the sadness of old citrus

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abandoned orange grove on the banks of the Colorado River, Baja California, March 27, 2014

Carey McWilliams said this about the life of the orange tree and those who grew it:

With its rich black-green shade, its evergreen foliage, and its romantic fragrance, it is the millionaire of all the trees of America…. The aristocrat of the orchards, it has, by a natural affinity drawn to it the rich and the well-born, creating a unique type of rural-urban aristocracy. There is no crop in the whole range of American agriculture the growing of which confers quite the same status that is associated with ownership of an orange grove.

(McWilliams, Southern California, an Island on the Land, as quoted in Matt Garcia’s A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970.)

Citrus begs tending and rewards it mightily. It is said (and I will look this up for you before I put it in a book, but it is repeated often enough that it is a point with at least literary merit, if not journalistic) that for a time in the late 19th and early 20th century Riverside, California, at the eastern end of the Southern California citrus belt, was per capita the richest place in the United States.

oranges, Baja, March 2014

Following the dry bed of the Colorado River into Mexico back in 2014, Karl Flessa led us to the little citrus ranch you see in the picture above. It seemed abandoned, but not so long ago that you could not see the traces of its old aristocracy, elegant palms lining the driveway, flanked by citrus spreading across the desert flats. It was hard to tell how long it had been since the trees were irrigated. They were spindly and dry, but the fruit pushed through anyway.

The riverbed there was dry too, covered in salt cedar. The entire space felt abandoned, but only recently so, the palms and ditch and orange trees a trace of the way water and farming still shape the place.

The Lee’s Ferry flood of record and the cat in the tree

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[T]he maximum discharge known outside the period of record was about 8500 m³sec¯¹ on July 7, 1884. According to E. C. LaRue (1925), during this flood, a resident of Lees Ferry rescued his cat from the branches of an apple tree. Decades later, the resident, with “the height of the water on the trunk of the tree … well impressed on his mind,” assisted a surveyor in referencing that elevation to the datum of the stream gage established at Lees Ferry in 1923.

8,500 cubic meters per second, translates to about 300,000 cubic feet per second. That is a lot of water. Sustained over a single day, it would be enough to raise Lake Mead by more than five feet and meet Las Vegas Nevada’s demand for water for two years.

The quote is from O’Connor, Jim E., et al. “A 4500-year record of large floods on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, Arizona.” The Journal of Geology (1994): 1-9. I thank Scott St. George for bringing this to my attention.

In western water management, the rest of us nervously watch California

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One of my new lectures this semester for UNM Water Resources Program students tackled the question of where and how you draw boundaries around a water management problem. The example I worked through was the Colorado River and the U.S.-Mexico border. You have water management institutions and governance that are largely separate on each side of the border, and a treaty that attempts to manage the handoff as water (a river and aquifers) moves from one nation to the next. There’s a fascinating history of adaptation, sometimes quite poor, in the way that handoff is carried out.

Salton Sea, Carol Highsmith, courtesy Library of Congress

Another great example – perhaps a lecture for next year? – is the handoff between the Colorado River Basin and a couple of water problems in California that have been placed outside the Basin’s institutional and governance boundaries but that directly impinge on our ability to solve problems within the Basin.

I had the chance to talk about two of these areas yesterday – the Salton Sea (an op ed in the Sacramento Bee) and a last-minute appearance on Larry Mantle’s Air Talk on Southern California Public Radio to talk about California’s attempt to solve the Sacramento Delta’s problems.

In both cases, I took the opportunity to try to impress on Californians the importance that they deal with their significant water issues because of their implications for the rest of us around the West trying to share these giant human-built watersheds. My Bee piece talked about the need for California to address the Salton Sea’s problems because of the way that issue is linked to a new deal on the Colorado River:

Water managers in the rest of the Colorado River Basin – Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and my own state of New Mexico – are watching nervously. We worry that shortfalls in Lake Mead could lead like tipping dominoes to water problems throughout the West as we try to share this interconnected, shrinking resource.

