a dinosaur, in the fog

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a dinosaur sculpture in the fog

a dinosaur in the fog, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Priorities.

Thrashing in a pile of work – a university program report that’s overdue, a book review (also overdue), two papers I’m writing with colleagues, a presentation for new grant funders to prepare, and a class to teach – I had plans for just a quick early morning bike ride this morning. But as my bike trail dropped down to Albuquerque’s valley floor, I saw the fog.

I have lived longer in Albuquerque than Southern California, the land of my birth. But Southern California came first. And so on those rare days when we have fog in Albuquerque, I am wistful, reminded of the magic of the fogs of my childhood. It encloses you gently, the fog, erasing things, telling you there are things you’ve no need to see, or know.

I headed out across the river, watching the Rio Grande disappear in the mist. Down back roads and dirt paths I’ve ridden a dozen times in daylight I became delightfully lost, more than once. My glasses fogged and I let them, the fog doing double work. As I dropped back down from the west mesa, toward the river again, the sun came close to burning through the fog, so I looked for the places it remained thickest and rode toward them.

When I was a teenager in the suburbs east of Los Angeles, we would drive to Chino, our valley’s low spot, when it still had dairies, was the place most likely to have fog. There was a story whispered from older brothers and sisters about the mystery of “the green mist”, and we weren’t quite what it was or why we were looking for it.

Just fog, I guess, but in retrospect that is probably enough.

Rio Grande in the fog, Albuqueruqe, New Mexico, October 2019

Rio Grande in the fog, Albuqueruqe, New Mexico, October 2019

Albuquerque’s water use continues to decline

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The decoupling between water use and economic and population growth continues in Albuquerque, where we’ve cut per capita water use by more than half since the mid-1990s:

Albuquerque endured a hot, dry summer this year. Temperatures are still above average, and the monsoon season never made a big splash. But that hasn’t stopped the city from conserving water.

At its board meeting Wednesday, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority said customers, through Sept. 9, have used 812 million fewer gallons in 2019 compared with this same time last year. That equates to about 4 fewer gallons per person per day.

Not some magic bean thing going on here. The decoupling we’re seeing across the West, as water use declines even as populations grow, has become the norm. Here’s the aquifer beneath my house, rising:

USGS Del Sol Divider

More Colorado River “grand bargain” buzz

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There was more buzz this week at two big Colorado River Basin events about the idea of a “grand bargain” to deal with coming collisions between water overallocation and the Law of the River.

The idea crept into the title of the Water Education Foundation’s 2019 Santa Fe Symposium – “Can We Build a Bridge to a Grand Bargain in the Basin?”. It  also came up repeatedly at the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s fall water seminar, including in a luncheon keynote by the University of Colorado’s Doug Kenney, who has done a lot of the analytical heavy lifting on the idea.

While most of the people yakking about it in public right now are folks unaffiliated with organized water interests (folks like, well, me), the interesting thing right now is the behind-the-scenes conversations among decision makers within the system. There’s been positive interest across geographic and water-using communities, including both Upper and Lower Basin folks, and both ag and municipal water users.

My collaborator Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of of the Colorado River Water Conservation District well known as a staunch defender of rural Colorado West Slope water interests, is in the middle of all this, speaking at both events. While the ideas has many parents, Eric has come to be identified with it in part because, now that he’s retired, he can thrown down a bit more than when he had the portfolio of obligations that comes with running an agency.

Eric’s 2012 white paper

The idea’s been kicking around for more than a decade, but it was in fact Eric who first publicly documented what to that point had been private discussions. In a widely read 2012 white paper (p. 41, pdf here), Eric detailed a conversation at a 2005 meeting of the basin states principles at a hotel here in Albuquerque. The details are arcane (click through for Eric’s explanation) but the idea is that each basin gives up politically treasured but practically unrealistic interpretations of the Law of the River in a compromise that avoids litigation and provides more certainty for the water management communities in both basins.

