Water conservation’s dark underbelly

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I tend to enthusiastically and often uncritically embrace every new water conservation number, as if using less water is an unqualified good. I generally believe that, and you’re going to have a hard time pushing me off that intellectual turf. But there’s a flip side I’m trying to think through. It’s what economists might call the “non-market value” of the green stuff in our cities.

Ben Jones, a recent University of New Mexico economics graduate now doing a postdoc at the University of Oklahoma, presented some data as part of his recent thesis defense about the health and wellbeing values of urban trees. In particular, Ben was looking at the impact of the emerald ash borer, an invasive pest killing trees in the eastern United States. Loss of ash trees comes with a non-market cost that’s difficult but important to measure. There’s a direct health benefit as trees clean air, and a less direct but no less important benefit because green amenities make us happy. That’s why we plant and water stuff around our houses. Ben and UNM economist Shana McDermott* have a paper here that digs into the details. While specific to the eastern ash trees, they’re raising issues that are worth applying to our municipal tree coverage here in the western United States, where we’re in the midst of a vast undirected experiment in using less water in our cities. One result of using less water is having fewer trees. This comes with a cost that I don’t feel as though I’ve properly conceptually matched up against my unbridled enthusiasm for water conservation.

water conservation’s California costs

I was thinking about this hole in my thinking today while reading this Sacramento Bee op-ed by John Woodling, bidding us think about the tradeoffs associated with California’s impressive water use reductions:

These reductions have come at a cost.

Most notably, our trees and landscapes suffered as most water agencies limited irrigation to two days per week or less, even in hot, dry summer months. Our trees are an important environmental resource, a source of tremendous community pride and a gift from one generation to the next. Many of them are showing signs of severe stress, making them susceptible to pests and disease. Some have died or eventually will – a sad legacy that will extend far beyond this current drought.

* By way of full conflict of interest exposure, I recently lectured in one of Shana’s classes, for which she compensated me with a gift card to the Frontier restaurant, which funded a delicious and large burrito on Friday. #universitylife

Federal California drought legislation looking increasingly dead

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dead

“I’m getting better!” “No, you’re not — you’ll be stone dead in a moment.”

Michael Doyle reports in the Sacramento Bee on the apparent death of California drought legislation:

A California water bill that skeptics say has been cloaked in excessive secrecy will probably miss its Capitol Hill train this year.

Facing criticism from fellow Democrats, and with key details still unresolved, Sen. Dianne Feinstein conceded Friday that the water legislation needs additional work despite “significant progress.”

By “dead” I think I mean “unlikely to get through Congress this year”. Next year’s an election year, making it even harder for Congress to do difficult things. Plus it might rain or snow in California.

New Mexico is “drought free”, sort of

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New Mexico is "drought free"

New Mexico is “drought free”

For the first time since Nov. 30, 2010, New Mexico has been categorized as entirely free of “drought” in this morning’s federal Drought Monitor. 26 percent of the state remains “abnormally dry”, but none of the state is in any of the monitor’s formally designated drought categories.

This does not mean that we are free of the sort of problem that one might normally label as “drought”, because it is a word with no one meaning, which is one of its difficulties. It depends entirely on how you use and perceive your need for water. If you are a farmer dependent on snowpack and reservoir storage to water your Hatch chiles, “drought” is not over. If you are a piñon in the low mountains of northern New Mexico sapped of soil moisture by warming temperatures, “drought” may never be over. If you are me, sitting in Albuquerque with a full reservoir of banked water upstream, a backup supply of groundwater in an aquifer that has been rising despite a long term precipitation deficit, and water demand that continues dropping because of conservation success and population growth that has nearly stopped because of a tanked economy, “drought” may be an increasingly unhelpful conceptual category.

Defining drought’s end

Otowi Index Flow

Otowi Index Flow, not drought free

Some good numbers:

  • The Albuquerque National Weather Service gauge has received 10.5 inches of precipitation in 2015 to date, 17 percent above the long term mean.
  • The aquifer at Jerry Cline Park, near my house, has risen 18 feet since the winter of 2008, which is the turning point for Albuquerque groundwater management.
  • Flow on the Rio Grande through Albuquerque this morning is 1,830 cubic feet per second, more than double the mean for this date.

Some bad numbers

  • Elephant Butte Reservoir remains extremely low, at 11.5 percent of capacity. This is the reservoir that serves the most economically productive farmland in New Mexico.
  • Since 2000, we have had just two years of above-average flow in the Rio Grande.
  • The average temperature in the state’s forested northern mountains in 2010 has been 2.5F above the long term average. The last year that was below the long term average (as measured by a bit more than a century of records) was 1991.

Tamarisk beetle now entrenched on New Mexico Rio Grande

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The Tamarisk Coalition’s latest survey maps for work done over the summer of 2015 show that the beetle has now spread along the entire Rio Grande in New Mexico. The light blue dots are areas where the beetle showed up this year:

tamarisk beetle map

Courtesy Tamarisk Coalition

The beetle was originally introduced in Colorado and Utah as an experiment in invasive species control, an attempt to halt the spread of the Eurasian tamarisk tree, seen (rightly or wrongly, the science is mixed) as a water hog. But the bugs quickly spread farther than expected, and as you can see they’re now pretty widespread across the West. (Background here.)

Notice the populations also showing up on the Montana-Wyoming border. What’s up with that?

