“just and stable titles to water”

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I spent the morning in an Albuquerque court listening to a fascinating legal argument about water rights. (Update: story from the am newspaper) The real issue, involving the way central New Mexico’s largest irrigation district allocates water, remains undecided  – this morning’s ruling was issued based on procedural issues rather than the substance at hand. So I’ll have more cracks at this question in the newspaper. But the central questions in debate break down roughly into a debate between the notion of water rights as property, versus the idea of water something collectively shared. As it happens, the two poles of the debate are nicely illustrated by two bits of recent reading.

The property doctrine is exemplified by Elwood Mead’s Irrigation Institutions, one of the seminal documents in the development of water law and policy in the western United States:

[T]he vital agricultural problem of the arid West is to establish just and stable titles to water and provide for their efficient protection times of need.

The always fascinating Kay Matthews, who writes for New Mexico’s La Jicarita, offers the alternative view:

 [T]he concept of “priority date” implies that the water we use we own, which is contrary to the way the acequia communities throughout northern New Mexico have always managed their water. José Rivera, in his book Acequia Culture, Water, Land, & Community in the Southwest, quotes from an affidavit submitted by acequia commissioners in the early years of the Taos Valley adjudication to determine priority dates and ownership of water:

“the aforesaid acequias by and through their fully elected commissioners agree that they will continue to follow and be bound by their customary divisions and allocations of water and agree that they will not make calls or demands for water between and among themselves based upon priority dates.”

In accordance with the traditional practice of repartimiento, or water sharing, the acequias did not want to establish a practice whereby a priority call could shut off water to “junior” water rights holders in times of drought.

In New Mexico, this question has not been sorted out, to our detriment in this year of drought.

Tree rings and the black death

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My fascination with tree rings (buy my book!) is mostly about climate stories. But the rings tell other tales as well:

According to folklore from the valley Hallingdal, between Oslo and Bergen, a young girl was locked into a farm storehouse to protect her from the Black Death.

The pandemic killed tens of millions in Asia, Europe and Africa and wiped out half of Norway’s population in the mid-1300s….

Few buildings have been dated to the middle and late 1300s because little construction was carried out. The Black Death was devastating in Norway, also economically, and empty farms were common.

So Thun was particularly delighted when he dated the Stave storehouse to exactly 1334, just a few years before the onslaught of the Black Death.

In America, we pump water out of the ground to put it in our rivers

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From Atlanta, another example of a concept we’re seeing increasingly here in the western United States – groundwater augmentation of dwindling river supplies:

Georgia’s efforts to quench metro Atlanta’s thirst include a $1 billion proposal to pump water from one aquifer to another and then release it into the Flint River in times of drought.

Thanks to Robert Osborne for the tweetlink.

A river with no water

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After three recent reporting trips to southern New Mexico, I can’t quite get my head around this:

Rio Grande, April 2013

Rio Grande, Hatch NM, April 2013

 

It’s the Rio Grande. The entire stretch through southern New Mexico has been completely dry since last summer, save for a few places where groundwater seeps, either hydrothermal stuff or leakage from upstream dams, wet the channel. Susan Montoya Bryan, a journalist pal with the AP who’s been grappling same as me with how to explain the drought, wrote this:

Only puddles remain, leaving gangs of carp to huddle together in a desperate effort to avoid the fate of thousands of freshwater clams, their shells empty and broken on the river bottom.

There’s a lot of left brain explaining to be done, involving climate variability, water management decisions, upstream dams and downstream farmers. Mostly that’s what I do. But there was something gut going on when I walked out onto the dry riverbed today, past the old tire and the off-roaders’ tread marks, beneath a swarm of cliff swallows that had built mud nests in the nearby bridge abutment, waiting for the bugs.

Will there be enough bugs?

irritable?

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Typo found in my notes: “irritable” where I meant to type “irrigable“. Looking at century-old estimates of possible agricultural land in the desert southwest. Notable mistake.

The arrival of the elk – another “what is nature?” story

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courtesy NM Department of Game and Fish

courtesy NM Department of Game and Fish

My Journal colleague Charles Brunt had a fascinating tale in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about the Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge’s struggle with elk.

