A storm blew through Santa Fe last night. Lissa and I drove up into the Sangres to see the snow:
The Cold War “dam gap”
Circa 1958, a unique argument in favor of the development of the next wave of dams in the Colorado River Basin. At the time, the Eisenhower administration had failed to include any “new starts” for U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects in its Fiscal Year 1959 budget. Sen. James E. Murray, D-Montana, was alarmed:
Your attention is called to the very real threat by Soviet Russia in outstripping the United States in water resources and hydroelectric power development…. We propose to delve into this subject at public hearings for the purpose of alerting the American people to the threat to the economic stability of this country.
Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Jan. 23, 1958
update: I found that last little bit while reading Congressional testimony about water and power project development in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Tugging on the thread, I found a remarkable Congressional report written in 1957 (sorry, only found it in the walled-off web, can’t find a public copy) purporting to be a thorough inquiry into this incredibly important question. It concluded that we were still ahead of the commies, but warned against complacency:
While the United States is still the leading producer of hydroelectric power and is still the leading industrial nation of the world and Soviet Russia has not yet outstripped the United States, its rate of progress percentagewise is a warning, against the background of the economic cold war, that this country dare not adopt a complacent attitude that would allow us to drift under a false assumption of unassailable superiority.
Relationships of river and related water resource development programs of U.S., Soviet Russia, and Red China, 12063 S.rp.1926, Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Senate; Committee on Public Works, July 23, 1958
Watering the desert, circa 1937
Imperial Valley, 1937, Dorothea Lange, courtesy Library of Congress
Full caption:
Irrigation ditch along the road. Imperial Valley, California; Lange, Dorothea, photographer; 1937 Feb.
Lange’s justly famous for her pictures of the people of the Imperial Valley when she travelled there in the late 1930s as a documentarian for the Farm Service Administration. She also took pictures of water. If you want to get lost for an hour or two, the Library of Congress has quite a collection on line.
Vegas: a race against nature?
With Lake Mead water levels dropping, Pat Mulroy is in a race against Mother Nature.
That’s how the risks facing by Las Vegas, Nev., were framed this week in a piece in The Henderson Press. But as one of the members of my water geek brain trust, Phil King, likes to point out, reservoir levels are a wonderful way of tracking drought and/or plenty in a single indicator because they integrate both how much water nature puts into the lake and how much water humans take out.
Lake Mead is dropping, and Pat Mulroy is racing, in significant part because the people of Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and most especially the farmers of the Imperial Valley, use a lot of water. In fact, as I’ve pointed out previously, Lake Mead’s been getting all the water it’s supposed to get under the Colorado River Compact, year after year, since forever. Sometimes it even gets bonus water above and beyond that. But Lake Mead keeps dropping.
Mulroy’s in part racing against Mother Nature, but in large measure she’s also racing against herself.
Carl Hayden: “water as cheaply as it can be served”
Carl Hayden, 1916, courtesy Library of Congress
Here’s a great quote from Carl Hayden. It was June, 1922, still in the early days of the jockeying for development of the Colorado River’s water. Hayden was at the time a relatively junior member of the House, having not yet ascended to the political heights from which decades later, as Arizona’s senior senator, he engineered the construction of the Central Arizona Project:
It seems to me that the irrigator under a reclamation project is entitled to receive his water as cheaply as it can be served to him. I think that is in the public interest.
That’s from the 1922 hearings before the House Committee on Committee on Irrigation of Arid Lands on HR 11449, A Bill to Provide for the Protection and Development of the Lower Colorado River Basin. Hayden didn’t get his way on the provision of irrigation water for Arizona until 46 years later, when Lyndon Johnson finally signed the Colorado River Basin Project Act of 1968. But on this central point – cheap irrigation water to underpin the “public interest” in the West, there seems to have been little disagreement.
That Hayden kept plugging away for the whole 46 years is, in and of itself, a remarkable thing.
(h/t Jack August’s Vision in the Desert
Eucalyptus
It was dark when I got out of my rental car yesterday evening in Rancho Bernardo, north of San Diego. I couldn’t really see the place, but I could smell the tell-tale scent of eucalyptus. I slept with the window open. There was a eucalyptus outside my window. I slept well.
The eucalyptus outside my window, Rancho Bernardo, CA, October 2013, by John Fleck
When I grew up in Upland, in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, the eucalyptus was ubiquitous, planted as windbreaks along the edges of orange groves. That smell, the mix of eucalyptus and citrus, is my youth. It turns out the story we learned as children – that the tree’s presence was the result of a failed attempt by the railroads to grow a fast-growing tree for use as railroad ties – is close to bunk. As Nathan Masters wrote earlier this year, the railroad thing played only a minor role. The real story is much richer and more in keeping with Southern Californians’ peculiar penchant for self-invention. Here’s Abbot Kinney (as quoted by Masters), a 19th-century booster extolling the virtues of the fast-growing tree (also known as the “blue gum”):
The introduction of this tree has done more to change radically the appearance of wide ranges of country in California than any other one thing. In the reclamation of many arid plains of the central and southern parts of California the blue gum has worked almost like magic. It modifies the winds, breaks the lines of view all so quickly that one can scarcely realize that a valley of clustered woods and lines of trees was but a year or two before a brown parched expanse of shadeless summer dust.
