I spent time this afternoon watching Caspian terns fishing off the beach next to the Coupeville-Port Townsend ferry. This guy was successful.
Caspian tern, Whidbey Island, May 2013, by John Fleck
Later, when I was wandering the backwater nearby, I apparently got too close to the terns’ nesting area. The sent out the call, and five hovered around squawking while one repeatedly dive-bombed me. Never got close enough to poke my eyes out, but I got the message and left.
Our waitress at dinner tonight, on finding that Lissa and I are from Albuquerque, asked what brought us to Seattle. “The water,” Lissa said.
“We’ve got lots,” the waitress said, pointing with a smile out the window to Elliott Bay. “Happy to share.”
Seattle wraps around Elliott Bay, both geographically and historically. I guess that makes sense. Geography always constrains history, but in ways that are particularly striking here. We splurged on a couple of nights in the city overlooking the water before heading out to see family on Whidbey Island, and as I write this I’m looking out on a pair of gulls (glaucous-winged I think) in the foreground, dancing lazily in the wind, and the Port of Seattle in the background.
As Matthew Klingle explains in his environmental history Emerald City
Seattle, May 2013, by John Fleck
Klingle’s book is a fascinating tale of Seattle simultaneously embracing and strangling the water around it – the lakes, the salmon runs, Puget Sound. As is almost always the case (few major US cities don’t have some roots in “port-ness”), Seattle grew up around its role as the regional shipping hub, which means it grew up around Elliott Bay. But as a community, a place, Seattle also loves its water, so the embrace is a complicated one. Heavy commerce meets jogging path. I noticed signs on several downtown waterfront piers explaining that they are public places (they have benches), but that on occasion commerce can trump public purpose when a ship’s unloading. Klingle tells the sometimes hilarious early stories of the decision about where to draw the line between public water and private land, that which was freely available for all to use and that which could be owned. The uneasy dance around that line continues.
I don’t know enough about Seattle’s economy to explain the role of the port. There have been stories in the local papers documenting the port’s decline relative to rival Tacoma. Traffic is down the last couple of years, but there’s still a lot of cargo moving through the big terminals sitting astride what used to be the Duwamish. We watched a pair of tugboats shepherd two big container ships.
But the horizon looking south across Elliott Bay highlights the complex geography – shipping terminals, ballpark, ferris wheel, clam shack (ah, Ivar’s), ferry terminal and the downtown skyline all compete for the scarce real estate embracing the bay.
As Lissa and I were walking around this afternoon, we stumbled upon a great tragedy narrowly averted. A trucker, lost in downtown, tried to make a right turn on Pioneer Square but couldn’t quite make the corner. When we arrived, the truck was lodged hard against the square’s historic pergola. Another few feet and it would have come crashing down, and not for the first time. A clerk in a store across the way told Lissa this has happened before.
Much flashing of lights and huffing and puffing by a truly mighty tow truck dislodged him, and the Pioneer Square pergola was saved to continue its sacred role of sheltering Seattle’s homeless from the city’s relentless drizzle. A rainstorm blew through, Lissa and I ducked into a shop for coffee and pastries, which is what one does here. The tables around us were all laptops and earbuds and while we were drinking it, I kid you not, we heard Pearl Jam on the shop’s stereo.
Country Green Turf Farms, Olympia WA
Given that I’ve got farming on the brain, our recent Amtrak trip across the western United States was fascinating. The train goes through a lot of farm country, I guess in part because there is a lot of farm country in the western United States. We saw strawberries in Oxnard, the metastasis that is California’s wine country, grand fields of lettuce, the most beautiful aggregation of iris I’ve ever seen and lots of wheat and alfalfa.
Wheat and alfalfa seem to be staples.
But the strangest farm of all came just outside Olympia, Wash., a carpet of green with little squares cut out of the edges, the largest lawn I’ve ever seen. When I tweeted a picture, Brett Walton recognized it as the turf farm where they grow the grass for the Seattle Mariners baseball stadium. With that clue and some Google mapping, I believe I tracked it down to Country Green Turf Farms.
Given the cost of a beer at the ballpark, I’d say that’s some high-value agriculture.
Ever the journalist in search of gloomy extremes, I just noticed that total storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs used to manage flows on the Colorado River, is currently forecast (USBR pdf here) to end the current water year at its lowest level since 1968, when Powell, the uppermost reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam, was first being filled:
Mead/Powell storage
Data here
It’s complicated. That’s what I realized this morning as I engaged in the now-nearly-mandatory journalistic self-promotion exercise – tweeting my work.
On one of the local water mailing lists, I was recently taken to task for feeding drought paranoia rather than pulling together comprehensive analyses. It’s a fair cop. I’ll try to keep it in mind as I run around with my hair on fire, that helping explain the policy tools needed for putting out hair fires is a part of my job.
