The Salton Sea and the risk of failure

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While I was writing my book about the future of Colorado River water management, I joked about my efforts to leave the Salton Sea out of the story. It was only sort of a joke. The problems of the Salton Sea, an inland water body fed by agricultural drainage from the Imperial Valley, are an integral part of the Colorado River story. As we pursue efficiency, agricultural drainage shrinks. And so, therefore, does the Sea.

Salton Sea, Carol Highsmith, courtesy Library of Congress

Salton Sea, Carol Highsmith, courtesy Library of Congress

My desire to leave the Salton Sea out of the book was in part a matter of the practical constraints of writing this particular book. The problems of the Sea are enormously complex, and every time I tried to write the story it failed in a blind alley with a heap of linguistic garbage. My Island Press editor Emily Turner Davis and I were trying to craft a short book. The Salton Sea did not lend itself to that.

There’s a layer of complexity to the Salton Sea problem that both made it hard to write about but that also illustrates why it’s a hard problem for water managers to sort out. The institutional plumbing we’ve built over the last century to manage water is about managing water. That sounds like I’m stating the obvious, but it has an important implication: we’re not good at thinking about and coping with knock-on effects of water management decisions on non-water systems. Often, our solutions come at the expense of what economists would call “externalities”.

The environmental piece of this is obvious, and we’re slowly learning to grapple with it. When we remove water from where it used to sit or flow, the environment is changed in ways that we increasingly view as detrimental (fish die, springs dry, cottonwoods whither, etc.). The options for bringing those watery values into the institutional plumbing are narrow, but we’re getting the hang of them. Environmental management is increasingly incorporated into water management.

But the most significant problem caused by a dwindling Salton Sea may be a public health issue. As the Sea shrinks, exposed shoreline flats are dust storms waiting to happen, creating filthy air and a public health risk. (See Michael Cohen’s Hazard’s Toll, and the Salton Sea Initiative for summaries.) Importantly, the most vulnerable population here is poor. We simply lack the institutional tools to incorporate public health into water policy decision making – all the more so when the people hurt are poor. Public health people speak a different language, go to different meetings, hang out in different hotel bars.

The current scheme for reducing water use in Imperial includes a trigger point that would lead to significant reduction in ag runoff and a shrinking sea beginning Dec. 31, 2017. That’s not far away. The water use piece is crucial to balancing California’s water books. Without those Imperial reductions, less Colorado River water would be available to municipal Southern California. A loss of water supply reliability there would increase pressure on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the other source of Southern California’s water.

So this is a statewide problem, but the poor folk of Imperial are being asked to bear a disproportionate burden in its solution.

There are three possible outcomes:

  • The deal to reduce ag water use in Imperial could collapse. By reducing the reliability of Southern California’s Colorado River supplies, this would place enormous pressure on California’s water system state wide.
  • The deal to reduce ag water use could hold, and the shrinking Salton Sea would leave exposed shoreline, create toxic dust and a public health threat. The burden of solving California’s water problems thus would fall on one community in particular.
  • Those who benefit – the residents of the state of California as a whole – could fund the mitigation measures necessary to manage the impacts of a shrinking sea, creating habit and dust control measures.

My preference is the third option. Time is running short.

And for what it’s worth, my efforts to leave the Salton Sea out of my book failed. It required some crushing simplifications, but it remains a short book.

I talked on the radio about my book

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I miss y’all! So busy being person-selling-a-book while simultaneously being person-teaching-grad-students-about-water. I have much to say, frustrated that I don’t have enough time to write about it all here, but Steve Goldstein at KJZZ helped me share some of my ideas with Phoenix radio listeners. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can listen in now too:

For as long as anyone can remember, there have been concerns about whether there’s enough water for a city like Phoenix to be sustainable in the long run.

The reality seems even more daunting after years of drought and disputes over what share of the Colorado River states like Arizona and California may get. And most headlines indicate those disputes are getting worse.

In his new book, “Water Is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West,” John Fleck paints a fairly optimistic picture about cooperation and collaboration.

wastewater reuse

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The language here is so delicate, which is in itself an interesting issue:

It is now possible to imagine a future in which highly treated wastewater will be plumbed directly into California homes as a new drinking water supply.

That’s Matt Weiser on California’s next big step in institutionally normalizing “direct potable reuse” – the treatment of wastewater and its reintroduction directly into our drinking water.

This is a live question right now for colleagues here at the University of New Mexico where one of our water faculty, Caroline Scruggs, has been spearheading research into questions of public acceptance of DPR. The water policy questions are complicated – issues of public acceptance, questions of where the wastewater is going now (in the ocean? into a river where the reuse is already happening downstream?).

In California, where treated effluent is often disposed of directly to the ocean, current questions of water scarcity are driving a robust discussion. Matt’s story outlines the next big step – the beginnings of the establishment of a regulatory framework governing DPR.

An important next step.

rainfall variability is for not fighting over

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Fascinating new paper by Lewis Davis at Union College (gated) arguing that the need for collaboration in early agricultural societies with highly variable rainfall led to the development of cultural norms of not fighting over water:

The link between rainfall variation and individual responsibility draws on an extensive theoretical and empirical literature on risk sharing among agricultural households in less developed countries…. I develop a model of informal risk sharing in which attitudes toward collective responsibility are endogenous, determined by the efforts of parents to socialize their children. Parents are willing to incur socialization costs because greater levels of collective responsibility permit their children to credibly commit to larger transfers in an informal risk sharing arrangement. The model predicts the equilibrium level of collective responsibility will be greater where nature is more capricious.

