The Rio Grande cutthroat trout and the Endangered Species Act

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Map showing former habitat of Rio Grande cutthroat trout in blue, spread across the mountains of Northern New Mexico and Colorado, and current habitat in red, much smaller.

Courtesy New Mexico Department of Game and Fish

The US Fish and Wildlife Service earlier this month (December 2024) once again declined to list the Rio Grande cutthroat trout as “endangered.”

It’s a native species endangered (in the colloquial sense, not the legal sense) by both anthropogenic habitat changes (warm temperatures, less water, dams and stuff) and non-native immigrant species.

USFWS identified non-native hybridization and competition as the most significant threat, and concluded that collective action by a collaborative effort including federal, state, and tribal governments, along with NGOs, has successfully stabilized the fish’s population since discussion about possible listing first began a quarter century ago.

The 119 populations are distributed across a wide geographic area, providing sufficient redundancy to reduce the likelihood of large-scale extirpation due to a single catastrophic event. Furthermore, the Rio Grande cutthroat trout Conservation Team has a demonstrated track record of responding to negative events to protect and even expand populations in the aftermath of large-scale changes to streams. Populations cover the breadth of the historical range, ensuring retention of adaptive capacity (i.e., representation) to promote short-term adaption to environmental change. The SSA report describes the uncertainties associated with potential threats and the subspecies’ response to these potential threats, but the best available information indicates the risk of extinction is low. Therefore, we conclude that the Rio Grande cutthroat trout is not in danger of extinction throughout all of its range and does not meet the definition of an endangered species.

ESA questions

I’ve not followed the Rio Grande cutthroat trout saga closely. My primary interest is in its value in highlighting broader issues around the ESA that my Utton Center colleagues and I have been discussing of late.

Collective action

Collective action by a broad coalition of stakeholders before ESA listing seems to have been key in protecting what’s left of the species and avoiding listing.

Question: Is this driven by a societal environmental value (We love this fish and the ecosystems on which it depends, and want to protect them!) or a desire to avoid the messiness of ESA listing and the resulting land and water management craziness that would result therefrom?

In the new book, we note a clear distinction between these two types of cases in the history of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande: environmental actions growing out of collective community values, and environmental actions driven by statutory (in this case ESA) mandates.

Charisma

Trout, with red behind its gills and pinkish side body.

Charismatic?

We know that charismatic species get more societal love. (Woe is our diminutive Rio Grande silvery minnow.) The Rio Grande cutthroat trout is charismatically beloved. Does this help explain the energetic collective action we’ve seen?

Loper Bright for the “foreseeable future”

Reading the USFW federal register notice in light of the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision, is interesting. IANAL, but my shorthand for the decision is that the courts no longer must defer to an implementing agency’s interpretation of ambiguous statutory provisions. Here’s USFWS in the cutthroat trout decision:

The Act does not define the term “foreseeable future,” which appears in the statutory definition of “threatened species.” Our implementing regulations … set forth a framework for evaluating the foreseeable future on a case-by-case basis…. The foreseeable future extends as far into the future as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service (hereafter, the Services) can make reasonably reliable predictions about the threats to the species and the species’ responses to those threats. We need not identify the foreseeable future in terms of a specific period of time. We will describe the foreseeable future on a case-by-case basis, using the best available data and taking into account considerations such as the species’ life-history characteristics, threat projection timeframes, and environmental variability. In other words, the foreseeable future is the period of time over which we can make reasonably reliable predictions. “Reliable” does not mean “certain”; it means sufficient to provide a reasonable degree of confidence in the prediction, in light of the conservation purposes of the Act.

Maybe language like that was always included in USFW Federal register notices? I expect a lot more post-Loper Bright debates about what Congress intended.

Ruscha and Wittgenstein

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A board for the game Scrabble with the words “emu” and “mug” spelled out with game tiles.

A fine word.

 

We had a round of holiday Scrabble this afternoon after first feast. I got “emu,” which is a fine word.

I never really got Ludwig Wittgenstein when I was studying philosophy in college. A lost opportunity. I’ve always been interested in words as objects, since I was a kid scribbling in notebooks, before my first typewriter.

Magical – written words on a page, objects, little vessels of meaning.

Ed Ruscha

It might have been the Spam.

In 2003, the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles showed a group of photographs taken in 1961 by the artist Ed Ruscha. Among them was a photograph of a can of Spam. Here is the Ruscha scholar Lisa Turvey:

Each Product Still Life features a single consumer item-Oxydol bleach, Sherwin-Williams turpentine, Wax Seal car polish-on what appears to be a shelf, shot frontally in black and white against a solid backdrop. As exhibited, these works foretold the photographic practice treated in the rest of the small show: Ruscha went on to use such artless viewpoints to picture vernacular subjects, stripped of affect, in artist’s books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations(1962) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965).

