The Bureau of Reclamation today named Brent Rhees to head its Salt Lake City-based Upper Colorado office:
As deputy regional director, Rhees managed several complex and high profile issues, including the Middle Rio Grande Endangered Species Collaborative Program, dam safety modifications, implementation of the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, the Colorado River Salinity Control Program and completion of the Animas La-Plata Project.
Water journalist Brett Walton wrote a lovely piece about finally meeting the Colorado River for the first time:
I have reported on the Colorado River for five years. I know it as a legal argument, as a topographic feature, as an obstacle, and as a matrix of charts, calculations, and grim projections. I’ve read its case law. I’ve driven across its two monumental dams, and I’ve admired its curves through an airplane window. Its history — legal, political, environmental — is as vivid to me as any river’s. Yet, until this week, I had never touched its waters.
Feet swollen from the 4,460-foot descent and body breathless but euphoric, I removed my shoes and walked across the soft sand of Pipe Creek beach. The water appeared emerald or olivine depending on the angle of the sun. I bent low, bringing my lips to the river and took a drink.
Alfalfa in the Parker Valley, Arizona, February 2015, by John Fleck
Parker Live, a news web site based in Parker, Arizona, seems to be engaging in a little bit of what Kathryn Sorensen calls “drought schadenfreude” here. Parker sits on the Colorado, at the head of a rich farming valley with some of the most senior rights on the river and big farming that has thus far been unfazed by drought. But there is a nervous tone to the thing, as if everybody’s looking over their shoulder:
It’s easy to forget that there’s a drought when Lake Havasu and Lake Moovalya are full of beautiful, crystal clear water and the bigger cities around us are lush with green lawns and landscaping. But that may begin to change soon….
The Parker valley, a rich agricultural area made possible by irrigation, is theoretically safe because it is part of the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation and utilizes water rights owned by CRIT. But CRIT officials, speaking at the recent 150th year commemoration of the establishment of the reservation, are warning that their water rights will be under attack in the coming months and years. With water becoming a more precious resource, municipalities will be turning their attention anywhere they can get it. “The fight over our water lies ahead of us,” said CRIT Council Chairman Dennis Patch.
If you look at the picture, you’ll see that the desert here is never very far away.
The price California farmers can get for their almonds doubled between 2007 and last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Strong incentive to plant more trees, drought notwithstanding:
Arizona state seal
Arizona’s state seal is a fascinating bit of iconography in light of the state’s uneasy relationship with aridity and developed water. A dam, a river and irrigated land are given center stage – water projects as state destiny. Today I learned the seal’s details are actually enshrined in the state constitution:
In the background shall be a range of mountains, with the sun rising behind the peaks thereof, and at the right side of the range of mountains there shall be a storage reservoir and a dam, below which in the middle distance are irrigated fields and orchards reaching into the foreground, at the right of which are cattle grazing.
The clouds, apparently, are optional.
Roosevelt Dam was not yet completed when the above language was written during the 1910 constitutional convention, but those gathered were all about the future.
Doug Obegi lays out an interesting argument about the implications of drought for the “Bay Delta Conservation Plan”, the California plan to build great water-carrying tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for farms and cities to the south.
On paper, the tunnels would be largely dry during drought years, to preserve salinity balance in the delta, including for those who get their water there. But the tunnels would make it physically possible, Obegi argues, to just suck up the entire Sacramento River in a dry year like this, if Californians were willing to write off the delta, removing the fresh water flow that keeps sea water at bay. It thus becomes a political question, and there is some precedent for the politics of water allowing the saltwater to intrude, he argues:
While the biological science shows how important delta outflow and other environmental protections are for the continued existence of native fish, wildlife and the people who make their homes and living on these natural resources, the political science in favor of increasing diversions and waiving these standards has often trumped the biological science.
USDA estimates of revenue from California crop production (excluding horticulture) in recent years. I know just enough about this data to be misleading or dangerous, so I make no claims, but it sure seems interesting. Source: USDA NASS
Lea-Rachel Kosnick, in a paper a few years back, described the “tragedy of the anticommons”. In a classic “tragedy of the commons,” every pumper is sticking their straw into an aquifer and sucking it out, with no incentive to conserve because the other folks will just take the rest anyway. In the “anticommons” example, there are sane solutions out there, but too many people are positioned to block them.
The commons can lead to the “Tragedy of the Commons,” where uncoordinated utilization of a good can lead to its overuse, and symmetrically, the anticommons can lead to the “Tragedy of the Anticommons,” where poor collective management can lead to suboptimal use of the resource.
Pat Mulroy, former head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, pointedly raised this problem at the March 19 California Water Policy Forum:
We are very, very good at blocking. Anybody can stop anything. What we can’t do or can’t seem to do is find a structure within which to say yes. You will never have enough science, you will never have enough data, but at some point, something has to change.
Huge thanks to Chris Austin for posting the text of Mulroy’s remarks, which as usual are interesting throughout.
An interesting paper compares the 19th century work of John Wesley Powell in measuring the climate of the West, and suggesting policy responses, with 21st century efforts to assess and advise with respect to climate change. Powell argued for constraints on development while the science needed to better understand the region was carried out. It did not go well:
The language of this early debate is familiar in the context of the current debate. Powell and the irrigation survey were accused of producing scientific information that “… is consistent only the practice of public fraud….” Further, opponents claimed that the ends for the work of Powell was not the improvement of public welfare but the development of a larger political-scientific monopoly run with machine politics methods.
That is from A historical perspective on climate change assessment, K. John Holmes, Climatic Change
March 2015, Volume 129, Issue 1-2, pp 351-361.
Dean Farr Farrell has made a great visualization tool of western U.S. reservoir levels.