Much math follows, leading to the conclusion that high rainfall variability leads to the general development of more cooperation, less fighting. The tip here came from Tyler Cowan, who makes fun of England and has links to several earlier, ungated versions of the paper. (link fixed, thanks TB for the corrective)

 

When do we stop calling what’s happening on the Colorado River “shortage”?

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Putting together a lecture for University of New Mexico Water Resources Program students tomorrow, I’ve been thinking about this quote from MWD’s Bill Hasencamp, in last week’s LA Times:

“Basically, what the models say is that, in the future, most years will be shortage years,” said Bill Hasencamp, the manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “Shortages are going to be a way of life.”

“Shortage” here has a very particular technical meaning, but it also carries some interesting baggage in terms of how we as a community think about the water supplied by the river we share.

All-American Canal passing through the sand hills west of Yuma, March 2014 by John Fleck

All-American Canal passing through the sand hills west of Yuma, March 2014 by John Fleck

The technical meaning is a reduction in the allocation of water under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in the case of Arizona v. California. The court interpreted the law governing the distribution of the river’s water to mean that California was entitled to 4.4 million acre feet per year, Arizona 2.8 million acre feet, and Nevada 0.3 million acre feet, for a total of 7.5 million acre feet.

The rules weren’t terribly clear about what happened when there was not enough water to do that, or even what “not enough water to do that” might mean. As long as there was water in Lake Mead, everybody could in theory get their full allotment until Lake Mead was sorta empty, and then suddenly we would be in huge trouble. It seemed reasonable to come up with some rules to start early slowing the decline of Lake Mead rather than waiting until it was empty, so in 2007 everyone packaged up some new rules to offer some clarity, the “interim guidelines” (big pdf). They defined “shortage” in terms of the amount of water in Mead on Jan. 1 of any given year. Below 1,075 feet in elevation is “shortage”, and downstream users have to take less than the full amounts laid out in AZ v. CA.

That’s the way Hasencamp is using the word. There’s less water in the river than AZ v. CA allocated, so most years in the future Mead will hover below 1,075, according to the models, and we’ll be in “shortage” most of the time. I don’t fault Bill for using the word – “shortage” is both technically correct, and Hasencamp is using it in a way that sends an important message.

But “shortage” carries some baggage. My big Random House defines it as “a deficiency in quantity”, which implies that we really need the full amount and in shortage we just have to get by with less. Embedded in the language we’re using is the notion that the right and proper way of things is lots water, and the current not-lots-of-water state is some sort of aberration. The core of the argument in my book is that our adaptive response to having less water is finding very successful ways to use less water. Because that seems to be the way it’s going to be, as Hasencamp so clearly explains. Less water is the norm, not an aberration.

We need some more neutral language to describe this future.

Suggestions welcome.

Some optimistic words on the Colorado Basin from Doug Kenney

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The University of Colorado’s Doug Kenney is sounding genuinely optimistic in this recent take on the Colorado River’s problems over at Carpe Diem West:

Throughout the basin, a lot of really good innovations are occurring. Conservation has, rightly, emerged as a credible management tool, and not merely something for the hippies to talk about. Cooperation among the states, between the US and Mexico, and between the water users and environmentalists, is arguably at an all-time high.

And yet:

The challenges are all growing, and despite our current momentum, Lake Mead—the unofficial canary in this coal mine—is projected to drop further over the next 2 years. We are doing better—arguably, much better. Nobody should be shy in acknowledging this; some boasting is justified. But we aren’t winning yet.

Kenney is one of the most thoughtful observers of the basin’s issues, from whom I have learned a great deal. The whole thing is worth a read.

Alfalfa in the desert? Really?

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One of the journalist’s techniques is to try to start where you think your reader already is, with some piece of knowledge they’re already got, and then lead them to a new place. For me, that often means retracing my own path. I started years ago thinking it was crazy to grow alfalfa in the desert. Squandering water on a cow? Really?

Island Press has posted Chapter 2 of my book as a teaser – watch how I try to shift the frame, to argue that alfalfa actually makes sense. Of course the entire book is worth reading and you shouldn’t stop with one chapter and should buy copies for all your family and friends.

Collaboration on New Mexico’s Rio Grande

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A new environmental water sharing governance experiment is underway this late summer on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico in an effort to keep stretches of the river wet for ecosystem benefits. Ollie Reed sketched out the details in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal:

Sandia, Isleta, Santa Ana and Cochiti pueblos each donated 100 acre-feet of San Juan-Chama water to Audubon and the Club at Las Campanas, located in Santa Fe, kicked in an additional 399 acre-feet. The total of 799 acre-feet is being used to supplement the Rio Grande’s flow for the benefit of fish and wildlife.

“In collaboration with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, we will increase the flow in the river for a 35-mile stretch for nearly 24 days,” Julie Weinstein, executive director of Audubon New Mexico, said in a statement issued Wednesday. “Our rivers are especially critical for bird habitat and biodiversity.”

This is a collaborative deal to put water in the river channel for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow – among a leading environmental NGO, the federal government, the valley’s largest ag water district and Native American communities. That’s a step away from the litigation and conflict that have been a major feature of the issue’s environmental politics.

The details of the plumbing being used are an interesting part of this project. The MRGCD is using its drain system to target the water at the river stretches where the partners have determined they can get the most benefit for the small amount of water available.