Doug Kenney and colleagues have done the most detailed analysis of the idea (see here), if you’re looking for details. But I caution not to focus too much right now on those details. What’s critical, as Eric and I write in our about-to-emerge-book, is that the process of discussion we’re now seeing among basin water users has a chance to bat around ideas, including beating up ours:

The process by which such a grand bargain might happen may be every bit as important as the technical details of what it would entail. At a 2005 meeting of the “basin states principles”—the Colorado River leadership team representing each of the seven basin states—representatives from Colorado floated a proposal. The details involved some tricky trade-offs. But the details are less important than the forum.

Such an agreement cannot be specified ahead of time but has to emerge from the process of collaboration and compromise that has grown up over the last two decades. That 2005 meeting is an example of the sort of meetings that happen all the time, as representatives of the basin water community meet to hash out their problems.

That’s the conversation that seems to be happening.

“I speak in numbers.”- Eric Kuhn

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I’m having a bad FOMO day today, watching John Orr’s Twitter feed from the Colorado River District’s fall seminar, being held today in Grand Junction:

Four years ago, as I was putting together the final bits of Water is For Fighting Over, the River District invited me up to give a luncheon keynote at this same event, a chance at a critical moment to pull together the book’s ideas into a single coherent talk.

Eric Kuhn at the Rio Grande, Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 2019

I didn’t know Eric well at the time, but a few days after the event he sent me a very nice email gently taking issue with something I had said. I went back to the source material, and of course Eric was right. I went back and rewrote a few paragraphs of the book – a small but critical fix – and sent Eric the revised chapter.

A few months later, at a cocktail reception at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas during the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, Eric and I began a conversation that turned into a collaboration that turned into a book coming out this fall on the history of our hydrologic understanding of the Colorado River – Science be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.

The book lives at the intersection of Eric’s deep understanding of the river’s hydrology, understood in a language of numbers, and my desire to tell compelling stories that help productively shape our understanding of water in the west. The book has a repetitive mantra, a motif – “LaRue, Stabler, and Sibert” – three early scientists who tried to warn us that there was less water in the Colorado River than the grandiose plans being laid.

The three – E.C. LaRue and Herman Stabler of the USGS and retired Gen. William Sibert – are crucial characters in the development of the Colorado River who have been largely lost to history because they were on the losing side of important arguments. Eric’s deep fluency with the language of numbers is the key to the book – I was kinda the translator, I guess.

Eric’s on the road this week, talking about the book – today in Grand Junction and tomorrow at a gathering in Santa Fe of the Colorado River brain trust. I’m missing both, enmeshed in some fascinating work in Albuquerque, working with University of New Mexico Water Resources Program students on critical questions involving the Rio Grande. We’re working on how much water it might take to meet shifting values – water for urban trees and their accompanying health benefits, water for the river itself. It was a bad time for Prof. Fleck to sneak away from fall classwork to indulge his Colorado River governance hobby.

I’m trying with our students to put into practice the message of the new book – that it’s important both to be clear and realistic about how our values translate into future water use, while also being clear and realistic about what the science can tell us about how much water we actually have. (In fact, I’ve gotta file this blog post pronto – Prof. Fleck office hours start in four minutes!)

FOMO – some fun party action and important hallway conversations with the Colorado River crowd! But I’m gonna try to get up Friday morning and crash the Santa Fe action, maybe get in an afternoon bike ride with Eric before he heads back to Colorado.

 

All I Want is an Accurate Colorado River Map

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1928 USBR map

 

A guest post by Doug Kenney, University of Colorado

John Wesley Powell, circa 1890

In recent months, we’ve probably all encountered a dozen or more articles reflecting on the 150-year anniversary of the Colorado River voyage of John Wesley Powell.  It’s a story coming from the tail end of an era when map-makers used to be among the most adventurous of all scientists, a task today that can be mostly automated and driven by data coming from a variety of remote sensing technologies.  In comparison to today, Powell’s techniques—albeit exciting—seem primitive and imprecise.  Yet, I’m not sure we have really made much progress.

