Garlic in the garden

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Delicate white flowers, with iris leaves and pinyon in the background and rocks in the foreground.

When did we plant garlic?

Sitting on our front porch the other day, Lissa and I were trying to remember when we planted the garlic. We’ve been in this house for more than three decades, and the garlic in the front yard was an early experiment. So at least a quarter century, we figure.

It’s been feral for years, along with one of the grains (barley?) that spilled out of an old bird feeder and the persistent remnants of the redbud trees we inherited from the first owner. The iris sort of fits in this category too, separated and spread out and added to over the years, built off of a single small patch that was there when we bought the house in the early 1990s.

I’ve written before in this space about the idea of garden in the new book Bob Berrens and I are writing about Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande. Here’s a bit from the book’s opening chapter, which I was working on again this morning as I work on revisions based on the editorial feedback we’ve gotten:

Throughout its history, the English word “garden” has done yeoman’s work, traveling with us as we made a modern world. At its simplest, it is a noun describing a place behind the house where we grow flowers, vegetables, and perhaps a few fruit trees. At its most expansive, it is “a region of great fertility.” Kent was “the Garden of England,” “known for its abundance of fruit and crops.” The province of Touraine was “the Garden of France.” But it is the noun’s interplay with garden’s verb form that does the word’s linguistic heavy lifting – “to bring a landscape into a particular state” – to mindfully and intentionally change the land on which we live.

It’s the verb form, at its most expansive, that Bob and I are playing with in the book – the deliberate transformation of Albuquerque’s piece of the Rio Grande Valley in a way that defines modern Albuquerque’s identity. But like our front yard with its feral garlic, the river and the valley in part are doing their own thing, in a tension between individual agency, collective agency, and the underlying reality we face in shaping our urban environment.

The Rio Grande keeps pushing back against our efforts.

It’s also a contested space (this bit of the analogy goes beyond our garlic-infested front garden), with conflict over who gets to define the gardening goal, something that underscores the power dynamics inherent in collective action as we garden the river valley floor. Lissa and I have no such tension in our garden. Lissa is the artist. I love helping her carry out her vision.

But like our front yard garlic patch, a feral sprinkling amid one of the recently added iris beds, it’s an ongoing process. A garden is never done.

 

Emerging Values and Institutional Reform on the Colorado River

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Lorelei Cloud and John Berggren had a really important piece on Colorado River governance in the Colorado Sun last month that has not received sufficient attention.

The challenge, they argue, is the lack of the institutional framework we need to address evolving societal values around the river’s management in a changing world.

Cloud is Vice-Chairman of the Southern Ute Tribe and has become a major voice in the effort to rethink the role of indigenous people in management of the Colorado River. Berggren, now at Western Resource Advocates, is the author of one of the most insightful analyses of Colorado River governance we’ve had in recent years. (I hope that link works for folks, this might also.)

They catalog the remarkable efforts within the last decade or more to create new frameworks for Tribal involvement in Colorado River governance, notably the Ten Tribes Partnership and the Water and Tribes Initiative. Here’s Cloud:

When I was first elected to the Southern Ute Tribal Council in 2015, I was asked to participate in the Ten Tribes Partnership, or TTP, which is a coalition of the 10 Tribes along the Colorado River focused on securing and using tribal water. After one year, I was asked to chair TTP.

I drew on my personal and spiritual connection to water and started learning about the complex legal and technical issues related to managing water in the American West. I was stunned to learn that Tribes have historically delegated to have little to no role in managing Western water, and that tribal needs and interests are often marginalized.

The challenge, as Berggren documented in his thesis, is a set of water management institutions – by “institutions” here I mean the formal rules we wrote to manage water – which are antecedent to the government agencies and political power centers that emerged to carry them out – created to allocate water for municipal and agricultural use.

Because those rules were allocative in nature, the government agencies and political power centers that emerged to carry them out focused almost entirely on carving up the water supply and getting it efficiently to farms and cities. Which worked great, until it didn’t. As the twin challenges of climate change and evolving values emerged, those institutional structures have proven maladaptive.

But it’s a path dependence from which it is hard to dislodge ourselves as new, changing values emerge. These new values (“New” here seems weird, the indigenous communities represent the oldest values! Maybe “newly recognized”?) don’t have a seat at the table.

