From the Texas Tribune:
“Without immediate and direct action from the White House and U.S. Department of State, Texans along the Rio Grande will continue to suffer from a lack of available water,” Perry wrote.
what newspapers do
Newspaper people don’t become newspaper people because they want to get rich, or because they want to be famous, they do so because they believe in what newspapers do.
TJ Sullivan, in his explanation of why he went to Roger Ebert’s funeral
Why “when the Ogallala runs out” isn’t the right way to think about this
Ogallala Aquifer
At dinner the other night, one of the people at the table commented about the risk we face when the Ogallala Aquifer, beneath the great plains, runs out, which he’d heard would happen in 20 years. Without taking action now to begin regrowing the native grasses needed to hold the plains in place, he’d heard, we faced the risk of another uncontrolled Dust Bowl like the one in that Ken Burns special.
There’s some science to support this, sort of:
Extrapolation of the current depletion rate suggests that 35 percent of the southern High Plains will be unable to support irrigation within the next 30 y.
But that “current depletion rate” caveat is the big “sort of” that exposes a peeve I’ve got about a lot of simplistic thinking about our water future. One can argue (as my dinner companion later did) that Lake Mead and Lake Powell have an x percent chance of going dry by year y, or that the a big part of the Great Plains is going to become another Dust Bowl in 20 years if one assumes that our behavior will continue “at the current depletion rate.”
But there are some unrealistic assumptions embedded here. One is that water users won’t scale back their use to forestall the aquifer’s decline. The other is that farmers don’t have alternatives when faced with less water.
There are a couple of recent things I’ve read (and one I’ve written) that illustrate the point. First, here’s what Mike Haederle wrote for Texas Climate News about the study I quoted from above, what happens when the water runs out:
If irrigation mostly disappears, “a high percentage of it will still be farmed – not necessarily all of it,” Smith says. “It’ll probably be mostly just cotton. Before they had any irrigation, they farmed cotton and some sorghum and some other crops. It’ll go back to that.”
A regional shift away from irrigation has occurred before. In the 1980s, skyrocketing fuel prices hit West Texas farmers who relied on the water- and labor-intensive irrigation systems common at the time, Smith says. “For a lot of them, it was more profitable to go to dryland farming then,” he says.
There’ll likely be economic dislocation, Mike wrote. Dryland farming is less lucrative. But this is a business management challenge, not an existential threat. If you’re worried about doom here, Mike’s piece will allow you to sleep a bit better this evening.
In a similar vein, Brett Walton at Circle of Blue had a fascinating piece last week about efforts by Texas farmers and ag scientists to prepare for a future with less water to work with. It’s a longish piece, well worth a read if you’re concerned about the Ogallala in the long term, but makes three basic points:
- Texas high plains water districts are beginning to restrict withdrawals
- Conversion from irrigation to dryland farming will cause reductions in farm income and jobs, but not an end to farming on the land (and wind power revenue will offset some of the economic dislocation)
- research is underway to develop more viable crops with less water
A similar point came through during my visit to the Hatch Valley last month. Farmers are adapting to the changing environment.
While thinking about the depletion of the Ogallala is an important exercise, a look at what folks are doing in impacted communicaties shows that an assumption of continued depletion at current rates doesn’t quite work for modeling the future.
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in the midst of drought, signs of water cooperation
It almost felt like a setup when Steve Harris asked me to talk at a conference about how “water is for cooperating over.” I make a meager but steady living these days writing about water conflict. And yet….
[B]efore I got to Ghost Ranch on Friday afternoon, I took the turnoff to Abiquiu Reservoir. In drought-parched New Mexico, this is the one reservoir that has a lot of water. It glistened blue-green beneath a bowl of rust-red cliffs, shimmering in a brisk afternoon wind.
For fans of cooperation, there is hope in plans for a release beginning today or Wednesday out of Abiquiu, a big slug of municipal water now in storage to try to boost the meager flow of the Rio Grande.
Turkey vultures over Ghost Ranch
Turkey Vultures over Ghost Ranch, L. Heineman, April 2013
Thinking like a watershed*
When I left Pasadena nearly 25 years ago, my water mentor Tim Brick was hard at work on the problem of restoring a semblance of riverness to the Arroyo Seco, the channel that defines that Southern California city’s western edge.
Via a visit by our old mutual friend Larry Wilson to the confluence of the Arroyo Seco and the Los Angeles River, I see Tim’s still at it:
I can say that if you dare to walk down a scary ramp just east of Avenue 22 and Figueroa Street in Cypress Park, underneath where the 110 and the 5 freeways meet, you will find yourself at the confluence of two of the sorriest looking bodies of water you could ever hope to see. Everything is paved. Everywhere is trash.
