Roadrunner in L. Heineman’s garden, 10/17/2015
I was trying to get a shot of our neighborhood roadrunner this morning as it hopped down into Lissa’s garden, a sort of “living Garden Gnome” shot. But I realized as I looked through the results that the garden itself, Lissa’s great work of living art, overwhelms the bird, however cool the roadrunner might be.
Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. Undated photo for Historical American Engineering Record survey, courtesy Library of Congress
“When will Lake Mead fill up again? Probably not in our lifetimes,” said Bill Hasencamp, the MWD’s point person for the Colorado River. “If you saw it full, save those pictures.”
My best guess is that the picture above was taken in 1987.
Albuquerque yesterday (Oct. 15) began pumping groundwater from an aquifer in the city’s northeast heights, the first time aquifer storage and recovery in New Mexico has reached the “recovery” phase.
New Mexico is late to this party – states around us have been doing this for years. But it’s a huge milestone in water management here.
Bear Canyon recharge, courtesy ABCWUA
This started, I think, back in 2008 with water recharged into Bear Canyon Arroyo, a sand-and-gravel-bottomed natural arroyo that flows down alongside the Arroyo del Oso Golf Course in the midst of suburban Albuquerque. The water comes from the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s allocation of San Juan-Chama Project water, imported from the Colorado River Basin. In a pilot phase over a number of years, the Water Authority stored 1,073 acre feet of water, which is what is now being pumped out over the next month, according to Katherine Yuhas, who’s overseeing the project for the agency.
The pumping will be done over the next month from six wells in the area around Bear Canyon, drawing on the same area of the aquifer that has been recharged.
The experiment here is as much institutional as it is hydrologic – how do you handle the accounting, making sure the water really got to the aquifer and doing the accounting as the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority recovers it? I can’t emphasize the importance of this piece enough – it’s something we talk about a lot in the intro to contemporary issues class I’m helping teach for University of New Mexico water resources grad students. Water management is half hydrology, half law, and half institutions. (I’m primarily on the law and policy side, not super good at math, but I think I’ve got the ratios roughly right.) So you not only need to figure out the physical part of getting the water into the ground and measuring that it got where you sent it. You also have to deal with the legal and institutional part – getting the Office of State Engineer to accept your measurements, agree with how the accounting is done when you pull the water out, etc.
Aquifer storage and recovery allows managers to smooth out variability, putting water in the ground on the wet side of the variability curve and pulling it out on the dry side. In Albuquerque, this would provide flexibility to manage San Juan-Chama water, which is imported across the continental divide from the upper headwaters of the San Juan River, in the Colorado River Basin.
This is an area in which New Mexico water management is staggeringly far behind other states. William Blomquist, in his classic collection of Southern California groundwater management case studies Dividing the Waters
In Arizona, groundwater banking of surplus Colorado River water has been standard operating procedure for decades, with 3.965 million acre feet banked as of the end of 2014 (pdf). So Albuquerque’s 1,073 acre feet is small stuff. But it’s an important start.
I’ve been joking to my Colorado River management friends about how I keep trying to leave the Salton Sea out of my book. This effort has been such a failure that the Salton Sea now makes multiple appearances in the current draft. All paths to the end of my book’s argument seem to pass through the stinky, super-saline body of agricultural drainage water in southeastern California.
The Salton Sea, left, discusses plans for its future with a visiting journalist
My latest effort to not write about the sea sent me back to reread a classic of planning literature, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s 1973 “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning“. Rittel and Webber outline a general class of societal problems that are inherently difficult because they are, to use the authors’ lovely coinage, “wicked”. They don’t mean these problems are witch-like, but rather that they share these characteristics:
Contrast this with what they call “tame” problems – ones for which we can clearly articulate the problem to be solved, and for which the definitions of success and failure are crisp.
My favorite example of a tame problem is the 1960s Apollo program to send astronauts to the moon. The problem to be solved was easy to describe: sending astronauts to the moon and safely returning them. Spaceship blows up on the way home? No question that’s failure.
Tame problems are not necessarily easy to carry out, they’re just easy to define.
Rittel and Webber were writing at a time when people were trying to apply the successes of science and engineering to social problems. We know how to build bridges that don’t fall down. Next up, poverty! But poverty turns out to be harder to define, and the solutions you pursue depend entirely on the definition you choose:
By now we are all beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems is that of defining problems (of knowing what distinguishes an observed condition from a desired condition) and of locating problems (finding where in the complex causal networks the trouble really lies).
