A farmer’s defense of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement

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The Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement embodies one of the great experiments in collaborative watershed management under contested conditions, with a complex web of sometimes conflicting interests among agriculture, indigenous communities, fisheries, environmental flows, and power production. It also demonstrates one of the great risks in collaborative water management in the arid West: everyone has to give up something, and there is always a risk that politicians pandering to any one faction can gain traction and sabotage the deal. The incentives of local politics pose huge risks.

Ben Duval, a farmer who clearly has some heartburn about the compromises required but supports the KBRA, makes that case eloquently in op ed this weekend:

The KBRA and the related Klamath Settlement Agreements are a product of simple reality — we don’t live in a bubble. Other viewpoints are part of the local, regional and national debate about water. We have to acknowledge the reality that the public sentiment places a high value on the environment, healthy fisheries and other ideals. There is no doubt they also appreciate the safe, stable, and affordable food supply that irrigated agriculture is so effective at providing. However, we cannot simply dismiss the other values that are important and also depend on our Klamath River.

Thanks to Michael Campana for the pointer.

Albuquerque’s water use down another 3.4 percent in 2015

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I keep asking my friends who manage municipal water systems in the West how low their communities’ water use can go. None of them really know, which is fascinating. Their customers’ water use just keep dropping.

I’ve been following a couple of communities particularly closely – Albuquerque (because it’s my home town) and Las Vegas (the focus of a lot of my research attention for my book). The two communities also are a useful comparison because both do accounting in a sufficiently similar way that I’m able to do reasonable apples-to-apples comparisons. (Municipal comparisons are a notoriously difficult problem because of different accounting approaches, especially with respect to effluent return flows.)

In 2014, water use in Las Vegas dropped dropped another 3 percent, to 205 gallons per capita per day, part of a long, steady slide. It’s dropped 38 percent in the last decade. I don’t have good 2015 Las Vegas data yet, but based on the preliminary Bureau of Reclamation reports, it looks like consumption of Lake Mead water in Southern Nevada in the first nine months of this year is down another 1.5 percent from the same period last year.

Welcome to Albuquerque, Desert Sands, swimming pool for registered guests only, by John Fleck

Empty Albuquerque swimming pool, using less water. by John Fleck

I just got Albuquerque’s numbers for the first nine months of the year, which are down 3.4 percent from the same period last year. That should put us at somewhere between 130 and 131 gallons per capita per day this year, a 48 percent reduction in water use per person since 1995.

This kind of reduction in per person use of a critical resource is astounding, and says two important things, I think. The first is that we were pretty profligate with our water use until quite recently. The second is that it’s still not clear where the water conservation floor lies.

Note on data for the water nerds: These numbers are based on total withdrawals. My calculations for consumptive fraction: Albuquerque 55 gpcd, Las Vegas 120. See here for background on the difference.

 

Roadrunner accessorizes garden art

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Roadrunner in L. Heineman's garden, 10/17/2015

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.

Here is a picture of that time Lake Mead was full

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Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. Undated photo for Historical American Engineering Record survey, courtesy Library of Congress

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.”

LA Times

My best guess is that the picture above was taken in 1987.

 

Albuquerque recovering stored groundwater, historic first for New Mexico

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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

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, describes simple recharge operations in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco carried out during the drought of 1895-1904. Recharge of various sorts – storm water, imported Colorado River water, treated sewage effluent – has been done in Southern California ever since. One of the critical insights in Blomquist’s book is the importance of getting the institutional pieces right.

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.

The wickedness of the Salton Sea

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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

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:

  • there is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem – the possible solutions depend (strongly) on the problem definition, and the act of defining is a socially contested process
  • wicked problems are never “solved” – in R and W’s language “they have no stopping rule”

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

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.

Climate change in New Mexico

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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.

The series landing page is here.

Lake Mead forecast to drop another 5 feet in the coming year

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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

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.

Basin geography

Colorado River Basin map showing location of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, courtesy USBR

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.

Lake Mead accounting

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

  • 9.9 million acre feet (Powell release plus side inflows)

Now the debits on Lake Mead

  • 9.8 maf (AZ, CA, NV, Mexico delivery plus downstream regulation gains and losses)
  • Mead evaporation loss: 0.5 maf acre feet

Balance

  • ~ 400,000 acre foot deficit*

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?

It’s hard to explain my daughter’s art, except that she’s good at it

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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.

For my benefit, she’s added some “drought” meme language, which has created some fun cross-pollination:

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:

Yes, dear, it is.

You can support Nora Reed’s art here:

Colorado River salinity program showing its age

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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.”