On Mantle’s show, I argued that California’s success or failure in dealing the Sacramento Delta affects all of us because the interconnection through the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California links that problem with the rest of the Colorado River Basin. Less water supply reliability from the Sacramento Delta means more pressure on the Colorado River Basin.

We’ve drawn the Colorado River Basin’s governance boundaries in a way that excludes both the Salton Sea and the Sacramento Delta. That leaves the rest of us dependent on California, on its side of these water governance boundaries, to do the right thing.

Some thoughts on the death of Sid Drell and the seriousness of nuclear weapons

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I once wrote a great deal about nuclear weapons.

For more than two decades as a beat reporter at a daily newspaper in a state for which nuclear weapons was at times arguably the largest single business, it had a routine dailiness to it – what’s the budget for the new B61 mod 12? does that new gazillion dollar plutonium building make sense? – that masked the thing at its heart.

Nevada – Frenchman’s Flat – members of 11th AB Div. kneel on ground as they watch mushroom cloud of atomic bomb test – Courtesy Library of Congress

But in dealing with the very ordinariness of those things, the moral core was never far from the conversation. The thing that was both exhausting but also deeply gratifying was the ethical stance among of those involved. On one side were the weaponeers who believed that nuclear weapons, through deterrence, had become tools for peace. On the other side were people who believed nuclear weapons were an unspeakable evil. No, not unspeakable. We spoke about them a lot. But a deep and corrupting evil.

These views among the political disputants were irreconcilable, but sincerely and seriously held. I worked with the last generation of weaponeers who had felt the ground shake after a Nevada Test Site blast. They took their awesome (I use that word in its literal sense) responsibility seriously.

Ann Finkbeiner, like me a journalist who has lived at the margins of this world, was recalling today the words of the late Sid Drell, a physicist who advised governments for more than a half century of this stuff, and who was the very definition of someone taking it seriously:

Science is not a moral subject. You don’t know when you’re doing basic science where you’re going to end up. But the minute you get some idea and you can start thinking about the technical applications, that’s where societal questions come in. And having a [public] debate on these things, thinking these things through, that’s what I call the moral obligation of the community. And [being a science advisor to the government] gives you both an opportunity and a responsibility to speak out or to testify.

As Drell’s New York Times obituary explained, Drell in the last decade of his life became one of the leaders of a group seeking a path to the elimination of nuclear weapons:

In 2006, he and George P. Shultz, the secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, founded a program at the Hoover Institution to propose practical steps to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“In dealing with terrorists or rogue governments, nuclear deterrence doesn’t mean anything — the value has gone,” he told the website In Menlo in 2012. “Yet the danger of the material getting into evil hands has gone up. So what are existing nuclear arms deterring now? In this era, I argue that nuclear weapons are irrelevant as a deterrence.”

There are those opposed to nuclear weapons who argued Drell, Schultz, and the other advocates of this approach to our nuclear future of providing cover for the status quo. I never felt competent to come to my own judgment regarding the answer to that question, but I appreciated the deep moral seriousness and sincerity of those engaged in the fierce debates.

It is in this context that I share my horror at the flip way the incoming Trump administration is dealing with U.S. nuclear weapons policy – tweet, confused explanation from spokespeople, strange new comments from the president-elect. (The Washington Post’s Philip Bump chronicled the whole affair if you want details.)

I get that elections have consequences, and that the incoming administration might pursue policies with which I disagree on a host of issues. But on all questions – especially on this one, where the risk is literally annihilation of billions of people on a time scale of hours – I expect seriousness of the sort the late Sid Drell brought to the task.

White Christmas

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The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, LA
But it’s December the 24th
And I’m longing to be up north

– Irving Berlin

citrus irrigation, Riverside County, CA, courtesy Library of Congress

The backyard of my childhood home, in the foothills above Upland, California, was a remnant of an old orange grove. It still had a concrete irrigation standpipe (I think that’s what they’re called?) like the one in the picture. No water came out – such are the traces of Southern California’s agricultural past as we brought water to the land, grew food, then moved on.

There were still groves checkerboarded through our neighborhood in the 1960s when I grew up, a past I romanticize – the smell when the trees were in blossom, the sound of wind machines on the rare cold mornings, the way my parents’ bridge game with their friends Dick and Elizabeth Fleming would stop so Dick could listen turn up the radio to listen to the fruit frost report.