Located on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico, the Bosque is famous among birders, a winter home to a flock of some 10,000 sandhill cranes. It’s always been my personal case study for thinking about human efforts to create and manage “nature” – an intensely managed landscape, with a rich and complex plumbing system of fields, ditches and gates designed to mimic an arid landscape riparian flood plain that no longer exists.

The refuge managers grow corn for the birds, and they’ve always had to manage it carefully to draw the right birds (cranes) while tolerating the wrong birds (snow and Ross’s geese, a species with a serious overpopulation problem). Now the corn has drawn a second pest – elk:

Elk in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge are devastating the corn crop that feeds the refuge’s migratory birds, leading wildlife managers to begin killing some of the animals for the first time since elk migrated there two decades ago.

And while New Mexico Department of Game and Fish officials and their counterparts at the refuge agree the herd needs to be thinned, there’s disagreement on who should kill the elk, and when they should do it.

Nature’s hard to get right.

I want my atmospheric river!

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Ever since I first heard about “atmospheric rivers” from Cliff Dahm, the biologist who until recently headed science efforts for the Delta Stewardship Council, I’ve been asking every scientist who I heard talk about them whether they can make it all the way to New Mexico. AR’s are  these amazing storms that blast California like a firehose, and they’re getting increasing attention in the climate-policy interface in California because of the importance of their presence, or absence, in determining whether that state has good or bad water supply years.

But they’ve been primarily a California thing. Can they push their moisture past the mountains and make it all the way to New Mexico?

atmospheric river

atmospheric river

Mike Dettinger, California’s “Dr. AR”, sent around a paper today (pdf) that pushes the boundary in our direction. It was a memorably impressive January 2010 storm, which came close to setting records (and in some cases set records) for runoff in the high country along the Mogollon Rim in Arizona and in the Gila Mountains of southwest New Mexico:

The AR was oriented nearly orthogonal to the Mogollon Rim, a major escarpment crossing much of central Arizona, and was positioned between the high mountain ranges of northern Mexico. High melting levels during the heaviest precipitation contributed to region-wide ?ooding, while the high altitude snowpack increased substantially. The characteristics of the AR that impacted Arizona in January 2010, and the resulting heavy orographic precipitation, are comparable to those of landfalling ARs and their impacts along the west coasts of midlatitude continents.

Neiman, Paul J., F. Martin Ralph, Benjamin J. Moore, Mimi Hughes, Kelly M. Mahoney, Jason M. Cordeira, Michael D. Dettinger, 2013: The Landfall and Inland Penetration of a Flood-Producing Atmospheric River in Arizona. Part I: Observed Synoptic-Scale, Orographic, and Hydrometeorological Characteristics. J. Hydrometeor, 14, 460–484.

 

So “playground activists” were a thing

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In early twentieth century America, there were playground activists:

Playground activists in cities across the nation, drawing from prevailing theories in psychology and sociology, championed organized play as the path toward stronger bodies and higher morals.

That’s from Matthew Klingle’s fascinating Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (The Lamar Series in Western History).

Groundwater: cooperating in Kansas

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Brett Walton’s got another good story about what happens when communities creatively confront coming water shortages and take control over their own adaptation. This one’s out of Kansas, where folks in the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District are on the cusp of agreeing amongst themselves to a 20 percent groundwater pumping curtailment, shared, to stretch out their aquifer supplies:

In the past, farmers could call on the chief engineer to administer water rights based on the priority system, in which older users are protected and junior claims are cut off. That course of action, Griggs explained, could enrage neighbors and ripple destructively through the local economy, if pumping were cut off completely. The result, he said, “was economic paralysis” and unchecked declines in the water table.

The LEMA law, however, shifts the power balance. Unlike an earlier law, the chief engineer can only approve, reject, or send back a LEMA management plan for revisions; he cannot make changes himself.

“It deals with the problem of inaction by locals, who want to manage their resource, but who are concerned that a central authority can come in and adopt rules that don’t take notice of local economic conditions,” Griggs said.