I say this because I’ve spent half a day tormented by a problem that has already tormented me many times before in my career: where can one find a Colorado River Basin map that is accurate?  It seems like such a simple task, but as others have noted before (namely Sara Porterfield on this blog on April 7, 2018) it is an ongoing problem.  The list of problem areas is long, and many seem to have a strong political motivation:

Mexico

2012 Basin Map

The most common problem is the treatment of Mexico.  Many maps, including most “official” Department of Interior publications, exclude Mexico entirely, envisioning that the water molecules of the basin dutifully stop their downhill march anytime they approach the US/Mexico border.  At the other extreme are maps that greatly exaggerate the Mexican land area in the hydrologic basin.  As Sara discusses in her post, the decision to include (or not include) Mexico, and how much of Mexico, often is driven by political considerations.  But it also, I’m told, reflects confusion surrounding the USGS shape files regarding lands in northern Mexico.  Where the land is really flat, defining the exact hydrologic boundaries is indeed complicated, but is this really a problem in the GPS era?  I believe the “real” basin map should show a bump of Mexican territory near Nogales and one near the main channel, but frankly, I’m unsure if that’s the true, hydrologic reality.

Salton Sea

A similar problem surrounds the Salton Sea.  Clearly there is a hydrologic connection; the Salton Sea was formed by, and is sustained by, water from the Colorado River mainstem, sometimes through natural processes, sometimes via engineering failures, and sometimes by deliberate management actions.  How best to characterize this connection via a map is unclear to me, but it is also clear that this is an important issue that we ignore at substantial peril.  This was highlighted in the final days of DCP negotiations by the unwillingness of IID to sign onto the historic agreement

Flows to the Sea

Another issue with almost all Colorado River maps is that they show the river reaching the ocean.  Of course, this has not been the reality for half a century.  Those of us “on the inside” in Colorado River matters understand this, but why do our maps keep this secret from the rest of the population?  Are modern map-makers lazy or careless, or do they want to avoid the hard conversations about why more and more of the world’s rivers die an early death miles short of the sea?  About the only map I’ve seen (thanks to a tip from Sara) that tries to show this is on Wikipedia, which the author made using USGS data.

Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin

Another common area of dispute is the so-called Great Divide in Wyoming, a closed basin which Brad Udall tells me is at HUC 140402.  On the Wikipedia map, it’s the bump you see midway between Casper and Rock Springs.  The pattern, it seems, is to omit this area on the older Colorado River Basin maps, and include it on the newer maps.  What happened?  Did the topography of Wyoming change (damn, it’s the Yellowstone supervolcano, isn’t it)?  Did a Wyoming representative decide it was politically useful to instruct the federal map-makers to have the Colorado River Basin appropriate the Great Divide Basin (and if so, why)?  If the map-makers feel it’s appropriate to include the Great Divide Basin, does this modify the case for including the Salton Sea?

And So On….

I’m sure a longer list could be generated, as I’ve heard rumblings of other issues as well. Personally, the one that most intrigues me is the groundwater issue; namely, in regions where surface and groundwater are used conjunctively and/or share a direct hydrologic connection, does a map of either resource individually really show us something useful, or conversely, does it hamstring our ability to make smart management decisions?  Some research suggests that over half the flow of the Colorado River comes from groundwater.  We all like to talk about each year’s snowpack levels, but maybe what’s happening below our feet is worth noting as well?  Similarly, is there a compelling reason for maps to include state lines and the US/Mexico border, but not reservation lands, or is that too slippery a slope leading someone to question the omission of water districts and other jurisdictions of importance?  Where, literally, should we draw the lines?  Do map-makers agonize over these choices?

I know many of my colleagues share these frustrations—I’ve heard them.  And as is the case for me, they do not see this as obscure issues for cartographers to debate; these are issues with real policy implications.  It shapes our thinking about who and what to include in policy and management decisions.  It is something we should do better.  Or, maybe we should just load up our modern rafts with sandwiches and Coors Light, and charge downriver reflecting on those days when map-making was the realm of the most courageous and forward-looking scientists. That sounds easier.  In the meantime, please excuse the maps you see in virtually every Colorado River document since Powell—as best as I can tell, they are all wrong, and on many issues, are getting worse every generation.