I’m in favor of Confluence Park.
* With a nod to Aldo Leopold, who argued for “thinking like a mountain“, and Jack and Celestia Loeffler, who took it the next step
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The “futile call” – a water rights priority dilemma
Drought exposes the fissures in water policy.
In the abstract, you can talk about where the problems look like they might lie, and the measures that look like they’re in place to ensure adaptability and sustainability. Drought tests.
This week’s test is happening down on the Pecos, a relatively small river that flows out of the bottom end of the Rockies, across the plains of eastern New Mexico and into Texas. All hell – OK, maybe just some hell – is breaking loose:
CARLSBAD — The leaders of the Carlsbad Irrigation District voted Tuesday to demand the state of New Mexico shut off groundwater users upstream in the Roswell and Artesia areas to protect Carlsbad-area farmers’ right to Pecos River water.
At its worst, the “priority call” could force many groundwater users — municipalities, farms, dairies and oil rigs — to stop pumping water, at a potential cost of $1 billion to the local economy.
The problem, as viewed from Carlsbad, at the bottom end of the system, is upstream groundwater pumping. The groundwater pumpers are “junior” under the doctrine of prior appropriation – they put in there wells after the downstream users had already put surface water from the Pecos to use on the farms of the Carlsbad Irrigation District. Under the doctrine of prior appropriation, the seniors get their water and the juniors get shut off. But the connection between surface and groundwater is slow and indistinct. The groundwater pumping does reduce river flows, but slowly and over time. That means you can’t just shut off the junior pumpers this year and expect to see the river jump right back. Their effect is already baked into the cake, hard to unwind on short time scales:
State officials have argued that any such effort to curtail pumping would amount to a “futile call.” It takes years for the effects of curtailed groundwater pumping to show up in the river, according to Greg Lewis, Pecos Basin manager for the Interstate Stream Commission. That would mean that a call this year would not likely yield additional water for the Carlsbad farmers in 2013, according to Lewis.
The system is breaking down.
Folks, we’ve got a drought going on
2013 Colorado Basin forecast, courtesy CBRFC
Bill Hasencamp at the Metropolitan Water District (I think it was Bill) asked a question today on the Colorada Basin River Forecast Center monthly briefing call that led to an email exchange that led to this, from the work blog: the forecast for spring inflow into Lake Powell, on the Colorado River, is the lowest since the CBRFC began doing forecasts in 1979. And the two-year sum of spring flows (April-July last year and this), if the forecast verifies, will be the lowest two-year spring total since Glen Canyon Dam was completed in the 1960s.
Meanwhile on the Rio Grande, southern New Mexico water numbers guru Phil King told me (newspaper story) that, if the forecast on the Rio verifies, 2013 will be the driest year by one measure (current flow and available storage reserves) in the history of modern water management, going back a century:
An abysmal March, on top of an abysmal snowpack season, on top of an abysmal 2011 and 2012, means 2013 is shaping up to be the driest year on the Rio Grande in a century of modern water management.
“It’s the worst year ever,” said Phil King, a professor at New Mexico State University and adviser to southern New Mexico’s largest farm water agency.
King had been preparing his farmers for the worst, but that did not make it any easier to take when the forecast showed that the worst case scenario is now happening.
“It hurts to get slugged in the stomach,” King said, “even if you’re expecting it.”
We’ve got a situation here.
Ebert
The reaction at the office today to the death of newspaperman Roger Ebert was striking. I cannot think of another writer of American English with the same broad, beloved appeal.
One friend, a younger-generation journalist who’s from Chicago, sent around a collection of particularly delicious fragments from Ebert movie reviews, and I was struck by their ease: “Watching ‘Mad Dog Time’ is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line….” He was the kind of writer whose phrases had a comfortable feel, without pretense, as if we could have written them ourselves. Except we hadn’t.
I am not a movie person. I rarely set foot in a movie theater, don’t do Netflix. But I loved reading Ebert’s movie reviews in the Friday paper. I guess that is my praise – the guy made we want to read things about a subject in which I had no interest, just for the love of his easy way with words.
A writer’s writer.
US Reclamation Service, 1915
The US Bureau of Reclamation was known as the US Reclamation Service (USRS) from its formation via the Reclamation Act of 1902 until it was renamed in 1923. This “USRS” was cast in concrete on Mesilla Dam, an irrigation diversion structure on the Rio Grande outside Las Cruces, NM, in 1915. The dam is part of the Service’s/Bureau’s Rio Grande Project, which delivers water from Elephant Butte Reservoir to farmers in southern New Mexico.
As an aside, note the lack of water in the river’s bed. That’s sand, folks.
US Reclamation Service sign, circa 1915, with some modern decoration. Mesilla Dam, on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico, March 2013