Thinking about California headwaters

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Cynthia Koehler, writing in the Sacramento Bee last week, offers another example California water’s wicked problem. While all the attention is focused on the Sacramento Delta, are the critical headwaters of the state’s great river systems being given short shrift?

California’s farms, commerce, industry and 38 million residents rely in large part on water that flows from headwaters forests – many of them on public land from the Feather River to the Owens Valley to Hetch Hetchy.

Whether remote or right in our backyards, the headwaters of California’s rivers and streams are essential to our water security. These forests capture and hold snow in the winter. Their soils soak up water from snowmelt like enormous sponges, providing a natural cleansing filter, replenishing aquifers, and moderating floods and high flows as the water moves downhill toward its many users. Headwaters forests are the savings accounts for water security in California and the West.

Today, these watershed regions are at risk. Emerging threats include severe drought, higher levels of insect infestations, invasive species and excessive erosion. Wildfires like those now blazing around the state bring massive post-fire washouts of sediment – clogging rivers and streams. Many headwaters are also weakened by past forest management legacies.

This is a great example of what John Bass recently called “the scope of the water geography to be implicated“. The set of problems Californians are grappling with when they deal with the “Bay-Delta problem” has been circumscribed by the processes being used to discuss them. Specifically, the Ba Delta Conservation Plan is a product of state and federal endangered species law, and the boundaries of the problem – the export of water from the delta and the resulting health of the delta’s endangered critters – has been tightly circumscribed. All the energy, as a result, is focused there. But as Bass argues, and as Koehler’s piece points out, the issues are broader.

don’t call it “drought”

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I’ve long thought “drought” is a troublesome word, implying abnormal when we’re really talking about dry part of the normal range of variability.

My colleague Rene Romo has a marvelous quote that sidles up to that point in an excellent story today about the problems of southeastern New Mexico farmers and ranchers:

Woods Houghton, the Eddy County agriculture extension agent, said the county lost roughly 30 to 40 percent of its farmland output this year due to drought.

“I always tell people in Eddy County we are in perpetual drought interrupted by moisture,” Houghton said. “But the last two years have been more severe than anything I’ve seen in the last 32 as county agent.”

 

Coming clean

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It would be wrong to say I harbored a dark secret lo these many years. Because it was only yesterday afternoon that I realized, “Wait, I’m just like Lance Armstrong! I was a doping cyclist!” At least, it appears I might have been.

OK, not entirely just like Armstrong. Like Armstrong, I’m maybe a bit of a narcissistic dickhead (I’ve got a blog, right?), but in my brief bike racing career, I had neither natural talent nor the willingness to train very hard. One year, participating in the local time trial series (the Race of Truth), I was quite literally the slowest licensed bike racer in Albuquerque.

Tuesday Night Crits

Tuesday Night Crits

But in a close reading yesterday of the regulations in place at the time of the fateful June 1, 2004 Tuesday Night Crits Cat 4 race, I realize that Armstrong and I have something more disturbing and sinister in common than I’ve been willing to acknowledge.

My affaire le dope dates to the late 1990s, when a physician wrote my first prescription for albuterol, an asthma inhaler. It was handy to have in the pocket of my cycling shirt as a hedge against the occasional bout of exercise-induced asthma. But when I first tasted the forbidden fruit of albuterol during a lung function test in the doctor’s office, I couldn’t help but notice that simply using the inhaler even when I wasn’t having an attack increased my lung capacity some 10 percent. What’s not to like?

You can see where this is going:

By using a USA Cycling license, you agree to know and abide by the applicable rules and regulations of USA Cycling and the UCI, including the anti-doping rules and procedures as set forth by USADA, the UCI or WADA and that you agree to submit to any drug test organized under the rules by the UCI, USA Cycling, USADA, or the official anti-doping authority of a foreign country where you are competing.

In the case of albuterol, the guidelines say this:

The dosage of albuterol or formoterol that may be used in sport without a TUE may translate into a wide range of “puffs”. You should examine your inhaler closely to determine the dosage. If you need to take more than the non-prohibited dosage you must apply for a TUE.

“TUE” is a “Therapeutic Use Exemption” – formal permission ahead of time, certified by a doctor, that you need the drug. If it please the Court of Arbitration, I hereby stipulate that I had no such certification, and that I sometimes took two puffs. Ignorance of the rules is no excuse. I have nothing to say in my defense other than, as a pathetically slow cyclist, it was a rush to be able to finish on the same lap as the leaders in the the Category 4 race, the slowest division on offer.

So when I came off the final turn that Tuesday night in perfect position, second wheel in the chase group with a perfect lead-out in the sprint for fourth place, I might have been a cheater. I might not have been. It’s possible my puffs fell below the 1,600 microgram threshold wherein you’re free to just puff away. But it was my responsibility as a licensed bike racer to make that determination, and I failed.

I’m pretty sure it was Tony Geller who lead me out, pulling off so I could sprint home the final 150 meters. And behind me, it was Jerry Kiuttu who I cheated out of a fourth-place finish (pdf).

