Steven Pinker on the how news misleads

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News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall to zero, there will be always be headlines to click on.

That’s Steven Pinker, in a great interview with Julia Belluz at Vox.

I came to this insight late in my journalism career,  and it was central to my decision to quit my newspaper job, go off and write a book, and now launch a new career in academia. Journalism no longer seemed well suited to the task at hand. Here’s how I explained it in the opening chapter of Water is for Fighting Over:

Like many who manage, engineer, utilize, plan for, and write about western water today, I grew up with the expectation of catastrophe…. 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 had Reisner taught me, people’s faucets were still running. Their farms were not drying up. No city was left abandoned….

When people have less water, I realized, they use less water.

In spite of the doomsday scenarios, westerners were coping, getting along with their business in the face of less water…. I have witnessed this resilience time and again as I travel the hydraulic landscape of the western United States. This book chronicles my attempt to understand and explain where that ability to adapt comes from, how it works, and how we can call on it to get us through the hard times ahead.

Writing about people not running out of water proved a challenge. I hope I pulled it off.

La Niña watch

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This is your semi-regular, repetitive reminder that El Niño and La Niña don’t matter a hill of beans, in statistical terms, for the Colorado River Basin as a whole.

The Climate Prediction Center has issued a La Niña watch. That means cooler temperatures across the equatorial Pacific, which tends on average to influence the North American storm track, pushing storms, on average and in bulk, sorta north. Sorta. Maybe. That means it tends to be a bit drier across Arizona and New Mexico on average, sorta maybe. But as you get farther north, where most of the Colorado River Basin’s water originates, dunno. Hard to say much in a predictive sense, as one says again and again:

Courtesy CBRFC

Courtesy CBRFC

on the Lower Colorado, the weekly human hydrograph

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I love this:

Thursday is the lowest release for the week, so starting late Thursday the water begins to drop in the river, with the lowest flows on Saturday. If you are a recreational water user — skiing, fishing, pleasure boating, or jet skiing — less water means more sandbars or exposed debris to avoid. You may ask why the releases are not kept at a uniform flow? Farmers are people, too, with families and other responsibilities. Irrigations are scheduled so that they can also enjoy other activities on weekends. By Monday morning, water releases are at their full flow for the week.

the long shadow of Marc Reisner and Cadillac Desert

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Water is for Fighting Over

Water is for Fighting Over

It is impossible, I have found, to write seriously about water in the western United States without being in conversation with the late Marc Reisner and his classic Cadillac Desert, published thirty years ago. It’s assessment of our problems is foundational, and even if I disagree with some of what he had to say (as I do), Cadillac Desert is one of the great American books, and I must assume that most people who read me have already read him.

Henry Brean did a nice piece this morning in the Las Vegas Review Journal about my new book Water is For Fighting Over. Here’s Henry’s kicker:

Most books about the Colorado River offer a pessimistic view, including the seminal work on the subject, Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert.”

Fleck jokes that his book is more like “Volvo Desert.” The future river he envisions is sturdy, reliable and built to survive a crash.

And then there is this kind review just posted on Amazon:

“Water is for Fighting Over” is worthy of placement on the shelf next to “Cadillac Desert.”

Cannot escape Reisner’s shadow.

The University of New Mexico Water Resources Program: playing water management’s long game

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On the Public Record posted yesterday soliciting water management recommendations for the new presidential administration (and offering some of their own). As happens with that smart blog and audience, cool ideas quickly emerged – better use of remote sensing to measure water use in something closer to real time, municipal leak detection, planning grants for local-level water management, and on. I offered this:

Fund educational opportunities in technical and policy and management skills to build capacity among the next generation of water managers, with special emphasis on members of currently under-represented communities. So that all the cool stuff other people are suggesting in this thread can be well used/executed.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot in the year and a half since I left a career in newspaper journalism and began heading down this strange new path I’m on. I left to write a book, because I’ve been a journalist all my life and that’s what one does. But as I was working on the book, holed up in an office in the little corner of the University of New Mexico economics building occupied by UNM’s Water Resources Program, I was increasingly struck by the opportunity I’d stumbled into.

UNM water resources students measuring the Rio Grande

UNM water resources students measuring the Rio Grande

Let me explain the WRP.

We’re a small program that grants interdisciplinary masters degrees in water management. We provide students with a grounding in both the technical aspects of water management – hydrology, climate, geochemistry, modeling – as well as the policy aspects, stuff like law and governance. If you look around New Mexico water management, you see our graduates’ fingerprints on things that matter. Santa Fe’s Buckman Direct Diversion, which helped that city diversify its water portfolio and reduce its dependence on groundwater? One of our grads helped develop that project. Albuquerque’s effort to expand aquifer storage and recovery? Yup, one of our grads. The struggle to get the Air Force to deal with groundwater contamination from an old fuel spill on Albuquerque’s south side? Quietly, one of our grads tenaciously pushed that rock up the hill.

