The Navajo Nation and New Mexico’s Colorado River allocation

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Very little of the Colorado River’s water originates in New Mexico. The San Juan, one of the Colorado’s main tributaries, starts in the mountains of Colorado, cutting through a corner of the state’s northwest desert, before snaking into the canyon country of Arizona and Utah. Yet when the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact was signed in 1948, we were allocated a disproportionately large share of the river’s water.

Back in 2012 and 2013, while still a newspaper reporter, I took a deep dive into the history to try to understand why. It resulted in this:

It was 1948.

Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading.

“The state of New Mexico wants the Indians to be protected,” Wilson told the other commissioners at the gathering in Vernal, Utah. The federal government’s Office of Indian Affairs had estimated that future water needs for Navajo Nation lands within the state of New Mexico would be substantial. But no deal that did not set aside enough water for both Indian and non-Indian water users could win political approval in New Mexico, Wilson told the other negotiators.

Wilson got his way. The final Upper Colorado River Basin Compact gave New Mexico a large share of water compared with the state’s contributions to the big river’s flow.

New Mexico got the water, but seven decades later a group of non-Indians persist in fighting a rear guard action to try to prevent it from being allocated to New Mexico’s Navajo residents.

The issue has risen again, with a story today by my former colleague Mark Oswald about the latest attempt by Victor Marshall, the attorney for the non-Indian San Juan River water users, to try to invalidate a 2005 agreement finally acknowledging the Navajos’ entitlement to their share of the river’s water.

I spent months examining Marshall’s claims in detail. His legal claims are dubious, having failed repeatedly in court. His hydrologic claims are laughable, aimed at repeatedly exaggerating the size of the Navajo peoples’ share of the water in order to make it seem an unreasonably large share of the state’s water. See here for my attempt at a simple explanation.

But this is about more than law and hydrology. There is an implicitly racist element to this litigation – the implication that in allocating water to residents of the Navajo Nation it is being taken from New Mexicans. These people are New Mexicans. This is simply a legal recognition of water that is rightfully theirs.

New Mexico has an entitlement to this water under the Upper Basin Compact because we demanded it to meet the needs of, and legal obligations to, this group of New Mexicans. The “othering” here is a relic of a painful past.

 

Is democracy to blame for our infrastructure problems?

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In general, if you ask people if they would prefer to pay less, or more, for a given product, the answer is likely to be “less”. Democracy is, at root, the process of asking such a question.

This, Manny Teodoro argues, is at the heart of the U.S. infrastructure problem:

The trouble is that, in too many cases, local democratic governance is a big part of why America faces an infrastructure funding crisis. State and local politicians have been too often unwilling to raise the taxes and fees necessary to maintain infrastructure adequately—even with municipal bond rates at historic lows. National political dynamics make it unlikely that Congress will produce a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure bailout. Long-term shifts in national politics might eventually change that picture, but the roads, dams, plants, pipes, and ports don’t care. They’ll continue to degrade without reinvestment.

I’ve written before about a related argument made by Teodoro, a political scientist at Texas A&M, regarding democratic governance and water conservation. More from him on infrastructure problems and new discussions of federal funding initiatives here.

Some thoughts on “the West’s Disappearing Water”

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We lost the daily direct flights between Albuquerque and Tucson a decade ago when the economy tanked, which left me in a shuttle yesterday morning at sunup driving north on I-10 from Tucson to Phoenix to catch a flight home after a couple of very intense, very productive days discussing water.*

It’s a beautiful stretch of desert, except when it’s not, capturing my ambivalence about life in the desert southwest – saguaros marching up the sides of rocky desert hills, the dry bed of the Gila River, spreads of nut orchards (pecans?), Central Arizona’s ever-present cotton fields, the spreading sprawl of Tucson creeping north and greater Phoenix heading south.

Tree rings, at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, Tucson

And of course all of this is tied up in my changing understanding of water. At this point in my life, it’s impossible for me not to map water onto the landscape, built or not, or conversely map the landscape onto the water.

It once would have been easy for me to tell this story, about what I was seeing as the Arizona Shuttle driver whisked us up the interstate, past the cotton fields and pecan orchards and sprouting subdivisions. My traditional, old school narrative could have easily riffed on how crazy it all was, that this is a desert and what Arizonans have done makes no sense.