 

Las Vegas Bay: a path into the story of the Colorado River

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Las Vegas Bay, as seen in Science Be Dammed

I’m talking with University of New Mexico Water Resources Program students about the Colorado River this week, and pulling together some readings I had occasion to revisit the opening of The New Book:

The boat ramp at Las Vegas Bay, once a shimmering recreation mecca on the shores of Lake Mead, now ends in a row of concrete barricades and desert sand. A short hike through the scrub leads to an incongruous flowing river, the effluent from the Las Vegas metro area’s wastewater treatment plants, flowing the last few miles to Lake Mead.

The floating marina that once anchored Las Vegas Bay here was moved in 2002, towed to deeper water as Lake Mead declined. The great reservoirs integrate the Colorado River’s two stories—nature’s water flowing in, and humans taking it out. Too little of the first, or too much of the second, is in the long run unsustainable. At the bottom of the old Las Vegas Bay boat ramp, you can look up and see which version of the story is playing out etched in the hillsides above, old shorelines long since left dry by Lake Mead’s decline.

It was one of the very last bits of the book we wrote, in mid-December 2018. My co-author Eric Kuhn and I had been holed up for much of the week in a suite at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, slipping away from the Colorado River Water Users Association downstairs to squeeze in time banging away at the manuscript.

The CRWUA meeting is the most important annual gathering of the Colorado River community, and it was there three years earlier, at one of the free-drinks-and-hors d’oeuvres events that are a CRWUA necessary evil, that a conversation between Eric and I launched what would become the book. So it was a fitting place to launch the final push.

The manuscript had been sorta done for months, but then all of a sudden the book contract->final revisions process had exploded on us in a hurry, with less than a month to respond to reviewers’ comments and polish off the final version. It was a crazy, nervous time.

And I still wasn’t satisfied with the book’s opening.

In our division of labor, Eric was the Colorado River genius (y’all who know him already know that), while I tried to bring a storytelling structure and literary voice to help usher that genius into our readers’ worlds.

We took the book’s opening seriously, had been reworking it since early in the project, trying and discarding a bunch of stuff.

Leaving Las Vegas with the final draft of the opening still hanging, I drove out through Henderson, around Lakeshore Road along the western edge of Lake Mead on my way to Boulder City. When I can I drive to Las Vegas from Albuquerque rather than fly, and often leave some time on one end of the trip or the other to visit Lake Mead and Hoover Dam. This trip, I had a room the night after CRWUA at the old Boulder Dam Hotel, with time to wander.

I’ve been visiting those same places along the western edge of Lake Mead since 2010, grasping for the physical representation of the thing I’ve devoted the last decade to writing about – “The great reservoirs integrate the Colorado River’s two stories—nature’s water flowing in, and humans taking it out.”

old shorelines long since left dry by Lake Mead’s decline

“old shorelines long since left dry by Lake Mead’s decline”

Writing a thing like this is impossible to force, which made this a particularly unnerving moment – a deadline weeks away on one of the most important projects of my life. The trick is to place yourself in a moment and hope that the bucket of intellectual building blocks you’ve got in reserve will fall into the right places around it.

I parked the car at the end of the old Las Vegas Bay boat ramp and walked toward the water.

I can see the mental progression in the cell phone pictures I snapped that day – looking down at the water flowing down Las Vegas Wash, then out at the distant reservoir, then back up at the hillside behind me.

At some point that afternoon I picked up a dead reservoir clam and snapped a picture (Corbicula fluminea or Asian clam, Karl Flessa later told me), then looked again, back up at the hillside. I drove south, stopped again at Boulder Harbor and did the same thing. Once I realized what I had, what I needed to do, I was kicking myself for not bringing the good camera.

To be clear, I’d been standing at the reservoir’s edge looking back up at “the story … playing out etched in the hillsides above” for a while. It’s a fascinating institutional geomorphology, traces on the landscape left by human water management decisions. But it didn’t find its place among my bucket of intellectual building blocks until that afternoon.