I had a longstanding tradition when I worked for the Albuquerque Journal of writing a White Christmas story, generally about how it was not going to be one in Albuquerque that year. I learned early the benefit of exploiting editors’ needs to fill the paper on slow news days to write the oddball stuff, the week before Christmas is invariably slow, and so I got away with a great deal in my annual riff about why it was, yet again, not likely to be a White Christmas.

I was goofing, but I took the work seriously:

It’s perhaps worth remembering the first verse of Berlin’s White Christmas — the “lost verse” that is often left out in our recreations of hearth and home.

In it, the song’s narrator is stuck “in Beverly Hills LA,” where “the orange and palm trees sway” — stuck in a place with no snow, and “longing to be up north.”

New Mexico is on a climate/cultural border between the snowless “Beverly Hills LA” and the Connecticut farm in the 1942 movie “Holiday Inn,” starring Bing Crosby, which introduced Berlin’s dreamy cinematic vision of snow at Christmastime. Unless you live in the high country, a white Christmas is better imagined than experienced.

Nathan Masters wrote earlier this month on the loss of snow in Los Angeles:

For generations, Angelenos could count on waking up, at least once or twice in their lives, to a wintry scene: children pelting each other with snowballs beneath powder-dusted palm trees.

For me, it was the Friday before Christmas, 1969:

I was in fifth grade, and it was the Friday before Christmas, and my teacher wouldn’t let me go out and play with the other kids because I had a little bit of a cold.

I do not remember the teacher’s name, but I have not forgiven her.

Old Baldy Brand oranges

If you look in the foothills in this citrus crate label, just to the left of the flag pole, that’s where our house was. The Chaffey Brothers, William and George, developed the irrigation colony that became Ontario and Upland.

So there are two threads here, and they are in conflict. In White Christmas, one of the great set pieces of Americana, Irving Berlin sets the real America apart from the orange and palm trees, the artificiality of “Beverly Hills, LA”.

The citrus crate labels I so love are precisely that, an artificial marketing dreamland created to sell Southern California fruit back east. It worked. There was a time, they say, when Riverside County was the richest place per capita in America.

But that gauzy citrus landscape is also the America of my childhood.

So was Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, artificial but with the power of a narrative that was self-executing. Here’s music critic Jay Rosen, from his wonderful book White Christmas: The Story of an American Song:

The longing for Christmas snowfall, now keenly felt everywhere from New Hampshire to New Guinea, seems to have originated with Berlin’s song.

I love the orange crate labels (check out the University of California library collection) in the same way that I love Bing Crosby singing White Christmas. Like the orange crate label artists, Berlin made up a world that, in our own longings, then became real.

So with that, via NCEP’s Global Forecast System Model, here’s your White Christmas forecast for total snowfall for the 24 hours ending midday Sunday:

sleigh bells in the snow

 

conservation undercuts the desalination business model

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“Decoupling” – when resource use is no longer inextricably linked to population or economic growth – is a central feature of water management right now in the western United States. (See here for a deeper dive.)

The LA Times’ Bettina Boxall had a great story over the weekend that illustrates its impact on a proposal to spend a gajillion dollars to build a desalination plant to provide water in Orange County, California. The problem? Because of conservation, and other lower cost alternatives like the use of treated wastewater to recharge aquifers, potential customers may not need the water:

Conservation is driving down demand at the same time there are plans to expand Orange County’s long-standing program of replenishing the groundwater basin with highly treated wastewater.

“You can stack up some really easy projects that are being contemplated … and all of a sudden we don’t see a need for this project at all,” said Paul Cook, general manager of the Irvine Ranch Water District.

Colorado River deal – not there yet, but close, and probably inevitable

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tl;dr There won’t be a grand bargain to reduce Colorado River water use before next month’s inauguration. But that doesn’t mean the grand bargain is dead. In fact, it is inevitable.

longer….