Like Tribes, environmental interests have mostly taken a backseat to the use of the Colorado River for municipal and agricultural purposes. Most adjustments to address cultural and ecological values have been treated as subservient to the allocative laws that largely service municipal and agricultural interests.

Returning to the primary purpose of the 1922 Compact, we believe that providing for the equitable use of water includes substantive and procedural elements. There’s a huge difference between how the Colorado River is managed for multiple values (substance) and how people who care about such issues determine what ought to happen (process).

I don’t know if their proposed solution, is the right one:

an ongoing, whole-basin roundtable that would embrace the entire transboundary watershed, address the major water issues facing the basin, and, importantly, provide an equitable process to engage all four sets of sovereigns (United States, Mexico, seven basin states and 30 Tribal nations), water users and stakeholders.

But if not this tool, then what should we do instead?

 

The search for enduring solutions on the Colorado River

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Kathryn Sorensen & Sarah Porter, Kyl Center for Water Policy, Morrison Institute for
Public Policy, Arizona State University; John Fleck, Utton Transboundary Resources
Center, University of New Mexico School of Law

Colorado River Basin governance is increasingly struggling with a deep question in water management: When we reduce our use of water, who gets the savings?

If I install more efficient irrigation equipment, should I get credit for the saved water to expand my acreage, or save the water in an upstream reservoir as a hedge against next year’s drought? If I tear out lawns, can I use the saved water to help build the next subdivision, or save the water in an upstream reservoir as a hedge against that next year of drought?

Or should the savings contribute, not to my own resilience and well-being, but to the resilience and the well-being of the system as a whole by simply reducing overall water use?

In a deeply insightful 2013 book, British scholar Bruce Lankford bestowed the unfortunately wonky name of “the paracommons” to this question, and it dogs water policy management around the world.

This issue has been lurking in Colorado River management for a long time. Should we create legal structures that allow users to bank the savings for their own use later? Or should the reductions benefit the health of the system as a whole? There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and we need to design new rules for managing the Colorado River with our eyes open on this question.

Assigned Water

In a new paper, we explore the implications of the two paths for the management of a post-2026 Colorado River.

One is to incentivize conservation by giving water users the chance to bank saved water for later use. Known most commonly as Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS), and more broadly in a series of increasingly creative implementations as “Assigned Water,” this creates short term savings.

The other involves permanent reductions – “System Water.” Water use is reduced for the benefit of the Colorado River as a whole.

In more than a decade of experimentation with these policy tools, we have seen the results. Investment in Assigned Water, attractive to water managers because of the allure of getting their water back, has crowded out investment in the more durable System Water reductions that will be needed to bring the Colorado River into balance.

As we develop new operating rules for the river, we need to be mindful of the differences involved.

Assigned Water does not solve the problem of overallocation because when it is deployed we are borrowing against our own bank.  Enduring solutions on the river can only be found by addressing overallocation.

  • Assigned Water creates critically important operational flexibility; it allows its owner to either forgo water deliveries in one year—or pay someone else to—and take delivery of that water during another potentially desperate time.
  • Assigned Water is generally insulated from shortage, forfeiture and abandonment.
  • Protection from shortage and forfeiture has value; Assigned Water creates individual resilience for its owner. Because of this, the availability of Assigned Water appears to crowd out investment in collective resilience in the form of System Water.
  • In conversations about post-2026 operations negotiators are contemplating extending, enlarging and/or enhancing Assigned Water and/or creating an operationally neutral form called Top Water. In any form, Assigned Water lives outside of the existing priority system.  In this regard, the conversation involves the reallocation of water in Lakes Powell and Mead.

Critics of the West’s priority system of water delivery can rejoice—nearly 40% of the water in Mead in 2023 was Assigned Water, meaning that Assigned Water is replacing priority to a significant degree. But is the priority system like capitalism in that it has its warts but the alternatives are far worse?  As the expansion of the rights of municipal water providers, irrigation districts, foreign nations and tribes to own even more and different kinds of Assigned Water is contemplated for a post-2026 world, consideration should also be given to how these changes may also inure to the benefit of environmental non-governmental organizations, hedge funds and water speculators. Those who share John Wesley Powell’s fears will understand the implications because the expansion of Assigned Water in Lakes Powell and Mead may bring about the ultimate divorce of priority-based water rights from arid lands in the Colorado River Basin.

