Living by a creek in Vail, an open window, the lullaby:
I loved that sound, what Wallace Stegner, in one of his many books, called “The Sound of Mountain Water.” In those same years I often kept my window open at night, lulled to sleep with the sweet discourse of a billion water molecules sloshing, slamming, slithering down the nearby creek, impatient to join the mighty Colorado River about 35 miles away.
More than a dozen Native American communities in the Colorado River Basin have yet to have their legal entitlements to a share of the river’s water quantified, according to a new report from the Colorado River Research Group. With the river’s water already over-appropriated (meaning users, largely non-Indian, have built farms and cities that have come to depend on more water than the river seems able to provide in the long run), this is a challenging problem:
Moving forward with efforts to provide the Colorado River tribes with the water needed to sustain communities and build economies is both a legal and moral imperative. The challenge is to do so in a way that embraces creative, flexible, and efficient uses of water, often in partnership with non-Indian water users. Most of the modern progress has come through negotiated settlements, some of which empower the tribes to lease water to off reservation users.
This is most importantly a problem in the Lower Colorado River Basin states, but the CRRG report nicely quantifies the issue throughout the basin, pulling together data from disparate sources in one place. I argue in my forthcoming book (pre-order now!) that failure to include native communities in basin decision making has been a fundamental problem, both in moral terms as well as in terms of practical water management. We have a large group of people legally and morally entitled to water, to borrow the CRRG’s language, that is not yet using it all. This is a huge problem.
At the risk of driving faster than is prudent on a twisty mountain road at night, the new 2016-17 climate outlook released yesterday does not look particularly encouraging for the Colorado River Basin:
December-February outlook
That’s December 2016 – February 2017. Browns mean odds are shifted toward dry.
A reminder that the maps can be a little confusing, so it’s best to paint a word picture of what they colors actually mean. The Climate Prediction Center divides the historical record into thirds – the one third wettest count as “wet”, the one third dry are “dry”, etc. That light brown means that there’s a 33-40 percent chance of dry, so it’s only a slight shift in the odds. For that darker brown draped across my house in central New Mexico, that’s a 40-50 percent chance of dry.
Importantly, the odds also favor warm, which combines pushes our river flows in the direction of dry.
The full maps are here.
It’s a bait and switch. The answer is “no”. (It always is when it ends with a question mark. See Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.) But as I report in my water newsletter, there are some encouraging signs that we’re moving in the right direction.
You can subscribe to the newsletter, which is supposed to come out weekly but rarely does (hey, you get what you pay for!) here.
I’m not sure I would be as sanguine as this Coachella pepper packer about the long term availability of water:
The process of producing peppers is both simple and complicated. “Workers, water, weather–those are our three big headaches,” Aiton says.
Aiton says while water is a concern in the state, it’s not as critical in the Coachella Valley as other parts of California. “Coachella Valley for us is one of the cheapest places to grow water. There’s a huge underground aquifer here. Plus, we have water rights from the Colorado River. So, we’ve been able to withdraw water from that,” he explains.
one of my rainbow unicorn socks
Some years ago, my adult child gave me a pair of rainbow unicorn socks.
They’re really nice, comfy socks, but in a complicated way. They are quite literally comfy – thin and stretchy, made of a high quality fabric. More than that, the rainbows and the unicorns are for me an assertion of comfort in queerness, and in particular comfort in and embrace of the queerness of my adult child.
I will never forget the power of my first Pride parade, the exuberance of the simple creation of a safe queer space in a world that still lacks them, that takes non-queerness (in its many points on the non-LGBTQ spectrum) as the norm. There were a shitload of rainbows at that Pride parade. Rainbows mean that to me.
In my newly remodeled career, I speak a lot in public, and I still get a little bit nervous, and I nearly always wear rainbow unicorn socks. People often notice them, comment on them (they’re rainbow unicorns socks!) and I tell them Nora gave them to me. The socks are a reminder of what’s important to me, bestowing a weird goofy confidence at what is often a nervous moment. I’m usually speaking about water policy, so I’m not sure why or how this matters, but it does. A lot. As many introverts do, I put on a mask when I’m on stage, and the socks remind me of who I am.
On this particular Sunday, I know that my rainbow unicorn socks (I now have more than one pair, it’s become an increasingly challenging family tradition for my botmaking artist offspring Nora Reed to find new and different ones) have limited utility. The hate they (I am referring with this pronoun to Nora Reed, the non-gendered pronoun still awkward for me but important) has endured can’t be stopped with my rainbow unicorn socks, and we are reminded on this particular Sunday that many endure much in a world that is still hateful toward those who are different.
The socks are simply this, my little way of carrying the power of that first Pride parade with me and the love shared by a father and his goofy queer child.
I’m working on a couple of projects right now in which I’m trying to help policymakers effectively communicate complex science (involving drought, climate change, and water availability, but that goes without saying, right?) in political and policy processes. Paul Cairney suggests the constraints:
In debate, evidence is mentioned a lot, but only to praise the evidence backing my decision and rejecting yours. Or, you only trust the evidence from people you trust. If you trust the evidence from certain scientists, you stress their scientific credentials. If not, you find some from other experts. Or, if all else is lost, you reject experts as condescending elites with a hidden agenda. Or, you say simply that they can’t be that clever if they agree with smarmy Cameron/ Johnson.
Cairney’s writing here about Great Britain’s “Brexit” debate, but this generalizes.