So here’s a start: allowing junior groundwater pumping to deplete the rights of senior surface water users in a way that can’t be remedied in real time is one of New Mexico’s central water management problems. Also, birds!
Shore birds stand in wet farm fields pecking for bugs in this stretch of the Pecos River Valley and the crops are beginning to green up. Defying drought by pumping groundwater, the center-pivot irrigation systems in the Pecos Valley Artesian Conservancy District are rolling, spraying water on alfalfa and wheat.
Forty miles downstream, the irrigation canals that normally supply Pecos River water to the farmers of the Carlsbad Irrigation District are dry.
Facing another year of shortfall, the Carlsbad farmers are looking angrily at the groundwater pumping by their upstream neighbors.
Too long to tweet.
Above is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Below, the Drinkwell Original Pet Fountain
Fountain
Drinkwell
Homage?
Doggie
In the midst of our drought, you can still find water if you know where to look.
The Rio Grande through Albuquerque is flanked by drains most of the way, ditches dug to intercept groundwater, draining swampy bottomland so it could be farmed and, ultimately, become our urban/suburban landscape.
This dog, with help, found the drain this afternoon.
Folks at the newly formed New Mexico Mercury are taking on New Mexico’s water problems in a big way, which I applaud.
But, as gently as I can do this, I need to engage them on what I think is a critical issue: their reuse argument: Here’s VB Price:
For New Mexico to get its water house in order, we need to … [a]ppropriate funds to subsidize the creation of urban gray water and black water treatment and recycling systems, on an individual scale and on a city-wide scale.
Also at the Mercury, Hana Wolf argued in a piece earlier this week for the reuse model.
I believe their argument is based on a faulty premise – that sewage effluent in New Mexico’s largest cities, especially Albuquerque, is water wasted, and that cleaning it so that it could be reused would end that water waste.
I took a crack at this question a couple of years ago in the newspaper.
As a National Academy panel argued in a report last year, there is a critical distinction between municipalities (primarily coastal ones) that simply throw away their effluent (usually by dumping it in the ocean) and inland cities that treat their effluent and return it to the system (primarily their rivers).
Places like Singapore and lately San Diego have made extraordinary progress with potable reuse. See my friend Cynthia Barnett’s Blue Revolution
If one’s experience with water reuse is in a water-scarce coastal city, one might assume that it is desirable for water to be treated and reused before it is released to the ocean. However, in an inland environment, water reuse may affect downstream users of the effluent.
In Albuquerque, every flush of my toilet makes its way down to the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s southside treatment plant, where it is cleaned up and returned to the Rio Grande. From there, it flows south. During a dry irrigation season, much of it is diverted at the Isleta diversion dam for use by downstream farmers, or flows on down the river, feeding a riparian ecosystem and eventually ending up in Elephant Butte Reservoir, where it is then available for use by farmers growing chile and pecans down in the southern part of the state.
My toilet flush is already essentially 100 percent reused. It’s true that if we reuse, that means withdrawing less water from the groundwater/surface water system. But because we also return less to the river by an equal amount, it’s a zero sum game. There may be benefits, but reducing water consumption is not one of them.
For those trying to rationalize New Mexico’s screwed up water management system, there’s a big risk here. Sewage reuse would take an enormous amount of political, managerial and economic capital, all of which are in limited supply in this poor state. If it doesn’t really save much water, it takes those resources away from efforts that will save water.
Thanks to Michael Morrison, whose useful questions on Twitter led me to clarify the post.
Vijf Mei
We’ve been doing this all wrong.
Growing up in LA with a May 5 birthday, I was steeped from the beginning in the whole “Cinco de Mayo” thing, the “Mexican Independence Day” that’s not. It had yet to turn into the beer marketing event that it is today. I realize now that the community I lived in wasn’t as gracefully integrated as it seemed to me as a child, but being the Cinco de Mayo boy made we want to embrace my role as an honorary Mexican. What can I say. I was a kid. It was before I learned about the zoot suit riots, before I learned how complicated race and nation are.
Now the whole beer party element just pisses me off.
So here’s my suggestion. In addition to marking the anniversary of the Mexican victory over the French at Puebla, May 5 also is the anniversary of the Canadian liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi rule. That’s worth celebrating, right? And one presumes the Dutch do beer well?
So happy Vijf Mei.
Concerned the current drought will end? No worries, climate change has your back:
Climate change is likely to render a key part of the water supply for Santa Fe and Albuquerque increasingly unreliable in coming decades, according to a new analysis by federal scientists.
The San Juan-Chama project, which imports water from the mountains of Colorado for use in New Mexico’s most populous cities, is likely to see shortfalls in one of every six years by the 2020s, and four out of every 10 years by the end of the century, according to researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
It seems I will never lack for water problems about which to write in the newspaper.