There are important elements of transparency and fairness at play.  The large, powerful players on the River received Assigned Water through negotiations not available to others—meaning, there was no open bidding process or invitation to smaller entities to acquire this valuable water. Apparently, there still isn’t.  Thought ought to be given to those other stakeholders—smaller cities, farmers, tribes and others—who have made investments and built economies based on the priority system.  Imagine a restaurant that operates on a first-come-first-serve basis and a hungry patron who waits patiently in line for the doors to open only to be told that the rules changed while he was waiting and all of the reservations have been claimed through a process from which he was excluded.

It is helpful to continue to deploy a tool as flexible and alluring as Assigned Water, particularly in the form of operationally neutral Top Storage, so there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. A reasonable path forward may be to allow the creation of Top Storage with appropriate guardrails while including a 50% cut for System Water. Post 2026, Assigned Water will be so valuable that entities likely will be willing to take a big haircut to get it, and such a required contribution solves the problem of developing enduring funding for System Water to a significant degree.  Maybe ultimately environmental non-governmental organizations, hedge funds and water speculators get a piece, but if so, it will be at the price of protecting and respecting the priority system upon which so many depend.

Finding Albuquerque’s Northeast Passage

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A narrow irrigation canal runs alongside a dirt path bordered by green vegetation and trees. The scene depicts a rural, sun-dappled landscape with blue sky overhead.

The Griegos Lateral, a Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District irrigation canal in Albuquerque’s North Valley. Also a lovely bike route!

I left for my Sunday morning bike ride today as early as an alarm, coffee, and breakfast would allow – to beat the heat.

To structure the route, I set myself a puzzle: to ride from Albuquerque’s Old Town, paralleling the Rio Grande to the north, all the way up the valley to the north with a minimum – ideally zero – time spent on busy streets. There’s no way to avoid crossing busy streets, which are like alligator-filled moats. And there are a couple of quite safe routes on small main roads with good bike lanes. But – my puzzle, my rules – those were off limits.

This of course would be trivial on the riverside bike trail, but, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, nobody rides that trail any more on the weekends – it’s too crowded.

I’ve ridden the north valley many dozens of times, and had a rough idea in my mind of the puzzles pieces I needed to assemble – a handful of twisty old country lanes, interconnecting ditchbanks, crucial alligator moat crossings, the critical breakfast burrito stop. But part of the fun was assembling the pieces on the fly, so I didn’t want to over plan.

A friend and I have done this on the west side of the river – we dubbed it the “Northwest Passage.” But we’ve strangely never done it on the river’s east side. So “Northeast Passage” was the goal as I set out before sunup this morning.

This is really about the book

This is, of course, a misdirection.

We got the latest round of editorial feedback last week for Ribbons of Green, the book Bob Berrens and I are writing. The feedback was useful, in particular in showing areas where the points we are trying to make did not come through with sufficient clarity.

I’m excited to dive back in, but there is this personal temporal challenge in writing a book. You spend a bunch of time writing, fully immersed, you hand it off into an editorial process, and then you go on to thinking about other things. And then the manuscript returns, months later, in need of love and attention.

Much of what I’m thinking about overlaps with the issues in the book, but writing a book, and now revising it, are full brain activities. I need to yank my brain back into Ribbons of Green.

So I spent six hours this morning riding my bike, slow AF, through our book’s landscape.

The Old High Ground

Exterior of a southwestern-style building with tan walls and red tile awnings. A bicycle is parked in front of brick steps leading to the entrance. The building appears to be a local business, with a sign visible above the door. The scene is set against a backdrop of a partly cloudy sky at sunup.

Sunup in Old Town

I hit Old Town, the plaza where one of greater Albuquerque’s villages was founded in 1706, around sunup. Like all the key human landmarks of the old landscape, it was built on slightly higher ground, a pattern that left traces that define the modern landscape in ways that show up, again and again, in the book.

The ditches and old twisty roads follow that slightly higher ground – that feature of the landscape was central to the bike riding puzzle.

