Municipal and agricultural use of Colorado River water: a comparison

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Henry Brean reports on lawn removal efforts in Las Vegas, Nev.:

Since the turf rebate program was launched in 1999, it has paid out $189 million in rebates and helped eliminate more than 167 million square-feet of thirsty grass, saving an estimated 9 billion gallons of water per year.

Translated: a reduction of approximately 4,000 acres of lawn, and a bit less than 30,000 acre feet of water per year.

By comparison, the Imperial Irrigation District, Vegas’s downstream neighbor sharing in the Lower Colorado River Basin’s limited allocation of Colorado River water, reports more than 1 million irrigated acres, and will use approximately 2.6 million acre feet of water in 2013 (pdf).

Vegas numbers, impressive on their own, are quite literally a rounding error when you fold then into the Lower Basin’s overall water use.

Volvo Desert

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I had a couple of pieces in the newspaper last week about New Mexico’s long term water usage trends. I wrote the stories because the data, a time series I assembled by reviewing state water use reports, surprised me:

Water for household use peaked in 1995 and has been declining ever since, according to state data. Farm irrigation, which makes up the bulk of the state’s water use, has been declining since the 1970s.

The explanation seems to be that we have less water:

“This is about a lack of water resources,” said Sandia National Laboratories water researcher Mike Hightower.

I played a bit with the “peak water” theme, which sounds problematic. A headline writer used the word “grim” to describe the situation, which did not entirely please me, because ultimately, I think this is not necessarily bad news. So I wrote a followup column:

It is easy to single out communities for which declining water supplies are a big problem – farmers this year in the Carlsbad area and the Hatch Valley, for example, or the villages of Vaughn and Magdalena. But perhaps more striking is the grace with which much of New Mexico’s population and economy has made the transition over the past two or more decades to a life with less water.

When one has less water, one uses less water. “We humans are incredibly adaptable,” one water policy wonk wrote me in an exchange following my column.

Two other Albuquerque Journal stories in the past month, one by me and one by my colleague Kiera Hay, tell a similar story, with Albuquerque water use dropping 6 percent this year compared to last and Santa Fe’s dropping five percent.

Early in the research for my book, one of the water community folks helping me asked a pointed question: “Mentioning that you are authoring a book probably rings of ‘Cadillac Desert’. We all have read that. You’re not writing a sequel to that? Are you?” When I started the project, the answer to that question would have been “yes”. As the much-missed OtPR wrote, “It isn’t accurate now (in fact, the book made itself obsolete), but Cadillac Desert fundamentally shaped the lay view of water in CA.” Not just California, but all the West, and it’s where I started. But the more I write about water issues, and the more I work on my book, the more clear it becomes that my friend’s observation about our adaptability is what gets us beyond Marc Reisner’s gloomy implications for our future.

I’ve begun joking that I should call my book “Volvo Desert” instead.

 

New York Times green shift: the verdict

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Last spring, I wrote a half-hearted defense of the New York Times decision to shitcan its Green Blog and related decisions:

A Green blog is a place where environmenty people go to look for environmenty news. If we’re doing it right, that sort of news is embedded in all sorts of stories rather than a category of its own. So I agree with the rationale – both for killing the Green blog and for dismantling the Times’ green pod. I think coverage of the family of issues sometimes called the “environment beat” is best done integrated into a bunch of different beats, not off on its own.

But I called this a “half-hearted defense” because it only works if Baquet and company aren’t bullshitting us here, if they’re really planning to drive the topic(s) out into the newsroom as a whole.

A preliminary verdict, by New York Times public editor Margert Sullivan, is in:

The quantity of climate change coverage decreased…. Beyond quantity, the amount of deep, enterprising coverage of climate change in The Times appears to have dropped, too.

I was aiming at a subtlety that Sullivan’s analysis doesn’t address (doesn’t she read Inkstain?), the importance of incorporating environmental issue reporting into other topics, not writing about it in a stand-alone fashion. That said, however, the Times does not seem to have lived up to its claims when the moves were made eight months ago.

Simon Rifkind’s great mistake and the shortfall on the Colorado River

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tl;dr – In 1960, U.S. Supreme Court Special Master Simon Rifkind made a fundamental mistake in calculating how much water was then available in the Colorado River Basin, and how much might be available in the future. The court, in its ruling in the case of Arizona v. California, accepted Rifkind’s math. The consequence is a shortage on the Colorado River relative to the expectations of the nine states (seven in the U.S., two in Mexico) that share it.

But it also was a fundamental mistake for the water users in the Lower Colorado River Basin to not recognize the flaw in Rifkind’s math and act accordingly. That second mistake, more than Rifkind’s, is the cause of our current troubles.

Click through for the longer version….

Continue reading ‘Simon Rifkind’s great mistake and the shortfall on the Colorado River’ »

River restoration – it’s all about the groundwater

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I’m looking forward to Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River, a forthcoming University of Arizona Press book by Robert Webb, Julio Betancourt and colleagues. While we spend a lot of time talking about how to return water to rivers in the arid southwestern United States, this group of authors is entertaining a more subtle point – it’s not just about the water flowing in the river, it’s about the groundwater beneath:

In prehistoric times, the Santa Cruz River in what is now southern Arizona saw many ebbs, flows, and floods. It flowed on the surface, meandered across the floodplain, and occasionally carved deep channels or arroyos into valley fill. Groundwater was never far from the surface, in places outcropping to feed marshlands or cienegas. In these wet places, arroyos would heal quickly as the river channel revegetated, the thriving vegetation trapped sediment, and the channel refilled. As readers of Requiem for the Santa Cruz learn, these aridland geomorphic processes also took place in the valley as Tucson grew from mud-walled village to modern metropolis, with one exception: historical water development and channel changes proceeded hand in glove, each taking turns reacting to the other, eventually lowering the water table and killing a unique habitat that can no longer recover or be restored. (emphasis added)

Thus, when a river runs low, a shallow water table still leaves refugia, muddy holes that stay wet even as the flow in the river itself dries. As we pump down our aquifers, we lose that, even as environmental restoration efforts focus on adding more flow to the rivers themselves.