On the grounds of the conference center/hotel place that I’m staying, there also are pepper trees, which lined Euclid Avenue in Upland when I was growing up, which were another signature tree of my childhood, and which Masters points out are also an import. So this trip is tinged with nostalgia for my youth. But it was fascinating when I snuck away this afternoon for a couple of hours from the conference I’m attending (beach trip, absolute necessity) to also see the chaparral hillsides as the freeway cut through the San Diego hills. They were dry, with no trees, and they also felt like old home week to me, like the foothills above our houses that my chums and I used to clamber up to get a better view.
The conference is about water, and my 54-year-old self can’t help but ponder the water needed to carry out Kinney’s vision of “the reclamation of many arid plains”, and the natural dry of those chaparral hillsides, notions of sustainability, that sort of thing. I’ve written before about my fascination with California’s great invention of itself, and about the sustainability of the results. The grand expanses of tile-roofed homes sprawling up San Diego’s hillsides, far above the high water mark the last time I was here, gives me pause.
But damn those eucalyptus smell good. I’ll leave the window open again tonight.
A reminder that the Endangered Species Act is a really lousy water management tool
Chris Austin reminds us why California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan may look like a water management plan, but isn’t:
The Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) is often criticized for not being comprehensive enough because it doesn’t consider other actions that could be taken such as desalination, or other statewide or regional needs such as water storage. Perhaps it’s the huge price tag or the over 40,000 pages that makes it seem like it should be more; however, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan is not supposed to be statewide water plan – it is, after all, a permit application for an incidental take permit that is being submitted under federal and state endangered species regulations.
One can imagine a water management plan for ensuring supply reliability for San Joaquin valley farms and Southern California lawns, developed as a water management plan rather than a plan for avoiding jeopardy to endangered species, that might look much the same. Or one could imagine a whole bunch of different possible solutions cropping up if this wasn’t an ESA-driven planning effort. But we have to imagine, because Chris is right here in pointing out what I think is one of the BDCP’s great shortcomings. It’s not a water management plan.
bug in the yard
Grasshopper hangin’ out in our backyard piñon:
grasshopper, by John Fleck, Sept. 29, 2013
Drought and Despair: “these enemies of mankind”
Working on a book chapter about the genesis and importance of the Arizona v. California litigation over the Colorado River, I ran across this priceless little bit of business from 1944.
Harry Bashore, Commissioner, Bureau of Reclamation, 1943-1945, courtesy USBR
It is Harry Bashore, Comissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, testifying in Phoenix in July of that year, before the a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation, regarding the great work that lay ahead:
Since the time of Alexander the Great, men have complained that they could find no more lands to conquer. We of the Reclamation Service know that there are still lands of the great Southwest where our two weapons – water and power – can conquer drought and despair. And as these enemies of mankind are routed, we can build a greater Southwest with the help of those who will seek employment here in our public works.
See what he just did there?
Following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great! Reclamation rhetoric doesn’t get much better than that. But Bashore is doing so much more. The hearing is part of a clever little game going on between Reclamation and Arizona Sen. Carl Hayden, two arms of wester water’s “iron triangle“. Hayden had set this up the year before, with a measure pushed through a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Post-War Economic Planning and Policy. The need to transition the economy from war to peace, and to find jobs for returning warriors, was a political opportunity not to be missed. The rhetoric of victory over the Axis Powers became transformed to the rhetoric of victory of those twin enemies of all mankind, “drought and despair”.
The full testimony is here.
Annals of fucked up metaphors
As a group of U.S. politicians prepared to vote on a measure intended to delay implementation of a federal effort to extend health care to uninsured Americans, one of them, a Republican Texas congressman named John Culberson, was quoted thus:
“I said, like 9/11, ‘let’s roll!’”
It is a reference to the words attributed to Todd Beamer, a passenger on the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, as a group of passengers tried to overpower the hijackers and prevent the use of the aircraft in a suicide attack.
In discussing U.S. health care policy in a column back in 2009, I employed a different use of the 9/11 metaphor in an effort to help readers make sense of the 18,000 people who, according to an Institute of Medicine study, die each year in the United States because of a lack of health insurance:
I’ve struggled with ways of getting across 18,000 preventable deaths per year. It is a 9/11 attack every two months, year in and year out.
I’ve often found it useful to push metaphors to the breaking point. Thinking through their failure mode provides useful information. So I’d invite you, in considering Culberson’s words and mine, to think about who represents Al-Qaeda here – the people attempting to extend health care coverage to the uninsured, or the people attempting to stop them.
Or maybe we should all just stop with the 9/11 references.