Like Armstrong, I could argue that I’ve never failed a doping control. Cat 4? Seriously. But still, Jerry, I’m so very sorry.

MWD and the case for optimism in western water

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The folks at Montgomery and Associates recently took a look at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as an example of why water management problems, once a region actually confronts shortage, are manageable:

MWD’s response demonstrates that supply-demand imbalances can be resolved through active management. In practice, active water management generally means acquiring more expensive supplies. Basic economic theory tells us that as more expensive supplies are added to a utility’s portfolio, overall cost of water to the consumer rises. In response to these rising costs, customers will reduce their water use. One result is that water demand in the aggregate falls, thus providing another element of the overall solution.

In light of this dynamic process, the question is not whether water will be available — because it will — but rather, how much will it cost, and how will the additional cost be distributed among water users?

making water conservation tougher than we need to

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In the Dallas suburb of Highland Park (media household income $172k), efforts to conserve water by not planting lawns have run into a hiccup, as Melissa Repko reports:

A new ordinance, passed on Monday, outlaws artificial turf on front yards. With a town permit, the turf is allowed on side yards and back yards, so long as the artificial turf is out of sight.

“Plastic grass is not in keeping with the design and quality of design we want to have in our town,” said Councilman Andrew Barr in an interview after the vote. “It seemed like, in the early stage, we should address this before it affects the neighbors and the general public.”

 

 

A clever argument for reduced flows in the Murray Darling

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There’s a pitched battle underway in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin over how much water humans can take from the system for their own use, and how much should be left for the river-fed ecosystem. One of the corollary arguments here in the states involves the human economic value of instream flows for recreation – river rafting, ecotourism and the like. Here’s a very clever Australian farmer trying to blunt that argument – too much water in the river is bad for tourism!

Mr Hatty said thousands of tourists packed his area of the Murray River region during the summer months and school holiday times, especially during the Easter break, swelling the town’s population and boosting the economic “harvest” for battling local businesses. But if the local river system swells by about 20,000 mega-litres per day or more, it can cause water levels to rise significantly and prevent access to beaches and family recreational areas, like those designated for camping.

 

Dendro as a historical tool

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Henri Grissino-Mayer and his colleagues have been doing some neat work using tree ring dating as a historical tool – in this case to clear up who really built the buildings on the old McDonald Farm* in Virginia:

We found cutting dates for the collapsed cabin ranged from 1809 to 1810, making the likely builder Samuel Myers and not Joseph Anderson, who is currently given credit for its construction. The logs in the barn had cutting dates ranging from 1830–1831, confirming the 1830 construction date estimated by the historical documents and confirming the builder was Joseph Anderson. The logs from the standing cabin and smokehouse had cutting dates ranging between from 1838 and 1840, refining the “mid-19th century construction” listed in the register nomination. Furthermore, the nomination gave credit of the construction of these latter two structures also to Joseph Anderson, but the builder was actually John Gish who owned the farm from 1837 to 1845.

(I’ve got a chapter about Henri in my book, including a discussion of his fun work on violins)

* No, I’ve no idea if it’s that old McDonald’s farm.

Delta hostages

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One of the smartest comments on last week’s Cal-Fed announcement about the California Bay-Delta system came in a blog comment from UC Davis’s Jay Lund:

The Delta has always been about hostage taking – traditionally with local interests using Delta salinity as a hostage on the big water export projects, and water export users using Delta salinity as a hostage to gain the support of local Delta landowners – who depend on Sacramento River flows to dilute salts in the lower San Joaquin River/south Delta. This situation has trashed native species habitat. Unfortunately, the hostages are dying (native species, subsided island levees, and drinking water quality). So new infrastructure and hostage arrangements will be needed.

Lund and Kaveh Madani wrote an insightful paper last year on the political/game theory problem:

Today’s Delta problem has characteristics of a Chicken game, where cooperation is in everyone’s interest, but is unlikely because parties deviating from the status quo are likely to bear more of the costs of a long-term solution. The state of California may become the victim (or chicken) of the Delta game, bearing the greatest costs, if it continues to rely on a policy of leaving parties to develop voluntary cooperative resolution without a sufficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation.

Phil Isenberg made a related point in his piece responding to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan Announcement (he’s actually quoting here from a talk he’s given to several California audiences):

In public, most of the speakers say pretty much the same thing. The most common refrain is “me, and my interest first.” However, when I talk to these people in private, they say things differently. In private, people are more candid, flexible and pragmatic. This difference between public posturing and reasonable private conversation irritates me. I occasionally demand they say in public what they tell me in private. Some smile, but mostly they glower or stare back without responding. This is the American way to negotiate: demand more than you want or need, in the hope of getting something better than you expect. Ask tough questions of your opponents, but duck the ones that come your way. Offer to compromise 30 minutes before a final decision. This pattern is not a great way to make public policy.