Among the pictures at the Gagosian in 2003 was a photograph of a can of spam. It was a sketch of sorts of Ruscha’s later painting Actual Size, which has “SPAM” in big type, the typeface from the can, and an actual size can of spam flying through space. It’s hilarious. It’s hard for me to place what I first saw when and where, but I likely saw Ruscha’s Spam can at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the 1970s as a teenager, along with other artists who were playing with words and type – Jasper Johns I’m pretty sure among them. (I would normally give you an image, but I haven’t found any that I’m confident are freely shareable.)

I’m done with revisions to the new book, so I’ve let my brain off leash for the first time in a while and it’s been over sniffing at the art.

Ruscha’s L.A., so my roots, and also a goofball. In 1966 he mounted a camera in the bed of a pickup truck, photographed every building on the Sunset Strip, and published them all as a 25-foot-long foldout book. “Pop” or maybe “conceptual artist,” whatever, I’m not here to pick a fight. It’s his words that interest me.

Ruscha, who worked briefly in advertising (a handy explanation?) plucked words out of language and hung them on gallery walls.

Spam.

Later Wittgenstein

The key to later Wittgenstein (there were sorta two of him) is his oft-quoted linguistic bon mot – “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.” I love this, because it recognizes language as a fundamentally social thing – it’s us, in conversation, iterating as we sort out meaning, a rejection of an “essentialist” notion of meaning in favor of looking at how we actually use language.

This is what’s so intriguing about Ruscha’s use of words in his art. He would make these big paintings of a word – “OOF,” “SPAM,” “HONK,” or his later work when he expanded to whole sentences! “ALL WE HAVE IS NOW.”

I stand there. I look. I bring my language to the exchange, and try to understand Ruscha’s. Is it an exchange? Does it matter what the artist *meant* when he picked *that* word?

Wittgenstein defines the meaning concept with something he calls “language-games” – the contextual frame around the type of communication we’re involved in when we’re using words in a particular way. Ruscha made a new language-game, and treated it like an actual *game*. Rip a word out of its context and hang it on a gallery wall!

This is the magic of Scrabble. It’s like an afternoon at a Ruscha retrospective, words ripped one at a time from their context, an aesthetic built around game play but also the intricate relationships of text and meaning. “Emu!”

Lousy start to the Colorado/Rio Grande 2024-25 snowpack season

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Evaporative Demand Drought Index map for four weeks beginning Dec. 21, 2024, showing high risk of drying across the Rio Grande and Colorado River headwaters.

Falling behind.

I was talking to Eric Kuhn Thursday (write a book together – bonded for life) who pointed out that the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center has started running its models for 2025 runoff. They don’t look good.

It’s way too early to think of this as a “forecast.” But they provide a feel for where we’re at now: Do we have a good head start? Are we already behind? The error bars are still huge, with a lot of upside potential, but we are already behind – 1.4 million acre feet below median for Lake Powell inflow.

The current climate forecast headlights, which can at least dimly illuminate the next month for us, don’t look good. The US Drought Monitor folks publish an experimental forecast tool called the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI).

EDDI uses the federal Climate Forecast System model, an operational model to help gauge conditions over the coming months. CFS is then coupled with tools to estimate evaporative demand – not simply how much snow we’re going to get, but how rain and snow interact with temperature and atmospheric moisture, all of which play roles in the system that sends water from the snowpack in the Rockies to headgates and kitchen taps across the West.

EDDI says that over the next month, we should expect the CBRFC’s runoff forecast to go down, not up. We’re falling behind.

Why this matters

The obvious reason this matters is its direct relationship with this year’s water management. Will Powell and Mead go up or down? What does that mean for near term water supply?

But we’re also all playing multiple games of four-dimensional chess trying to anticipate how the near term runoff scenarios influence long term negotiations over Post-26 river management. One of my little projects right now is to step back from my normative angst (where “normative angst” == John’s super pissed off about the negotiators’ abject failure) to think about the deeper negotiation theory stuff going on.

Peter Kropotkin and the alley behind my neighborhood gas station

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Temporary fence across a narrow dirt alley, with cinder block walls and houses on either side.

Kropotkin’s alley

There’s a pedestrian alley in my neighborhood that provides an important link for the low-stress version of my bike commute.

The neighborhood, built in the 1950s, has a few of them, but they don’t get much use. People don’t walk much any more. Which I guess is why someone thought it would be OK to put a fence up at both ends of my alley.

This seemed wrong.

Whoever did it went to some trouble, hiring a fence company. The one at the south end wasn’t a gate that could swing, it was bolted onto fence posts stuck in the dirt of the alley. I snapped a picture so that I could file a report with the city, then rode around the block to check it out from the other end.

There was a guy with a pickup truck from one of the companies that runs utilities down the alley on the far side. He said the fence wasn’t theirs. Then a man materialized from the building on the far side of the alley – my age, with hands and clothes suggesting he worked, and an unlit cigar in his mouth.