The riff would have included the bizarre sight of “Lake Pleasant” on the north edge of the Phoenix metro area where they (we?) pump Colorado River water up a hill into a dammed desert canyon and then water ski on it (How crazy is that?), or the desert water writer’s obligatory observation about all the pools you see as your plane climbs out of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport.

173,500 acres of cotton (2017’s harvested acreage, up 34 percent from 2016) in a desert state like Arizona? Really?

Here you have the dilemma – a landscape of saguaros and irrigated cotton. We’ve made some strange choices. And yet those are the choices we made, and the question becomes what to do next.

And here Young John and Old John have parted company.

In my quest to better teach some critical communication skills to UNM Water Resources Program students, I’m in the midst of reading They Say / I Say, a popular text on academic writing. The book’s central bit of business revolves around the importance of having a work of rhetoric engage in dialogue with that which came before – start with what “they say”, and then offer your own argument in response.

in dialogue

For me, to write about the Colorado River Basin, about water in the west, was to unavoidably enter into such a dialogue with Marc Reisner, whose epic book Cadillac Desert profoundly shaped Young John’s thinking. And so in the introductory chapter of my own book, I engaged Reisner in a very explicit way:

Reisner concentrated his fierce critique on what he saw as a corrupt process that overbuilt the West’s great plumbing system. The subtitle notwithstanding, Cadillac Desert spends little time on the “dis- appearing water,” or the actual human consequences of water shortages. But neither did Reisner shy away from apocalyptic rhetoric. In the 1993 afterword to the book’s second edition, Reisner was explicit. California had just experienced what was at the time its worst drought on record, which, Reisner said, “qualifies best as punishment meted out to an impudent culture by an indignant God.”

Like many who manage, engineer, utilize, plan for, and write about western water today, I grew up with the expectation of catastrophe. I first wrote about water shortage in California during that same late-1980s–early-’90s drought Reisner bemoans. But as drought set in again across the Colorado River Basin in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was forced to grapple with a contradiction: despite what Reisner had taught me, people’s faucets were still running. Their farms were not drying up. No city was left abandoned.

I began asking the same question, again and again: when the water runs short, who actually runs out? What does that look like? Far from the punishment of an indignant God, I found instead a remarkable adaptability.

Thus when I point out that Arizona’s water use peaked around 1980, before the publication of Cadillac Desert, that last year’s Arizona cotton acreage was just 25 percent of its 1953 peak (source:  USDA), that municipal water use in Arizona’s populated central valleys around Tucson and Phoenix declined from 2010 to 2015 even as their populations continued to rise (source: USGS), I am in a “they say/I say” dialogue not so much with Reisner as with my younger self.

Young John’s riff on the craziness of Lake Pleasant and swimming pools and irrigated cotton hard against the saguaros missed two important things with which Old John has made truce. The first is that the cotton fields and swimming pools bring genuine value to the people who chose them, who would prefer to keep them. The second is that, faced with scarcity, we have shown again and again the ability to back away from the water supply cliff, to use less water in a way that – and this is the crucial point – allows us to preserve a significant measure of that which we value.

Phoenix and Tucson (and Albuquerque), in all their strip malled sprawling glories, are not going away easily, nor need they.

And yet….

At dinner Friday night on Tucson’s west side – an impromptu dendro grad student/postdoc gathering (thanks Will!) – we had enchiladas and chile rellenos and talked megadrought.

Dendro people – those who use tree rings to tease out and help us think about ancient climates – have a particular and particularly useful vantage point on life in the arid landscapes of western North America. I’d make a joke about what a drag they are at parties as they eagerly point out that the west has experienced droughts far deeper and longer than anything in what we call “the instrumental record” – the period for which we have rain and stream gauges to measure how much water we have to work with. And that the risk of megadrought’s return is rapidly rising because of climate change.

But really, I love the people of dendro. Their story matters.

And I do not know how to answer their question about what happens under their megadrought scenarios. I can do some relatively straightforward arithmetic in response – the ability for city people to use X percent less water than they are using today, even after the conservation we’ve already done, the ability for farm communities to continue to exist while irrigating far less acreage. Those are the conversations we’ll need to have, and they are far more robust if we can get beyond the rhetoric of “punishment meted out to an impudent culture by an indignant God”.

I am the professional optimist of the Colorado River Basin, until I sit down with the dendro people. This could be hard.