Lake Mead, December 2016

LAS VEGAS – When Jeff Kightlinger said during a public session yesterday at the Colorado River Water Users Association that a long-awaited deal to reduce water use on the river would not be completed before next month’s change in administration, it offered a very public answer to the question many of us brought to the Las Vegas meeting:

Would negotiators get a deal done before the Obama administration leaves office?

no, but….

Kightlinger’s short answer was “no”, but it’s misleading if we stop there (as I did in yesterday’s blog post). There’s a lot going on, and reason to be hopeful.

The annual CRWUA meeting is the traditional point in the calendar when big Colorado River deals are announced, but despite being very close, it’s been increasingly clear over the last few weeks that the final details remain out of reach.

The group of people I describe in my book as “the network” – has been red-lined in recent months, trying to work out the details of a complex deal to reduce the use of Colorado River water in California, Arizona, Nevada, and possibly Mexico. When I call my friends in the network lately, they’re almost always in airports or hotels or not answering my call because they’re in meetings.

The deal is the closest we have yet come to a formal recognition, attached to substantive actions, that the laws governing the Colorado River allocate more water on paper than nature provides in practice. For much of the last century, we’ve dodged the problem as population and therefore water use slowly grew into the available supply, but in the 21st century we’ve overshot, the big reservoirs (Lake Mead outside Las Vegas and Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border) have been drained to meet the demands of the basin’s farms and cities.

Commissioner of Reclamation Estevan López, speaking this morning at his final CRWUA, had perhaps hoped to be able to hand over the moment to one of his bosses to announce an agreement. He called the moment “bittersweet”. “We’re not there yet,” he said of the deal. “That’s the bittersweet part.”

López then went on to outline the major terms of the deal on which everyone seems to agree – larger cuts in water deliveries as Lake Mead drops, with the cuts first felt in Arizona and Nevada, and eventually in California. (I won’t rehash, you can find details here.)

protecting 1,020

López described what may be the most important feature of the deal – an agreement to “protect 1,020”, meaning that the Lower Colorado River Basin’s water users would agree to extraordinary water use cutbacks to prevent Lake Mead from dropping below the critical elevation of 1,020 feet above sea level.

At 1,020, there’s less than a years’ water left in the reservoir. A recognition that 1,020 is even possible, let alone that we have within view a plan to deal with it, is something that would have been unthinkable in Colorado River Basin management as recently as a decade ago, when the last grand bargain on the river, the Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, was being negotiated.

López called the nearly-done agreement “an emergency brake”, “a parachute”, “a way to slow things down”. Pick your metaphor, but whatever it is it is the clearest recognition in the history of Colorado River management that there is not enough water to use in the ways to which we have become accustomed.

There is, as Deputy Interior Secretary Michael Connor told reporters during a news conference yesterday, “a very good framework in place”.

But it is not yet done.

what happens next

I don’t fully understand why, other than that there are a lot of niggling details still being sorted, including the fate of the Salton Sea and Southern California’s desire for clarity on the Sacramento Delta, another of its water supply sources. (see here for more on that stuff) In addition to the deal itself, there are a series of side agreements required among the players, which in some cases must be approved by water agency boards, and a requirement for a vote of the Arizona state legislature. So even when the final agreement is agreed to, there remains work to turn the ideas into a substantive, binding deal.

I asked one of my friends working on the negotiations, one of the members of “the network”, whether she was going to make it home for Christmas, and she looked at me like I was crazy. As we near the change in administration, the frequent flier miles will continue to accumulate.

Connor said the goal is to have the package in good shape as it is handed off to the new administration. Whether it then would stall as the new federal team gives it a look is anyone’s guess at this point. Talking to people at all points of the political spectrum, it seems as though there is no clear “Democratic” or “Republican” position on this. Colorado River governance has never broken down along partisan lines. Given the names being mentioned in CRWUA hallway gossip for key Trump administration posts, there’s a good chance we’ll have folks in key positions who already understand the river and the deal.

Or not. Who knows what Jan. 21 holds?

the inevitability of a deal

But given the hydrologic reality, this deal or something very much like it appears inevitable. There seems to be no interest among the network’s members in litigating who gets how much water, and every incentive to do a deal that provides some certainty, even if the reality of less water is an unpleasant response.