to get to the water. I could look out across the water to see the elbow of the old Southern Nevada Water Authority intake, above the water line. I was gut-punched by the visceral reality.

On the walk back to the car, Lissa carefully picked up some pieces of cracked mud. Her art has always been wrapped up in the conceptual properties of her materials. So she carefully packed up the cracked mud in a box and took it home. It’s been sitting in her studio ever since, and last month she tried firing some of it atop some small ceramic plates in her kiln.

It worked, and she gave me the results to give to my Lower Basin/Lake Mead friends. The texture of the mud, with ripples across the sandy and muddy reservoir bottom, captures a moment in history I hope we never repeat.

So last week, with the Colorado River brain trust in Santa Fe for the Water Education Foundation’s always-fascinating Colorado River symposium, I drove up to see folks and stuck a couple of Lissa’s pieces in my backpack.

I shared them with a message: That was scary. Let’s not go back there again. Please don’t fuck this up.

I’ve got a lot going on – revisions to the new book, teaching my fall semester graduate-level water resources class, nervously eyeing the levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and the gridlock in Colorado River negotiations. So when my brain suggested listening to Rubber Soul Friday night, I was resistant. But we’ve been together for a long time, and I trust my brain’s judgment. So Rubber Soul it was.

What a great album.

This post is lengthy and rambly, so for those who are annoyed by my discursive side trips and just here for the Colorado River stuff, I’ve added anchors to the key material:

• Rubber Soul
• Path to 1,040
• Game theory and the game of chicken now being played on the Colorado River
• Buy me a coffee

Rubber Soul and my fascination with innovation

When Eric Kuhn and I set out to write Science Be Dammed, the project arose in part out of a mutual fascination with E.C. LaRue, the early 20th century hydrologist who first tried to map out the supply of water, and possible uses of it, across the entire Colorado River Basin. The thing that first drew me to LaRue, long before I knew Eric, was the fundamental innovation of what LaRue and the others working at the time on similar projects were doing. No one had ever tried to envision managing a continental-sized river at the full basin scale.

In an entirely different context and framework, it’s a theme Bob Berrens and I take up in our new book Ribbons of Green, about the making of a city.

The first time I remember thinking hard about this was when Lissa, my sister Lisa, and I saw the Hermitage exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986. It was a magnificent sweep of early modern painting that had been collected by rich Russians before the revolution. I remember rounding a corner and being gobsmacked by a big Picasso canvas, Three Women, one of the first few cubist paintings that he and George Braque had been making in Paris in 1907-08. Lissa, who understood the history, took me back through the rest of the exhibit to see the roots – the impressionists breaking one way, Matisse another, and Cezanne sweeping them all away with the beginnings of the deconstruction of the picture plane that led to Braque and Picasso.

My own father had been deeply influence by the reverberations of that work, and I had always seen it in Dad’s work, but it wasn’t until Lissa held my hand and walked me through the history that I began thinking about pathways. How does this happen? Once I saw, read, and learned about it once, I became hungry for examples. My intellectual life is now littered with them. I have long since soured on Picasso himself (what an asshole!), but the genre of intellectual journey continues to fascinate.

The most interesting books I’ve read in recent years all document this – Patti Smith’s Just Kids, about the birth of punk and her invention of Patti Smith; Amartya Sen’s memoir Home in the World; Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip Into Another World (I still can’t grasp the music, but his story of innovation is a joy); Stanley Crouch’s biography of early Charlie Parker, Kansas City Lightning. In each case (three memoirs, one not), the innovation is rooted in a deep understanding of the past and foundations, and then the ability to see, out of that, something entirely new. And all four books are ripping good reads.

I love playing this game with the Beatles, because thanks to streaming services it is possible to dive in and listen to them learning on the fly, to watch the way the bar band Beatles learned how audiences responded to the old things and began envisioning something new.

This is metaphor.

The path to elevation 1,040

As we near the Sept. 30 end of the water year, Lake Mead is at elevation 1,064 feet above sea level, twenty feet above where it was when Lissa picked up the cracked mud two years ago.

In 2021-22, it took one year to drop from the 1,060s to the 1,040s. Could this happen again?

The short answer is probably not in a single year, because of a couple of things that have changed since then. But in two years? Yup. Lissa and I could have a chance to collect more 1,040s cracked mud.