Water management’s grand gestures are the ones we notice (Hoover Dam, the San Juan-Chama Project, Adams Tunnel), but mostly water management is the accumulation of zillions of smaller things done by motivated people who care. In working with Water Resource Program students, I began to see the opportunity to help with that part of the project of making water management work. The students are smart and engaged and passionate, which offers enormous leverage.

As I was finishing the book late last year, I jumped at the chance to expand my teaching role in the program. One thing led to another, and I began this week as the program’s director.

This seems a good use of my time.

Despite drought, the value of California farmland is rising

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California’s epic, headline-grabbing drought has not dented the value of the state’s farm land.

According to a new USDA dataset released today, California cropland rose 2.1 percent in value per acre in the last year, and 16 percent since 2012. Despite drought, California cropland remains at $10,900 an acre the second most valuable in the nation behind New Jersey. (New Jersey? Ag econ nerds please help in the comments.)

One might hypothesize that groundwater pumping on irrigated land is the explanation. (I did, in fact, so hypothesize.) But one’s hypothesis might be wrong. Non-irrigated California cropland is rising more quickly in value than irrigated land – but both are going up.

 

I’m the new director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program

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When Bob Berrens invited me three years ago to join him in teaching a class on contemporary issues in water management in the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, I was hesitant. I was pretty busy – working full time at the Albuquerque Journal, trying to write a book. But heck, it seemed like fun, so I figured I’d give it a shot. (My joke has been that the real hook was university library privileges. There is truth in that joke.)

One thing led to another. The Water Resources Program gave me an office, I quit my newspaper job to finish the book, I expanded my teaching role, I started working more closely with the program’s terrific graduate students, and now this:

John Fleck has been appointed director of The University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program. Fleck is Professor of Practice in water policy and governance in the university’s Department of Economics, and has been the Water Resources Program’s writer-in-residence since January 2015.

“UNM’s Water Resources Program is a unique interdisciplinary program with faculty contributors from across campus,” said UNM Dean of Graduate Studies Julie Coonrod. “While many faculty members work across disciplines, John Fleck truly thinks in an interdisciplinary way. This rare quality, along with his highly-regarded reputation in the western water community will provide strong leadership for this graduate program.”

Lower Colorado water consumption lowest since 1992

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update: A correction to this post here, thanks to some excellent journalistic sleuthing by Tony Davis.

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The Bureau of Reclamation’s Aug. 1 Colorado River Lower Basin Water Use Forecast (pdf here) passed a symbolically important milestone: at a forecast consumptive use of 6.998 million acre feet, if the forecast holds, this will be the first time Lower Basin use has been below 7 million acre feet since 1992.

Water use in 1992 was down because it was an extremely wet year. In Arizona, for example, it was one of the three wettest years in the last half century. This year has been dry. Water use is down because water users across the basin are cranking down their water use to try to keep Lake Mead from dropping further.

Here’s the data, with consumptive use in Nevada, Arizona, and California, plus reservoir evaporation in Lake Mead and the major reservoirs downstream – 7.858 million acre feet this year, compared to 7.806 maf in 1992. It’s a 17.5 percent decrease in water consumption since the 2002 peak:

Lower Colorado River Basin water consumption

Lower Colorado River Basin water consumption

Since 1992, the population in the major metropolitan areas served with Lower Basin water – LA-San Diego, central Arizona, and Las Vegas – has grown from 19 million to 26 million. That’s pretty striking – 7 million more people using essentially the same amount of water.

One of the central arguments of my new book Water is For Fighting Over is that when people have less water, they use less water – that we have the ability to significantly reduce our water use in the arid West and still thrive, and that we are in fact already making significant progress. That’s what’s happening in the graph above.

Climate science identifies the problem – it can’t tell us what to do in response

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Writing in the latest Nature Geoscience, Reiner Grundmann of the University of Nottingham calls out a problem that I wish I’d understood years ago about our understanding of, and response to, climate change and the family of problems to which it is connected. (I hope that link works, let me know in the comments if it doesn’t.)

Some top notch scientists over a number of decades have characterized and clarified the physical science part of the problem, and it’s only natural to then turn to those scientists in our discussion of what to do about it. But as Grundmann argues (and as I came to learn only slowly and painfully), the “what to do about it” stuff lies in a domain different from the physical sciences:

Climate change is a challenge, as acknowledged by the various proposals. Nevertheless, climate science provides no help to meet this challenge, once it has been acknowledged. The essential expertise for making progress with climate change mitigation and adaptation lies in the social sciences, including economics but also including a variety of other disciplines such as cultural studies, history, sociology and policy research. We need to understand the different social contexts of climate policy before we can find pragmatic steps to manage the problem. It is high time the expertise of the social sciences is recognized and assembled.

This line of argument maps nicely to the issues I grappled with in writing my book on water scarcity in the western United States. It’s why I turn to the human disciplines – law, policy studies, political science, economics – in talking about what the solutions might look like.