Ten years after I handed in the manuscript for my book Water is For Fighting Over, about the governance past, present, and future of the Colorado River, my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara and I took a look back at the book on our Water Matters podcast. Writing it changed my life, reading it changed Rin’s, and we now spend a good chunk of our time in the office we share working together on Colorado River issues.
What of my optimism (because it was nothing if not an optimistic book) has held up? What do the current failures in Colorado River management tell us about the function of the basin’s governance network? Does my deeper optimism about communities’ abilities to thrive with less water remain? What can a new generation of water leaders (looking at you, Rin) bring to bear?
Special thanks to Rin for what was the most fun interview I can remember doing.
You can find it on Buzzsprout or, as they say, “wherever you get your podcasts.”
I read your book. Agreed with the title then and now. Disagreed with the content. Pretty difficult for us to decipher what exactly is going on. How much does the Upper Basin use? 4 MAF? What is Denver Water Board doing? How much is delivered to Lake Powell? Change in storage, evaporation, groundwater recharge, seepage around dam to river? Then there’s Lee’s (my spelling) Ferry gage, easy enough to get data. Then Paria, usually a trickle, didn’t there used to be a gage at the farm? Then Lee Ferry. I’ve been by that point dozens of times and I’ve never noticed it. Is there a monument? Then Marble and Grand Canyons. No gage any more at Little Colorado, Gage at Phantom. No gage anymore at National Canyon or Havasu Creek. Gage at Diamond Creek. What contributions come from Little Colorado (gage at Cameron plus the spring), Havasu Creek, another creek from the north (Tapeats?) and all the flashy creeks that occasionally contribute to long-term storage in Lake Mead? Who owns that water? Evaporation and stream loss in Marble and Grand Canyons? Then Lake Mead, seepage, evaporation, release from Hoover Dam. Then nobody cares. Except there are more dams and the Gila, takeouts for CAP, CRIT, and others, return flows, NO CONTRIBUTIONS WHATSOEVER FROM CALIFORNIA, Yuma, Imperial (finally lined All America Canal in 2010) and delivery to Mexico untreated for salt.
Do the Upper Basin States use only 4 MAF out of 7.5 MAF. If so, why are they faced with a possible failure to deliver 75 MAF/10 yrs? Have the Lower Basin States reduced to 6 MAF. Is the river now 8 MAF? What about 3.5 MAF each for Upper and Lower Basins and 0.75 MAF for Mexico (how much do they get now out of their 1.5 MAF) or run of the river in those proportions with something going into storage in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. That leaves the Lower Basin States (especially my state of Arizona with lower appropriative rights) drier (ie., screwed). (Now I must flee and hide before the vigilantes string me up.) Arizona should get and distribute waters from contributions downstream from Lee Ferry. Nevada should similarly get its contribution from the Virgin River. California should get its contribution–oh yeah they don’t have any. ALLOW “LEASING” OF WATER or purchase of water rights by entities in the Lower Basin States from users in the Upper Basin just as it is becoming lawful among entities in the Lower Basin. The water comes from Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, little bit from New Mexico. Divide it up fairly based on run of the river and then let entities “lease” according to the market.
Mr. Fleck – your book is quite good but has a couple of significant problems:
1) I think you’ve misinterpreted Ostrom’s work. Your text emphasizes the communal nature of decision making over scarce resources, which is certainly something Ostrom discusses at length. In some of her case studies, including the seminal study of water management in SoCal, what emerges is the critical role of an outside 3rd party playing a somewhat threatening role and incenting (forcing) the warring parties to play nice with each other. Ostrom is explicit about the potential and actual importance of such actors. This is exactly the potential role of the Federal government whose abdication of coercion you deplore in this podcast. This is quite different from the way you present Ostrom’s work in your book.
2) The partial rejection of Reisner misses his bigger point. It’s not that its impossible to cooperate on dividing a resource like water in the west, it’s that the perverse incentives of Federal (and state) policies led to rather irrational use of resources. Why isn’t Arizona a warmer version of Iowa, state with a substantial agricultural economy and moderate to small size cities? The Phoenix metropolitan area has a population substantially larger than the whole state of Iowa.
Roger – Thanks so much for your thoughtful critique! I absolutely agree with your criticism of my treatment of Ostrom in the book. My understanding of her work has evolved a lot in the decade since I wrote it – this is something I talk about with my students when I teach her work now. In particular, I was filtering her through my own normative lens in a way that missed nuances of her work, in a couple of ways, including the area you point out. I also was insufficiently attentive to her insights about how the sort of processes she describes can fail. That’s at the core of the analytical work we’re engaged in now as we try to understand the failings of the current Colorado River governance regime.
On Reisner and Arizona, I think Arizona is a marvelous example of communities’ ability to adapt. I’m not gonna accept “perverse” and “irrational” – the incentives represented real and important societal values at the times the rules were written. When Arizona sued California in the Supreme Court in 1953, it was explicitly to ensure a water supply for a substantial agricultural economy. In the decades that followed, Arizona’s goals shifted, and their allocation and use of water has followed, population has risen, creating amazing cities (their goal) and water use has steadily declined.
John – Yours is an incomplete assessment. The “shift” in Arizona’s goals was driven by cheap real estate made feasible by the CAP et al. This was less a reflection of any rational process than the failure to provide adequate housing, which would have required significant public investment, in already settled parts of the country. It’s a typically American story of poor allocation of public resources for private gain.
I don’t think the real estate around Phoenix is cheap and a lot of it consists of groups of five or fewer houses so they can’t be called developments and have a 100-year supply. East of Scottsdale people were having water hauled from the beginning. Scottsdale warned them that they would not be able to continue and actually stopped deliveries. I don’t know who supplies them now. Developers in Buckeye are finagling ways to try to show a water supply. I certainly agree that there’s been an explosion of housing developments around Phoenix. I don’t think that the CAP is the cause. CAP, transfer of Colorado River water rights, and other withdrawals don’t matter a whit if no water comes out of Hoover Dam. That is a distinct possibility in the foreseeable future. It’s a very lucky thing that the earth fissures have occurred almost entirely outside densely populated areas.