Which brings us to the Salton Sea, a problem located at the end of a really confusing causal network.
First formed in 1905 when the Colorado River breached Imperial Valley’s early irrigation works in a big way, the sea would have soon evaporated were it not for continued inflows of the valley’s irrigation drainage water. In fact, contrary to those who argue that “it was an accident, let it die”, it seems hydrologically likely that even without the accident of its original sin, the sea would exist today in sort sort of equilibrium after more than a century of ag runoff in the valley.
Its rise and fall has always posed problems – flooding of the farms around its shores drove major litigation in the 1980s over allegations that Imperial Irrigation District’s practices were causing the lake to rise because they were “wasteful”. The problem today is the opposite. Efforts to conserve water in Imperial today to permit ag-to-urban transfers in Southern California will slowly deprive the sea of inflows, causing it to shrink.
Greetings from the Salton Sea
So what?
The “what” here is the wicked problem. Is it the loss of habitat for migrating birds? Is it the increasing air quality problems from the exposed shoreline? Is it the fading dream of a recreational paradise in the desert?
The real problem of the Salton Sea seems to have been that the people working on the problems of the Colorado River Basin were solving a different problem entirely – ensuring that water users from Denver and Grand Junction to Los Angeles and San Diego, with a lot of farms in between, had “enough” water. (How much is “enough”? Another wicked problem.) Down a tortured causal chain of water shortage (perceived or real) and water savings, you end up with less water flowing to a dying Salton Sea. One of Rittel and Webber’s key insights was that “every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.” Check that one off of your “wicked problems” bingo card.
I played at the top of this post with the Wicked Witch of the West as a rhetorical device, but in the end it doesn’t quite work. When the Great and Powerful Oz gave Dorothy and her traveling companions their assignment – “Bring me the broomstick of the Witch of the West” – it was pretty clear how success was defined. Tin Man: “B-B-B-But if we do that, we’ll have to kill her to get it!” Whatever. Just bring me the broom.
I’m still not sure I know how to define the problem of the Salton Sea quite so crisply.
New Mexico journalist (and friend of Inkstain) Laura Paskus today launched a year-long look at climate change in New Mexico. From the opening installment:
As the region continues to warm, snowpack will continue to decrease, the snow line will move higher in elevation and farther north, and winter snows will start later and end earlier in the season. Evaporation from reservoirs will increase; water storage in reservoirs will decrease.
I’m happy about this for a number of reasons.
The first is the subject itself, which I think is incredibly important. The second is that I think journalism matters, by which I mean that the telling of stories about important things matters, and Laura’s partnership with New Mexico In Depth fills a gap left by the decline in the journalistic enterprise.
The third is that she’s my friend, and I understand the journalistic passion that drives her work. In this regard, Laura is a journalist’s journalist, and the opportunity to dig this deeply into a project of this sort, of a journalist’s own choosing, is to be treasured.
Even with a dose of bonus water transferred from the Upper Colorado River Basin’s storage account to the Lower Colorado River Basin’s storage account, Lake Mead is forecast to drop another five feet between now and the end of September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s first forecast of the 2015-16 water year.
Data source: USBR. 2016 projection based on USBR October 2015 24-Month Study
We’re heading into another one of those “Lake Mead’s at its lowest level in history” years again this year. We journalists will have a cheap story peg any time we want it as yet more shoreline emerges along the reservoir’s edge that has been underwater since the 1930s.
Colorado River Basin map, courtesy USBR
Just a reminder of basin geography for those not obsessed with these things: Lake Powell is on the Arizona-Utah border. It represents the Upper Basin’s “savings account”, used to meet the Upper Basin’s delivery obligations under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Lake Mead is on the Arizona-Nevada border just southeast of Las Vegas. Water is released from Mead over the course of the year for farms in Arizona and California (ag gets the biggest share of water), for all the region’s major urban areas on the U.S. side of the border (Las Vegas, Phoenix-Tucson, Los Angeles-San Diego), and for farms and cities in Mexico.
My updated graph is based on the 24-Month Study released today by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (pdf). You should maybe ignore the Lake Powell forecast this early in the year – that’s entirely dependent on how much snow we get this winter, which at this point is not accurately forecastable. But the Lake Mead forecast is worth paying attention to, even this early in the year, because it’s based on human decisions about how much water to release from Lake Powell and send on down through the Grand Canyon to Mead. That’s governed by the rules in the 2007 Interim Guidelines, which are likely to call for a release of 9 million of acre feet of water from Mead to Powell in the coming year. The minimum legally required Powell release is 8.23 million feet, but with Powell higher than Mead, the rules have provisions to release extra to try to keep the two big storage tanks roughly in balance.