Modern Albuquerque Old Town is a wonderful combination of cheesy tourist fluff and community center. The San Felipe de Neri Catholic Church was built on its current site on the plaza’s north side in 1793, but the parish dates to the village’s founding in 1706. As I rode through the center of the plaza, people were converging for early mass. It’s still a working church.

A couple of alleys to the west led me to Gabaldon Road, which turns north at what was once the edge of the river’s flood plain. The Rio Grande’s main channel, pinned between levees, is now nearly half a mile to the west, and this part of former flood plain is filled with houses. The road passes what was once Palmer’s Slough, where city kids in the early 20th century would go swimmin’, and sometimes drownin’, until they filled it in because of pestilence and whatnot and built houses on top of it.

Gabaldon met my “country lane” puzzle rule, but the Duranes ditch, which for over 300 years has been spreading water across the flood plain for human use, was even better. It jogs north through a modern subdivision called Thomas Village, built on an old swamp. Modern subdivisions are often built atop old swamps, land that was available as the swamps were drained.

The Duranes does significant work in our narrative – a centuries-old irrigation ditch that serves as a modern urban amenity, irrigating a bit, and shading the ditch walkers. And bicyclists!

Guadalupe Trail

After a couple of ditchbank miles to the heading of the Duranes, I switched over to the Griegos Lateral (“before 1800” in my 19th century guide to the ditches of Albuquerque) until I hit one of the modern drains. “Modern” is a relative term here. In a landscape threaded with ditches dating to the 1700s, the Griegos Drain is a youngster at 90-plus years old. The drains were crucial to the making of modern Albuquerque, lowering the water table and allowing a city to emerge from the swamps.

The drains are also crucial to low-stress cycling, with big wide service roads. They’re not always rideable – they can get sandy, and drainside riding can lead to a good deal of walk-a-bike through the sandiest bits. And they’re mostly not nearly as shady as the irrigation ditches. But the Griegos Drain is special to Bob and I, because it’s where we first dug down into the old maps in detail to understand the relationship between the old swamps and the modern city. Crossing the alligator moat at Montaño Boulevard, I followed the ditchbank past what was labeled a “lake” in the 1920s map, a swampy piece of land owned by Melquiades Montaño now home to a city-owned expanse of farmland.

With the water table lowered by more than a half century of urban groundwater pumping, the drain doesn’t have a lot to do these days, and its northern reaches have been abandoned, so I jogged east to a lovely street called Guadalupe Trail. It’s one of the old ones, twisting and starting and stopping, pavement laid down on an old wagon route through the North Valley. When I first started riding in Albuquerque a quarter century ago, a friend gifted me Guadalupe Trail, and I’ve always treasured it.

Water in the desert.

Guadalupe Trail is home to some of Albuquerque’s most ostentatious, well-irrigated wealth. This raises questions about equity in the allocation of water under conditions of scarcity, which are a big part of what I’m thinking about lately, but which are largely beyond the scope of the book. But it’s hard to look away when you’re rolling slowly by on a bike and see the sprinklers. This sort of thing is why I assigned myself the bike ride puzzle.

Lately I’ve been taking my morning rides through some of Albuquerque’s poorest neighborhoods. They are noticeably less green, both to a dude wandering around on a bike and also to a dude who spends an inordinate amount of time poking at the satellite data to try to better understand, quantitatively, where Albuquerque’s water conservation success is most noticeable. A subject for another bike ride essay on another day. As I said, beyond the scope of the book. Pay attention to the book, John!

Brunch

The closest thing to a busy street came at the upper end of this section, where I diverted into the urban busy-car landscape for a breakfast burrito. It was still early, but breakfast burritos are key for umpty-hour bike rides. Properly packaged, they fit in a cycling jersey back pocket. Or today I was riding with a pannier. Five or so bites every few miles, and I can ride for hours.

An irrigation ditch runs through a park-like area with trees. A person jogs on a path beside the water. In the foreground, a small metal bridge crosses the canal, with a bicycle parked on it. A white utility box stands next to the bridge.