* A huge thanks to Sharon Megdal of the University of Arizona’s Water Resources Research Center for hosting the visit and arranging a couple of really valuable chances to talk to members of the University of Arizona community, and Sarah Frederick, Bethany Coulthard, Will Tintor, and Kevin Anchukaitis of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research for some great bonus time.

Water, not for fighting over

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While historically, water has been depicted as something that has driven a wedge between communities, “I think it should be something that ties our communities together,” Mueller said. “We all need it, we all depend on it, we all want it in one way or the other. If we can work together (on water) we’re much stronger.”

That’s Andy Mueller, the new director of the Colorado River District.

Hey Tucson, I’ll be yammering at the University of Arizona Thursday

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Thursday at 4:

With another dry year setting in across the West, the challenges of meeting the water supply needs of a growing population while maintaining our rural communities and a healthy environment are again being thrown in sharp relief. The continuing decline of Lake Mead has become a symbol of deepening problems, but there are also less-noticed examples of success – in conserving water and sharing in times of scarcity – which we need to understand in order to craft solutions.

John Fleck – A former journalist with 30 years’ experience writing about water in the West. John Fleck joined the University of New Mexico faculty in 2017, where he directs the university’s Water Resources Program. He is the author of Water is For Fighting Over: and Other Myths About Water in the West, an account of the roots of the region’s water problems combined with an optimistic narrative about our growing success in solving them.

Refreshments will be served. (emphasis added)

 

“drought” – Philp on weather, water, and yesteryear’s language

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Tom Philp had a great piece in Water Deeply last week about the language we use:

Water policy becoming a prisoner of its own limited vocabulary, particularly when it comes to the weather. Here is a case that “drought” and “normal” belong in the dustbin of history, for their overuse can lead to the wrong conversation. These words are not so sinister as to be banned from the dictionary. But they tend to miss the mark as to what seems to be happening with our weather this century.

I was thinking about this as I read my morning California Department of Water Resources daily news links:

Drought Headlines

“Drought” is becoming an increasingly unhelpful word, or, as Tom put it,

Meanwhile, we all watch the weather. We all wonder what about the future. And we converse about it in yesteryear’s language.

The Rio Grande forecast keeps getting worse

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The preliminary Feb. 1 forecast for runoff on New Mexico’s rivers, out  this evening, is now projecting record or near-record low flows for the 2018 runoff season. It would take an epic wave of wet storms from here on out to bring the river to anything approaching a “normal” year, and no such epic wave is in the forecast.

The numbers:

  • Rio Grande at Otowi, 21 percent, with a one in ten chance on the wet side of getting up to 45 percent of average, and a one in ten chance of having as little as 6 percent of average.
  • Pecos above Santa Rosa, 11 percent of average (that’s not a worst case, that’s the midpoint of the forecast range)
  • Native water inflow into El Vado, on the Rio Chama – 24 percent

This is a crazy bad forecast.

Keeping Colorado’s Crystal River wet

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Crystal River, Gunnison County, Colorado. Carol Highsmith, 2015, Courtesy Library of Congress

Sarah Tory had an interesting piece Friday about an effort to keep water in Colorado’s Crystal River, a tributary of the Roaring Fork (Carbondale area, or Aspen for those of a certain geographical bent). Tory’s piece does a good job of explaining the institutional complexities of an agreement that spans potentially both opportunities for exploiting shared values but also risks of conflicting interests among a rancher, the state water rights regime, county government, and an NGO (the Colorado Water Trust).

It’s an interesting case study because it doesn’t involve fallowing land or some other sort of water use reduction on the Cold Mountain Ranch, but rather a re-timing of the ranch’s seasonal water use to put some more water in the Crystal in August and September.

The new deal is the culmination of a multiyear effort to help boost streamflows in the Crystal River, which runs from the Elk Mountains above Marble to its confluence with the Roaring Fork River at Carbondale.

During the drought of 2012, demand for water outpaced supply and the Crystal went dry, prompting the Water Trust to look for new sources of water for the river’s benefit.

Although the Colorado Water Conservation Board has an environmental instream flow right on the Crystal, the water right dates from 1975, far lower in priority than the major agricultural water rights on the Crystal – and thus is of little to no use when the river most needs water.

The folks involved in the project seem to have found a way to overcome some complex “use it or lose it” water rights problems associated with Colorado’s “doctrine of prior appropriation”. It’s an interesting example of the multi-faceted structure of these complex deals, seems hopeful, offers some great institutional learning, and makes me wonder about how examples like this can be scaled up.