Even with that bonus water, Mead is forecast to keep dropping, because water users downstream are still using significantly more than the system can reliably provide under hydrology like this. Here’s the math:
First, the inflow
Now the debits on Lake Mead
Balance
This can’t go on forever. I’m confident that downstream users are capable of getting by on less water. They need to get on with that project.
* Calculations after the classic Bureau of Reclamation “structural deficit” slide, adjusted with this year’s 24-Month Study projections, and rounded to one or two significant digits because who really believes any more than that anyway?
We’re Approaching Global Warming All Wrong & How To Use Conspiracy Theories To Fix It
— Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) October 13, 2015
Sometime yesterday afternoon, my “grandbotchild” @thinkpiecebot passed a milestone: my daughter Nora Reed’s digital art now has more Twitter followers than I do.
The bot is a thousand lines of code that is somehow able to speak like a relatively intelligible human, if by “relatively intelligible human” you mean an underthinking op ed pundit being paid too much to spout shallow ideas. Here’s Nora explaining the thing to Sean Miller at PopMatters:
My fascination with bots and generators is pretty simple, though: they make me laugh. I can make a bot that tickles my fancy, press a button, and have pretty good jokes come out the other side. There are other reasons, too—I’ve always loved playing with language and things like headlines and advertisements can use such repetitive phrasings that it’s really easy to imitate them or introduce absurdity or the surreal. There’s also a fair amount of frustration in the bots too, though—I’m obviously pretty annoyed with thinkpieces in general and making fun of them makes it easier to deal with that.
It’s mostly the joke thing, though.
The craft here is to provide both believable basic language elements and a grammatical structure in the code from which emerge things that are surprising but don’t have the clunk of a machine language failing some humorous Twitter version of the Turing test. Nora’s gotten really good at that.
What Would John Lennon Think of Gritty Reboots?
— Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) October 13, 2015
For my benefit, she’s added some “drought” meme language, which has created some fun cross-pollination:
Could Welfare Recipients Have Caused Drought?
— Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) September 9, 2015
TPB, as we call our little grandbotchild, has had a bit of a run of celebrity of late. Aaron Sankin did a fun piece in the Daily Dot and then turned the bot into an assignment editor for the staff, with uneven but sometimes hilarious results. Bustle did a piece, and some others I can’t put my fingers on. In addition to being wonderful, TPB touches the sort of Internetty nerve that Internetty writers love to write about.
Nora had this to say earlier today:
have i mentioned how big @thinkpiecebot is today because it is getting HUGE
is this how people feel about their children growing??
— Nora BLEED (@NoraReed) October 14, 2015
Yes, dear, it is.
You can support Nora Reed’s art here:
if you pay me i will build a robot army and vanquish thinkpieces forever
Patreon: https://t.co/FTCFJNtZAp
Paypal: https://t.co/4w2rLocH7K
— Nora BLEED (@NoraReed) October 11, 2015
In the latest High Country News, Stephen Elliott reports on the tribulations of the Paradox Valley desal unit run by the Bureau of Reclamation to help reduce salt load on the Colorado River:
Without the unit’s deep injection, the salt that covers the desert valley floor at Paradox, and the thousands of tons of it just beneath the surface, will continue to flow to the Colorado River and its millions of downstream users. Each ton of salt in the river causes $173 in damage to crops, water treatment facilities and the like, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. That puts the price tag for going without the Paradox unit at around $457 million annually, and that doesn’t account for the damage done to fish, bugs and other aquatic life. As Luecke says, something has to be done: “It’s important that that salt be taken out.”
Jay Lund, Dr. Water at UC Davis, asks a provocative question that gets to this gnarly question of the status of water saved by conservation measures – what if municipal water users could direct how the savings from their conservation efforts are used?
Albuquerque has done extraordinarily well in the last two decades. Per capita water use is on track to be half of what it was in 1995, and total municipal water use (even after population growth) is the lowest it’s been since the 1980s. But never has there been a conversation here about what the savings are to be used for. It’s simply presumed that the savings will continue to be used in the municipal water system. For some, this chafes. Here’s Lund:
People who save water like to know their conserving is doing some good, such as sustaining economic growth, building municipal reserves for longer droughts or supporting the environment.