The Albuquerque Main

I refilled the water bottles, and turned back to the Chamisal Lateral, another of the old twisty ditches that follows the high ground the rest of the way north, all the way to the Sandia Pueblo, the indigenous community on Albuquerque’s northern border. Looking back at my old bike ride GPS traces, I see a few rides on bits of the Chamisal, but I’d never ridden the whole thing, which is a shame. Now I know.

At its northern end, the Chamisal’s heading draws from the Albuquerque Main Canal, a larger canal that is mostly big and straight, built in the 1930s as the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s early works were consolidating irrigation in the valley, in pursuit of the development of commercial agriculture here.

It’s the “straight” part that’s the clue to the socio-hydrologic history. The old ditches are twisty. The modern ones are straight. The old roads are twisty. The modern ones are straight. Or when they curve, it’s a planned, drafting-tool curve, not the wander of a foot path turned into a horse path turned into a wagon path turned into a street.

This is why I ride.

Burrito on red picnic table with bicycle and street in background.

“Now I can ride all day!”

Albuquerque’s Aquifer

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I've been

a) Playing with Datawrapper as a tool for displaying data here on Inkstain, and

b) Thinking about Albuquerque's aquifer as bad summer river flows force us back onto groundwater

(City #2, in the North Valley, is one of a quartet of groundwater monitoring wells drilled in the late '50s as Albuquerque's population and groundwater pumping began to grow. I use it for big picture attention because it's reasonably well placed to give a good rough picture of what's going on, and has a nice long time horizon.)

update:

 

Locator map was super easy in Datawrapper.

Tipping Point: Colorado River Reckoning

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Scenic sunrise over a large lake with mountains in the background. In the foreground, a marina with numerous houseboats is visible, surrounded by arid terrain and small islands dotting the lake's surface. The sky is painted in warm hues of orange and purple, reflecting off the calm water.

Lake Mead at sunup, July 24, 2024.

 

 

Out toward the top left corner of this picture – maybe a little bit left, out of the frame – is the point where the Southern Nevada Water Authority gets its water out of Lake Mead. There’s nothing to see – the intake is at the bottom of the reservoir.

Completed in 2015, with a new pump station first turned on in early 2022, the intake system represents a ~$1.5 billion investment in shoring up the reliability of the Las Vegas, NV, water supply as Lake Mead and the Colorado River decline.

I hitched a ride yesterday on SNWA’s water quality sampling boat, and they took me over to the face of “Saddle Island” (not an island any more with the reservoir this low!) to see the areas where the old intakes are. Back in 2022, one of the old intakes emerged above water. Had Las Vegas not invested in the new system, we would have faced huge risk to the water supply of a community of 2 million-plus people, and terrible choices, as Mead dropped.

I tried to peer down into the water to see the pipe, but Mead’s up high enough now that it’s no longer visible. But it’s an important place, I wanted to try to see it, which is why I hitched the boat ride. Mead here is doing double duty: water storage for Phoenix, Los Angeles, and the farm districts of the Lower Colorado, but also forebay for the pumping system for Las Vegas’s water supply. Multiple purposes.

Las Vegas spent the $1.5b not for new water, but to provide reliability for the water they’ve got. But in doing that, removing (reducing?) the risk to a city of 2 million people, Las Vegas also removed the risk that the basin as a whole would have faced if it had to chose between Las Vegas’s supply and the needs of downstream users as the reservoir’s levels dropped toward the intake pipes.

Newshour link

I’m here for today’s (July 24, 2024) PBS Newshour “Tipping Point” show. 5 p.m. Mountain Time (7 eastern, 4 Pacific), livestream link here.

Hoover Dam and the social nature of infrastructure

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A view of the Hoover Dam, showing its massive concrete structure with distinctive art deco intake towers rising from the water. The dam is surrounded by rugged, rocky terrain and a body of water. In the background, a highway bridge is visible spanning the canyon.

Hoover Dam in the fading light of a hot summer evening

A water nerd friend and I made a pilgrimage yesterday evening to Hoover Dam, spanning the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border.

We’d had dinner at one of the restaurants on the docks at Hemenway Harbor, and driven up to the old abandoned boat ramp at Boulder Harbor, two Lake Mead landmarks for me, places I often visit. It was late, and hot as hell, and we were tired, but it didn’t take much persuasion for my friend to say “yes” to a last stop at Hoover Dam.