New Mexico, borderlands

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New Mexico has always seemed the least borderlandish of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands states. Unlike Texas, Arizona, and California, we don’t really have a large twin city spanning the border (think Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, El Paso-Juárez, the Nogales’s, San Diego-Tijuana). My former Albuquerque Journal colleague Lauren Villagran in a poignant column this morning on the scars left by Juárez drug violence bids us not forget:

If it’s easy in Albuquerque to forget New Mexico is a border state, but it’s not so simple down south, where families often have connections on both sides and many people, their friends or family were in some way touched by the violence.

She tells the story of a young Juárez-El Paso rapper named Luis Barron:

Barron, 35, was born in Juárez, grew up there, went to school in El Paso and, like many other people in the region, crisscrossed the border daily. A U.S. legal resident who works as a driver for an El Paso health clinic, he was raising three daughters on the El Paso side when his wife was deported in 2008 and given five years before she could apply to return. The family went with her to Juárez.

This is the life that’s hard to understand when you’re farther away from the mysterious line we’ve drawn on the map – a community that spans the border, moving back and forth, with connections often tighter across the border than to the distant national centers of power and influence – borderland as third nation.

The drug violence that so devastated Juárez during those awful years was not a thing just in “Mexico”, but in that shared third nation of the borderlands.

Juárez, at peace, wants to move beyond its violent past, but there are scars that no slogan can erase.

I should have written a book about pizza cheese

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A colleague notes an interesting bit of business in Dan Boyd’s story in this morning’s newspaper about the state of New Mexico’s “closing fund”, a state government goody bag to help fund economic development:

The most recent project to be allocated closing fund dollars is the expansion of a Southwest Cheese Co. factory in Clovis.

data source: USDA

data source: USDA

My book-in-the-making includes a riff on “burgers and pizza cheese,” because a significant fraction of the water we use for agriculture in the western United States goes to alfalfa and other forage for animals, and a significant fraction of that goes to dairies, and a significant fraction of that goes to the production of pizza cheese. Per capita U.S. consumption of Mozarella (mmm, pizza) has increased ten-fold since 1970 to 11 pounds per year. In the early 2000s Mozarella caught up with perennial favorite cheddar. For a few years it was neck-and-neck, but Mozarella ended the clear winner.

So when we as a state fund an eastern New Mexico cheese plant as a tool of economic development, we are funding the topmost rung of a ladder that is based on farmland devoted to alfalfa and other yummy cow food. It’s the alfalfa->dairy->pizza cheese supply chain.

 

Myths of rising water demand

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I’m not sure what Nebraska attorney David Cookson was up to in this recent talk in Kearney. He seems to be trying to scare the crap out of Nebraskans about water wars risk, of Californians and rich Wall Street money hounds coming after his state’s water. Whatever, this statement, at the heart of his argument, is flat wrong:

“The demand for water never goes down. Ever,” he said.

Here’s the water use trend data, from the U.S. Geologic Survey:

U.S. water use

U.S. water use

There’s a frustrating linguistic confusion that I need to sort out between “use” and “demand”, which have both technical and plain English meanings that don’t always line up and hide conceptual difficulties. But by whatever word you choose, water use/demand across every sector of the U.S. economy – irrigation, municipal, power plant cooling – has gone down.

Water scarcity in U.S. Indian Country

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When we talk about water scarcity in the western United States, it’s usually a conversation couched in acre feet of water and groundwater regulation and the Lake Mead bathtub ring and gallons per capita per day. But a dive into the data as I was cleaning up one of the chapters in my book-to-be reminded me that any conversation about water scarcity needs to start with whether we’ve got plumbing at all.

I’d been writing about water in Native American communities in the Colorado River Basin, and looking at Census Bureau data tables on who does and does not have indoor plumbing. But it didn’t really pop out until I plotted it up in a map:

plumbing

plumbing

Apache County in Arizona and McKinley County in New Mexico are, by far, the most water-scarce communities (by this measure) among populous areas in the Lower 48 states. This is the heart of the Navajo Nation, a native community that has struggled for years to win rights to the water implied by the promise of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1908 Winters decision. One in three homes in Apache County, nearly 11,000 of them, don’t have the full suite of toilet, hot and cold running water, and a shower or bathtub. Another 7,000 homes in McKinley County (27 percent) are lacking. I’ve written about this before, in stories about efforts to leverage the right to water under the U.S. legal system to an opportunity to actually bring plumbing to these distressed communities:

The public health implications for the communities that lack running water are enormous, Robertson pointed out. A 2007 federal study, noting that a wide variety of diseases are common without access to clean water, put the health care savings of the Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project at $435 million over 20 years. “There is a clear connection between sanitation facilities (water and sewerage) and Indian health,” the study concluded.

Some caveats about the data: I’ve left Alaska off (most of the highest rates of homes without plumbing are rural Alaska counties, but I don’t know enough about rural Alaska and native issues there to sort them out). My cutoff for “most populous” is arbitrary, but McKinley and Apache counties have far more homes without plumbing than those Alaska counties, or anywhere else in the nation for that matter. Shannon County in South Dakota, the Oglala Lakota reservation, has a 24 percent lack-of-plumbing rate. The county on the Texas-New Mexico border that looks dark on the map is Loving County. Almost no one lives there. Terrell County on the U.S.-Mexico border, west of Big Bend, has a 27 percent lack-of-plumbing rate, but hardly anyone lives there either.

There are only a couple of counties in the eastern U.S., all in western Pennsylvania, that have low rates of indoor plumbing, especially Forest and Potter counties. I think that’s Amish country?

There’s also a lengthy and fascinating discussion here about the methodological sensitivity involved when Census Bureau surveyors come calling to ask people about their plumbing: “Asking explicitly about flush toilets has resulted in negative attention from the public.”