But many urban residents are concerned their water savings will go to uses they value less — such as supplying more wasteful customers, new urban development or agriculture — rather than meeting the needs of fish, waterbirds and other wildlife, which they value more.
What might a policy mechanism that broadens the options look like?
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., had a go at Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor during a Senate hearing last week, looking for assurances that if his state left unused water in Lake Mead as part of a Colorado River Basin conservation effort, the Interior Department wouldn’t just kype it and give it to someone else (mumble mumble California something mumble mumble):
The number one priority in Arizona is to make sure that when Arizona, or any other state, voluntarily contributes their water to the health of the Colorado system the contributed water actually stays in the system and doesn’t disappear along somebody else’s canals.
“system water” behind Hoover Dam – the “paracommons”, wet water style
This is the latest manifestation of something I’ve written about before, Arizona’s deep-seated paranoia that others (mumble mumble California something mumble mumble) have designs on their scarce water supplies. But it also gets to a really interesting issue that I think needs to be articulated carefully as we go about the project of using less water: where does conserved water go?
Bruce Lankford of the University of East Anglia, in his recent book Resource Efficiency Complexity and the Commons: The Paracommons and Paradoxes of Natural Resource Losses, Wastes and Wastages
In a scarce world, society is increasingly interested in the efficiency of resource use; how to get more from less. Yet if you ‘save’ a resource, what does that mean and who gets the ‘saved’ resource? In other words who gets the gain of an efficiency gain?
Consider a few examples:
As a result of its extraordinary water conservation success, Las Vegas reduced its use of Colorado River water by more than 30 percent over the last decade. That saved water remains Las Vegas’s. It has banked lots of water in aquifers around the West with the idea that it could withdraw that water for its own later use.
Phoenix also is not using its full Colorado River allocation, but the rules around its Colorado River water use are different. Any “saved” Colorado River water that might result from Phoenix’s conservation efforts reverts to other users. (see here and here for an explanation of the rules)
red lettuce, Yuma County Arizona
Farmers in Yuma County (they’re the ones growing a big fraction of your lettuce in the winter) have reduced their water use by more than 30 percent in the last three decades as they have shifted to more efficient irrigation techniques. Like Phoenix, they have seen their water revert to other Arizona water users who are behind them in that state’s water allocation queue. They haven’t gotten a dime for the water.
Farmers in the Imperial Valley of southeastern California have reduced their water use by 22 percent in the last decade. They have been compensated for this by other water users in California, with saved water going to Coachella Valley, San Diego, and the Los Angeles area. Some of the saved water is providing environmental flows to the Salton Sea.
System improvements and operational changes in Mexico in recent years have saved water for a variety of reasons and purposes. Some of that water was used last year for an environmental pulse flow through the desiccated Colorado River Delta.
So we’ve got four different types of cases above:
The differences in the above cases illustrate the range of rules governing water management. The rules are crazy complicated, and importantly they generally weren’t written with this sort of “How can we best manage conserved water?” question in mind.
I hate the word “paracommons”, but Lankford is careful and deliberate in defending the need to coin a new word to deal with a resource category that, because it is poorly labeled, also has been poorly conceptualized. And strange word or not, as a conceptual category I find the paracommons quite useful. Lankford’s basic argument is essentially that efficiency yields something (in this case saved water) that has a lot of the basic characteristics of a common pool resource. Do we leave that water in the river to reduce the environmental damage our diversions have caused? Do we save it in a reservoir for future use? Do we just hand it off to another water user who’s come up short this year? This raises a whole bunch of institutional challenges that we’re only beginning to grapple with as we transition from water management under surplus to scarcity.
Flake’s grandstanding in the Senate hearing was annoying (can you Grand Canyon staters chill already about the “California’s gonna steal our water” meme? increasingly sounding to me like fingers on a blackboard). But his political play to the home crowd is enabled by confusion on this issue. The water in question is what Colorado River Basin managers are calling “system water”, by which they mean water that is intentionally conserved and just left in the common pool, with no one’s name attached and no purpose delineated for its use. All the cool kids are trying to pull off system conservation deals right now as a way of reducing the decline in Lake Mead (see here and here). Ambiguity about the status of that saved water as it enters the common pool is exactly the problem Lankford is writing about. And it is precisely that ambiguity that leaves the door open for Arizona’s old fears that someone’s trying to screw them in a water deal.