Rio Grande, San Luis Valley, southern Colorado
tl;dr The Phoenix kerfuffle over a Nestlé bottled water plant is an example of people distracted by a facile but meaningless caricature of the problem they think they care about.
longer: When University of New Mexico Water Resources Program graduate student Sara Gerlitz* was looking at Arizona water management over the last year, she zeroed in pretty quickly on the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District’s “2015 Plan of Operation“. If you’re interested in the long term sustainability of the greater Phoenix area’s water supplies, the plan and the processes it describes are super important.
The plan lays out how central Arizona water managers will meet their legal obligations to provide a 100-year assured supply of water to growing parts of Central Arizona in the context of groundwater pumping regulations and available supplies of imported Colorado River water. This is big deal stuff, central to Arizona’s sustainability. The back-and-forth over the details – the reasonableness of the assumptions that went into it, the risks if the estimates are wrong – makes for important reading if you’re interested in the deep and important details of how Arizona plans for its water future. But to the people of greater Phoenix, this seems to have not been a very interesting process at all. When the Arizona Department of Water Resources held a legally required public hearing on the plan March 30, 2015, not a single member of the public showed up to testify. Zero.
Irrigated alfalfa on the east side of the Phoenix metro area, February 2015
It is interesting to compare that lack of public attention with the current public kerfuffle over Nestlé’s plans to build a new water bottling plant in Phoenix. Some perspective: the CAGRD’s new plan of operation contemplates the need for roughly 50,000 acre feet of water per year by the mid-2030s. In comparison, the Nestlé plant will use about 100 acre feet of water per year. The CAGRD process was making important policy decisions about a supply of water 500 times larger than the Nestlé plant. No members of the general public showed up to the CAGRD process, while 37,000 people by Friday had signed an on line petition against the Nestlé plant.
Back in my errant youth, when I worked as a volunteer documentation writer for the big free software GNOME project, I became intimately familiar with what we called “bicycle shed” discussions, a shorthand drawn from the work of 1950s management scholar C. Northcote Parkinson. Here’s a nice short explanation:
Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.
Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far….
A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*.
Sometimes also called “Parkinson’s law of triviality“, it’s popular among geeks and mostly applied to software development discussions. But it generalizes, a nice shorthand for why people attach to simple things they think they can understand and act on, while ignoring the more important but vast and complex. I get why bicycle shed discussions are inevitable. But that doesn’t mean they are not a problem.
Here’s why, in the case of Phoenix and Nestlé.
Those 37,000 petition signatures suggest a bunch of people who care a lot about the sustainability of Phoenix’s water supply. That’s great! But they’ve attached that wagon of caring to the wrong horse. Central Arizona can do a great job of managing the sort of long term water sustainability problems sketched out in the CAGRD process (and in a bunch of others policy processes now underway), and it will have plenty of water for a Nestlé plant and lots of other things future Phoenicians (?) might want to do.
Or it could do a terrible job at those big picture processes, in which case rejecting the Nestlé plant won’t matter a hill of beans.
But a whole bunch of people have been left with an entirely different perception – that caring for Phoenix’s water sustainability future means killing that Nestlé plant.
This is a big problem for the pursuit of water sustainability in Phoenix, because the current community water management has done some important things to move it down the path toward sustainability (water use declining, aquifer rising, innovative conjunctive groundwater management institutional arrangements, etc.). If the protesters don’t get their way on the Nestlé plant, they’re gonna think Phoenix doesn’t care about water supply sustainability. And that would be completely wrong, and Phoenix water management would lose an important set of allies in the hard work yet to come in ensuring the sustainability of its water supply.
I don’t blame the mass of people signing the Nestlé petition here. Bicycle shed problems are inevitable because people care. Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done. The important thing is for the leadership of the anti-Nestlé crowd to demonstrate some seriousness about Arizona’s real water supply sustainability challenges, leading this mass of people now assembled into a more meaningful discussion of water supply sustainability, and not waste all of our time arguing over a bottled water plant.
* CAGRD governance issues were just a piece of Sara’s masters degree project, which primarily focused on the use of remote sensing tools to help water managers get a handle on agricultural water use – something that will be critical for Arizona’s long term water supply sustainability. It was a great project – she just finished, it’s not on line yet, but will soon be posted here.
I got an education this year in the nuances of global toxic materials regulatory regimes when I served on UNM graduate student Rachel Moore’s masters committee with Caroline Scruggs, a professor here at the university who’s worked for years in this area. (The paper on their work is here.)
Caroline showed up in the Albuquerque Journal yesterday, talking about the regulatory reform effort being led by Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M.:
Caroline Scruggs, an assistant professor at University of New Mexico who studied the safe use of chemicals while earning her doctorate from Stanford University, said her research has shown “a clear and urgent need” to update the 1976 law but that becoming a mother drove the point home. She said she has tried to study the chemicals in products her sons use and worries about exposing them to toxins.
“Americans shouldn’t need to research product ingredients or have training in toxicology or chemical engineering to understand if they’re buying safe products,” she said. “Tens of thousands of chemicals are on the market and only a handful have received safety testing and under current (federal law), and it’s almost impossible for EPA to restrict risky chemicals.”
In addition to toxics regulation, Caroline’s doing a lot of work on technical, economic, and social issues around direct potable reuse of municipal wastewater, and is very active working with students in the UNM Water Resources Program, where my little academic beachhead is housed. (Wave to future students!) One of the things we talk about a lot is the translational component of academic work – how to get it out of the academy and into the political and policy arenas. Great to see Caroline doing that here.