Moving beyond the “water wars” frame

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To speak of ‘war’ is to invoke images of militaries, violent conflict and destruction on a grand scale. Although we do not deny that water can be a factor – one among many – in some conflicts and mainly at intra-state level, we question why this drift towards water ‘securitisation’ at this time? To align ‘water’ with war is without doubt worrying, for water is an essential and non-substitutable resource needed by all. But to suggest that inter-state water wars are forthcoming is to ignore or undervalue decades of cooperative action. What is being argued here is in support of a more nuanced approach, that is both more evidence-based and constructive, highlighting the many varied and overwhelmingly positive efforts at an international level in support of cooperation within complex shared river basins. Ultimately, we believe that transboundary water cooperation is primarily a development issue and one that should remain in that space.

Why are water wars back on the agenda? And why we think it’s a bad idea! – by Ana Elisa Cascão and many colleagues at the Water Governance Chair Group at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands

More talk of a Colorado River climate change “grand bargain”

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the Colorado River “grand bargain” discussion draws on our new book

The Denver Post’s Bruce Finley took a deep dive in today’s paper into the idea of a Colorado River “grand bargain” that might trade off the Lower Basin’s right to make a “call” on the river if flows at Lee’s Ferry drop against an Upper Basin cap on future development:

The grand bargain concept arose from increasing anxiety in booming Colorado and the other upper-basin states — New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — about their plight of being legally roped into sending more water downriver, even if dry winters, new population growth and development made that impossible without shutting faucets.

California, Arizona and Nevada, the lower-basin states that for years have siphoned more than their allotted one-half share of river water, face greater uncertainty and painful weaning from overuse.

What Finley characterizes as “serious behind-the-scenes contemplation” of the “grand bargain” is driven by increasingly clear hydrologic reality. There has always been less water in the Colorado River than the planners thought when they allocated the river’s water in the first half of the 20th century, and there is even less water now as climate change saps the river’s flow.

While lots of people talked to Finley about it, none of the basin officials would commit to actually liking the idea. (Becky Mitchell, head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, offered my favorite faint praise – “an interesting thought exercise”.)

It’s an idea that’s been floating around for years, but Eric Kuhn and I, co-authors of a new book coming out in the fall, gave it a fresh push this summer. From Finley:

The grand bargain gained traction this summer at a University of Colorado Law School forum, following circulation of a paper by former Colorado River District manager Eric Kuhn and reporter-turned-water-analyst John Fleck of the University of New Mexico that articulated the concept.

They cast the bargain as a crucial recognition that the river on average holds about 2.5 million acre-feet less water than state negotiators put on paper in the 1922 compact.

The grand bargain “is a long-term sustainable solution” to Colorado River Basin problems “providing flexibility and security for water uses in the basin, including recreational and environmental flows, while recognizing that there is less water in the system than what was contemplated when the Law of the River was conceived,” they wrote.

Our “fresh push” includes the white paper Finley mentioned, which draws on the material in our new book.

I wrote obliquely about the “grand bargain” in my last book, which came out three years ago.

Within the network of state and water-agency representatives working on Colorado River Basin problems, there is a clear recognition that eventually some sort of “grand bargain” will be needed that finds a way to reduce everyone’s water allocation. To keep the system from crashing, everyone will have to give something up. But each of the participants in that core network also understands the dilemma that follows: each
must then go home and sell the deal in a domestic political environment that views the river’s paper water allocations as a God-given right.

I’m no longer sure that bit is right, about the “clear recognition” that some sort of grand bargain will eventually be needed. What you see in the quotes in Finley’s story is a tension between the reality of water allocation on the Colorado River and the “but ya gotta sell the deal back home” part.

For the last book, Water Isn’t Really For Fighting Over, I’d written a much longer bit that ended up on the editing room floor. I dug it out this afternoon to reread. I see why I abandoned it – the complexity was daunting, and I still find the nuances of the “grand bargain” hard to explain. But the kicker went to the heart of where we’re at now:

Water managers hate risk. What if there were a middle ground, a deal that shared the risk?

The “grand bargain” does just that. But it is so politically sensitive that you don’t hear it talked about much. It doesn’t really have good “lies you can tell back home” that would make its unpleasant reality, advantageous though it might be, politically saleable.