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A guest post from longtime friend of Inkstain (and friend of the Colorado River) Karl Flessa.
By Karl Flessa
In the classic Monty Python sketch, a customer returns to the pet shop where, just 30 minutes ago, he purchased a parrot. He complains that the parrot is dead. The shopkeeper tries to convince the customer the parrot is only resting or is stunned.
In the ensuing argument, the customer uses no fewer than eighteen euphemisms: “This parrot is definitely deceased…demised…passed on…no more…ceased to be…expired…gone to meet his maker…a stiff…bereft of life…rests in peace…pushing up the daisies…metabolic processes are now history…off the twig…kicked the bucket…shuffled off his mortal coil…run down the curtain…joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.”
Indeed, the parrot was nailed to its perch, already dead when the customer bought it.
The Compact and its subsequent agreements are as dead as that parrot.
- The Compact is dead because it is founded on a false premise: a river that can produce the prescribed amount of water.
- The Compact is dead because it is unjust: neither the Tribes nor nature participate in negotiations.
- The Compact is dead because it doesn’t work. The Basin States are locked in battle; the Federal government tinkers and dithers.
In the longer version of the sketch, the shopkeeper goes to the back in search of a live replacement, returning to report “…we’re right out of parrots.”
So are we.
We need a new Compact.
Proposals are not lacking: proportional allocations, Tribal standing, a whole-basin approach, adjustments based on actual flows, a basin authority, nature’s fair share, interstate trading… .
What’s lacking is the courage to change.
The Compact is a dead parrot.
Good way to put it. Wish I had gotten to meet Karl at Stony Brook, but he was leaving just as I got there.
THE COMPACT IS THE LAW. IN IT IT SAYS THE UPPER BASIN WILL DELIVER 75 MAF/10 YEARS. It worked for 80 years because the Upper Basin took less than its share. In any other appropriative legal setting, the Upper Basin would have lost those rights. The current administration has no interest in the law. If I understand correctly, lawsuits will go directly to the Supreme Court. Decisions there have not gone well in this administration. From the plots I’ve made of Lees Ferry, Diamond Creek, and Hoover gages total flow in MAF, the numbers do not add up.
I love your Python approach, Karl! I’m a Hydrologist from Alberta, Canada. I have been following this blog for several years and we are currently under the same stress with the ‘snow flows’ that come from the Eastern slopes of the Rockies. Our problem is a dwindling lack of snowfall in the ‘Continental Divide Rockpile’ to the West. At least we have a pretty good management system which has been working pretty good until you throw A . I. Into the mix. Luckily for us, we don’t have a California at the end of the supply channel. Our Government here in Alberta has just this week put out notice to all users to write in to the Environment Ministry with ideas and possible solutions to a for the Government to write up a ‘white paper’, and come up with a management plan by next March. I’be already made my submission and we’ll see if it’s ’water or whisky’ we’ll be fighting over next summer.
Good Luck in the Colorado Basin!
Hello Karl, as my Aussie friends say, “Good on ya mate!” I’ve been saying it’s time to rewrite the Compact for years. I’ve even offered a framework for doing so in this recent blog: https://www.sustainablewaters.org/a-simple-yet-powerful-framework-for-managing-water-scarcity/
But the only way that’s going to happen is if enough of us say it, over and over and over again.
Thanks Brian. Everybody should be reading your stuff.
The Compact has received too much reverence. It’s time for some ridicule.
Any agreement that doesn’t have a good foundation is going to be trouble. Now we see the results of not having the science that was presented back in the early 1900s taken into account. We also see that various parties that should have been included in those negotiations and so by that route we also get further problems.
Yes, time to redo from the start using both science and including all parties.
“Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” (Robert Louis Stevenson)
I love satire. Also when I worked in the field on the Colorado River, I’d often listen to Rock tunes on my ever present MP3 player. A favorite artist in the playlist being Warren Zevon as he was a master of satyrical lyrics.
As the chips are down, I thought that this song might fit the bill.
Send Lawyers guns and money: Modified by yours truly.
1…2…3…4…
I went home with a waitress.
The way I always do.
How was I to know.
She was from the stakeholders too???
I was working on the Colorado.
A job of little risk.
Send Lawyers guns and money.
John…Get me out of this!
Now I’m hiding out in Oregon.
I’m a desperate man.
Send Lawyers guns and money!
There’s no water at the Dam!!!
Send Lawyers guns and money!
Send Lawyers guns and money!!
Send Lawyers guns and money!!!
/satire off
All kidding aside, it’s pretty easy to speculate on exactly why there are so many flaws with the Compact. First, the basin states couldn’t come to an agreement on their own. The Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover more or less forced them to the table at Bishop’s Lodge. A good example of this is the term ‘herding cats’. Each state pulling in their own direction. To compound matters, the agreed to number of average yearly flow was overestimated. That’s two strikes right off the bat. Arizona was never happy from the beginning and still isn’t happy. That’s another story.
Over the years there have been add ons to the Compact. Adjustments were made for the times. All of this time the basin states still acted like a herd of cats. Compromises made as things changed. Kind of like tenants at a one hundred year old boarding house with the Federal Government being the landlord. No that isn’t right. More like the caretaker of the place trying to keep the occupants happy, better describes the situation.
Now due to the ‘perfect storm’ or more accurately, the lack of them – the well is drying up. Many people are blaming the government. Primarily Reclamation for lack of direction for over the years. I have to agree to some of this but want to point out that the leadership is not consistent. It is driven by the national administration at the time. Be it Republican or Democrat, the focus at the top determines the direction. Speaking of politics, I wonder who came up with the ‘trip levels’ for Lake Mead’s elevation? They were made at linear intervals, however the storage in Mead is non linear. Same story in any reservoir in our country. The levels sure went down quickly, didn’t they? That is because the reservoir is emptying. Everybody and their brother acted shocked and claimed mismanagement. They assumed that the storage was that of a fixed container, not a container that had its shorelines shrink or a bottom that had hillsides.
I’ll throw out another thought here. Think if you were an official within Reclamation and YOUR DECISION dictated how someone’s livelihood would be ruined because you turned off the tap? The common complaint being that we are going to ‘lose the family farm’. That happened sometime back in an irrigation district at Klamath Falls. I remember that.
Now apply that to multi state basin level.
I like reading everyone’s take on the situation and possible solutions. I know what I’d do but am glad that the decision is out of my pay grade. Lawyers are standing by.
The view is different from where you are standing…