I’m here in Southern Nevada to be part of a PBS Newshour livestream Wednesday: “Tipping Point: Colorado River Reckoning.” I came out a couple of days early to see some friends and do the sort of “place-based” stuff that’s at the heart of my Colorado River work. I’ve been coming to this place – Lake Mead and Hoover Dam – for the last 15 years, watching the reservoir rise and fall, using this place as a conceptual anchor as I write my books.

My best guess based on hazy childhood memory is that I first visited Hoover Dam 60 years ago. We were on our annual summer car-camping trip, and I remember five-year-old John being both awestruck and uneasy – a bit frightened? – at the scale of the thing. Many years later, on one of many return trips, I stumbled on the thing that I remember most vividly: off the side of an embankment, massive concrete plugs that had been removed from the turbine tubes, dumped off the old rail line, lying today in a ravine.

It was a vague thing, fuzzy and just out of reach, but seeing them again on a bike ride along the Hoover Dam rail trail, the memory jumped up out of the ravine at me. As my friend remarked when I told them the story last night, I got bitten early.

Deb Chachra and the social nature of infrastructure

In an interview published last week in Public Books, the engineer Deb Chachra said a kaching thing about Hoover Dam that captures why I keep coming here, why I anchor so much of my thinking in the dam itself:

To borrow an idea from Joan Didion, who used it to describe driving in Los Angeles, these older forms of infrastructure, especially charismatic megastructures like bridges and train stations, can be secular cathedrals. We recognize that these are things that we made for ourselves and for each other. People have been visiting the Hoover Dam in droves since it was brand-new, so I don’t think it’s nostalgia per se—I think it’s more about celebrating this idea of the collective, these collective or communal projects. If we’re nostalgic, I think it’s less about the physical structures and more about the idea of working collectively.

A frieze on Hoover Dam includes descriptions of all the dam's legally authorized uses

The Boulder Canyon Project Act, carved in stone

Five years ago, on my umpty-first tour of Hoover Dam, a friend steeped in the “law of the river” led me to the elevator tower on the dam’s Nevada side to look at the decorative frieze. It’s a stone carving (or maybe cast concrete), visualizing the statutory purposes embodied in the Boulder Canyon Project Act, the act of Congress that authorized construction of the dam.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That for the purpose of controlling the floods, improving navigation and regulating the flow of the Colorado River, providing for storage and for the delivery of the stored waters thereof for reclamation of public lands and other beneficial uses exclusively within the United States, and for the generation of electrical energy as a means of making the project herein authorized a self-supporting and financially solvent undertaking, the Secretary of the Interior, subject to the terms of the Colorado River compact hereinafter mentioned, is hereby authorized to construct, operate, and maintain a dam and incidental works in the main stream of the Colorado River at Black Canyon or Boulder Canyon…. (emphasis added)

This is what Chachra is talking about. We often view Hoover Dam as a remarkable achievement of physical engineering, and it is. But it is, more importantly, an act of collective will. We came together in the 1920s, in community, to envision a desired future – of cities and farms in a place with too little water for either without infrastructure. We wrote a set of rules – the Colorado River Compact, the Boulder Canyon Project Act – that instantiated that collective will in the construction of a physical object – Hoover Dam.

And then we did the same thing, again and again, across the West. This enabled the places that tens of millions of us now call home.

Yesterday evening it was 110F (43C) after sunset, the parking lots were closed, and the tourists still came. My friend, who may be more of a Hoover Dam/Lake Mead/Colorado River nerd than I am (this is saying a great deal) was talking about the dam’s aesthetics – the care paid to the art deco flourishes – like the Boulder Canyon Project Act frieze. It’s a testament to the understanding of the people who built it that it was more than physical infrastructure – that it was a monument to collective action, the point Chachra so eloquently made.

This is why I’m confident, despite the current conflicts over how to share the shortages we face as a result of climate change, that we’ll figure things out. Collective action is at the heart of what we’ve been doing, it’s often hard, but we do it.

A note on Chachra’s book

Chachra’s book, How Infrastructure Works, is a terrific look at the social nature of infrastructure. Highly recommended.