The first thing that has changed since 2022 is the release from Lake Powell. In 2022 the Basin was in the midst of its hair-on-fire crisis management because of fears of Powell dropping dangerously low, so the Powell release that year was just 7 million acre feet. This year, it’s 7.48 million acre feet. So more water coming into Mead.

Things are also better on the outflow side. In 2022, the three Lower Basin States used 6.66 million acre feet. This year, the latest forecast number is 6.09 million acre feet.

Between the higher inflows and lower use, the latest midpoint forecast has Mead ending next year at 1,059 feet above sea level, with Reclamation’s most pessimistic model runs (the “minimum probable”) at ~1,054. But the min probable clearly shows risk out at the edge of what our headlights can illuminate right now, of dropping back into the 1,040s again by the summer of 2026.

The game of chicken on the Colorado River

The “game of chicken” is a game theory classic. It involves a conflict which, in the classic storytelling version, involves two drivers headed toward one another on a collision course. We’ll call them “U” and “L”. Each has the option to swerve or stay on course. The best outcome for each driver is for the other to swerve and lose face (water), while the driver who stays the course demonstrates dominance (keeps its water). But if neither swerves, we end up with a catastrophic collision. In the game theory matrix, it looks like this, with the payoffs for each:

	Driver U Swerves	Driver U Stays
Driver L Swerves	(0,0)	(-1,1)
Driver L Stays	(1,-1)	(-10,-10)

 

I’m obviously talking about the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin here, which are at impasse over the Lower Basin’s proposal to cut deeply up to a point (1.5-ish million acre feet total) and, if any deeper cuts are needed, to share them among the two basins.

The Upper Basin’s counter is basically “no.” If deeper cuts are needed, the Lower Basin should make them.

The payoff matrix, though, is a lot more complicated than my toy example above. First, both sides can gamble on good hydrology, which could avert the crash. So even if the impasse remains, the collision is not a sure thing. (In this regard, it’ll be interesting to see how the players’ strategies shift if we have a really bad winter.)

The second is the nature of the collision itself. No one knows quite what it will look like.

In the classic chicken game, both drivers know about the crash that happens if neither swerves. But part of the risk calculation we all have to live with right now is the uncertainty about what happens if the Upper and Lower Basin states can’t come to an agreement. We also have a situation where the nature of the game is changing over time.

Walking down a Santa Fe sidewalk Wednesday evening after dinner, one of my Colorado River friends observed that both sides seem to think that, if the collision comes, they have a winning legal argument.

If you think that, your understanding of what happens in the bottom right quadrant of the matrix, the crash scenario, is very different.

The Upper Basin seems to have convinced itself, at least based on public pronouncements, that it has a winning legal argument in terms of its obligation, or lack thereof, to send water downstream past Lee Ferry. This seems dangerous to me given my understanding of the history and the law, but it doesn’t matter what I think. The Upper Basin seems happy to keep hammering down the road.

Once deliveries past Lee Ferry drop below one of the “tripwire” triggers (82.5maf / ten years or 75/10), the Lower Basin states have nothing to lose by suing. And when that happens, my community’s water supply is at risk if my basin’s lawyers aren’t right.

Crash!

A few years back Kaveh Madhani and Bora Ristic wrote a paper working out the details of a game theory example that seems to fit what we’re currently seeing in the Lower Basin’s proposal to “own” the 1.5 million acre feet of structure deficit, and to try to negotiate some sort of sharing arrangement if the cuts need to go deeper. This would appear to be what Ristic and Madhani describe as “strategic loss.”

Without foresight into game changes over time, players are blind to the fact that they are in a game of chicken. We model agents with foresight by interconnecting games across time and show how this creates opportunities for “strategic loss” early on, allowing players with foresight to reduce total costs. High future costs can thus be avoided with foresight if the rising costs of inaction are made apparent.

Which seems to model what the Lower Basin has done.

I would prefer to live in the upper left quadrant of the chicken game matrix, where both sides compromise. My values: mindful shared reductions across the basin can leave us all with healthy, thriving communities. I wrote a whole book about this path. But one of my smart friends pointed out something that is a reasonable hypothesis: The model I laid out in that book, written a decade ago, was sufficient on a river that shrinks some, but seems to be failing on a river that has shrunk a lot.

Risti? and Madhani seem to be suggesting a game theoretic path that could get us back on track.

Buy me a coffee

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