He agreed the fence shouldn’t be there, said the fiber optic crews who have been swarming our neighborhood had put it up, but it’s a public right of way, they built it in the 1950s so people could get from the neighborhood to the businesses on the far side of the alley.

I have a tendency to focus on governance in a situation like this – to study municipal maps to determine whether it is a public right of way. To call the fence company or file a complaint with the city.

Cigar Guy’s approach was more direct. He started yanking at the fence, disappeared for a minute and came back with wire cutters, snipping away the loops holding it in place. Pickup Truck Guy joined in, helping haul the fence out of the way.

We walked down the alley to the other end. The gate was bolted in place, not amenable to wire cutters. But the posts weren’t deep, so we pulled them out and reopened the right of way.

The anarchist toolkit

Cigar Guy had wire cutters. This is important by way of metaphor, but also because the fence was being held in place with wire that needed to be cut in order for us to reclaim the commons – in this case, an alley.

As a student of government, I tend to focus on rules and process and the nature and structure of institutions. The lesson from Cigar Guy is that sometimes you just need wire cutters.

North 54 Salvage

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"An outdoor lot filled with old, worn-out vehicles including vintage trucks, a painted salvage race car, and other aged automobiles. The salvage race car is painted in bright orange and purple, with 'North 54 Salvage' and 'We Buy Junk Cars' on the side. The background includes an industrial yard with construction equipment and a dirt mound."

“We buy junk cars.” John Fleck, December 2024.

The guy seemed puzzled by my presence. I guess I looked lost – why else would an old guy on a bike be riding down a road that dead ends in a junk yard? He wasn’t fazed by my explanation: “I’m trying to ride on every road in Albuquerque, and I haven’t ridden on this one yet.”

His dog looked friendly.

His neighbor has 75,000 hub caps.

This is why I ride.

“a vessel for meaning”

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My kid, Nora Reed, penned an insightful thread yesterday about the nature of the their work – they run a jewelry shop, still not too late* for holiday gift giving! – and the nature of craft and art:

a thing i think about a lot when figuring out both packaging for the business and the basics of what i am selling is that jewelry acts as a vessel for meaning.

all art is like this, it carries the associations an individual has with the point in their lives they first experience it, but art that is made particularly for gifting has to be suited for holding that sentiment

my dad, @jfleck was a science journalist when i was growing up (he’s a professor now) and my mom’s a ceramicist

dad always described the difference between art and craft is that you can make as beautiful a sculptural artistic object as you want, but it has to carry the coffee to be a mug.

journalism, he says, has to carry the coffee. it can be beautiful, but the main thing it has to do is convey the news.

jewelry also has to carry the coffee, but the coffee is much more abstract: you have to make it a vessel for the milestone someone celebrated buying it for themselves, or their admiration or love for a giftee.

it also accumulates a patina of meaning as you own it and wear it for special occasions.

i put a lot of love and care into my work but all i am doing is making a container that people can put whatever feelings they want in.

it’s a pretty fucking good gig.

“Patina of meaning” is a pretty special turn of phrase. They’re a writer, too.

* Nora noted I should be sure to add a link to their shipping deadlines page because if you’re in Finland or something it might be too late to get your vessel to its destination in time.

 

A sign of hope on the Colorado River

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One of the hopeful notes coming out of the recent Colorado River discussions is the way the operation of Glen Canyon Dam in a more flexible way, to accommodate a broader range of values, is back on the table. The USBR alternatives released ahead of this week’s Colorado River Water Users Association, while requiring some tea leaf divination because of their brevity, seem to leave the door open for this discussion.

Jack Schmidt and I have a new white paper offering some assistance, based on our understanding of the legal and regulatory structure around Grand Canyon National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The idea behind what we’re arguing isn’t to wag a regulatory finger and say, “The law requires us to do X.” Rather, we’re saying, “The law enables us to do X,” where for “X” we argue for the consideration of a wider range of social, cultural, and environmental values as we make decisions about how to divide the water up between Lake Mead and Lake Powell.

The resources in each part of this spectacular region are unique. Cataract Canyon was known to river runners as the “graveyard of the Colorado” because of its challenging rapids. Glen Canyon held sublime beauty amid the tranquility of its countless side canyons until they were inundated, and those side canyons are now reemerging. Grand Canyon is one of Earth’s greatest geological statements and is sacred to many native American tribes. In the eyes of the Bureau of Reclamation in the 1960s, and to millions of visitors today, Lake Powell is the “Jewel of the Colorado.” Lake Mead, visited by four million people each year, is the largest reservoir in the United States and allowed transformation of much of the American Southwest.

In 2025 we have an opportunity to establish policies for the Colorado River that honor these diverse and evolving environmental and societal values. The legal and administrative foundations that guide river and reservoir management in Cataract Canyon/Lake Powell/Glen Canyon/Grand Canyon/Lake Mead appear to encourage, and perhaps even require,
consideration of the many environmental and societal resources throughout this diverse region.