People on wells less likely to view water management as a shared problem

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This is fascinating:

A survey finds correlations between utilizing an individual water source (e.g. well or spring) and attitudes toward water management and conservation. Compared to respondents with a shared water source, those with an individual source believe they are segregated from regional water concerns. They are less willing to pay for water management or conservation measures and less supportive of any government intervention in water management. These results suggest that planners and water managers may face resistance to conservation policies or any policy based on the idea of water as a common pool resource. (emphasis added)

That’s from “Individualized water source as an indicator of attitudes about water management and conservation in humid regions” by Kristan Cockerill, Peter A. Groothuis, Tanga McDaniel Mohr, and Courtney Cooper in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. (I’ve only read the abstract, my university library doesn’t have a subscription.)

 

Sierra Madre, CA, introduces Colorado River water, winds up with “the Tucson problem”

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Water is just water, right? What happened when Sierra Madre, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, switched from local groundwater to imported Colorado River water is a reminder that, well, no:

In 2013, Sierra Madre was forced to begin importing water from the Metropolitan Water District. That led to a new problem. The water source has a different chemistry, temperature and disinfecting agent than the groundwater supply. That started taking a toll on the city’s aging infrastructure.

Residents began to see yellow, foul-smelling water coming from their taps ? the result of iron oxide being released from the inside of old pipes.

When water pipes acclimated to water of a certain pH suddenly get water of a different pH, the chemistry of degunking the inside of the pipes can be a bit of a mess. This is what happened in in the early 1990s when Tucson made a similar switch, as Mitch Basefsky wrote some years ago in Southwest Hydrology (pdf):

Almost immediately following the initial delivery of Colorado River water, the utility began receiving complaints about water that was discolored, smelly, foultasting, or contained rust. Analyses showed that the water contained high levels of iron and other corrosion byproducts from metallic water mains and private plumbing. In essence, the aggressive water was releasing existing corrosion and scale from the pipe walls.

The GI Bill and the history of American art

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Blue Curve III, 1972, Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Blue Curve III, 1972, Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Surely some art historian has puzzled through the impact of the GI Bill on the history of American art.

Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944

Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944

I noted in the PBS Newshour’s obituary this evening that the late Ellsworth Kelly, after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, went to art school on the GI Bill. My Dad was part of that generation – a young guy who wanted to make art and got a crack at the education he needed thanks to the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944”. The statute’s presumption was that guys like Kelly and Dad “whose education or training was impeded, delayed, interrupted, or interfered with by reason of his entrance into the service” deserved a chance to resume said education.

I have only anecdotes, but know of a wave of artists who got the chance at the years of study and “Masters of Fine Art” degree. My Dad never rose to the level of Kelly, whose abstractions wowed me when I first saw them as a teenager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But Dad had a crack at making a living at art that he never would have had absent the GI Bill. Surely that wave of talent, which otherwise would have gone untapped, had some influence on the trajectory of 20th century art.

One must not forget that the GI Bill was not, in the words of scholar Hilary Herbold, a “level playing field“. Black servicemen may have enjoyed the same benefits on paper as Kelly and my Dad, but in practice the U.S. system of higher education remained a system of unequal access. But for those who benefitted, it was a remarkable opportunity.

“hold others in the light”

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luminarias, Christmas 2015 - "hold others in the light"

luminarias, Christmas 2015 – “hold others in the light”

Walking after Christmas eve dinner, we came upon a rainbow of luminarias around the corner from our house. The luminaria is a tradition in the southwestern United States, a little paper sandwich bag with a bit of sand in the bottom to weigh it down and a candle to light the way for Christ’s spirit.

The rainbow bags are a recent innovation, of which I approve.

Daughter Nora came over before dinner and helped set out the candles while sister, Lisa, and wife, Lissa, finished making the gyoza. We think of gyoza as Japanese, but they made their way to Japan from China (jiaozi) and to our house by way of a Japanese restaurant in L.A.’s Little Tokyo whose name is long forgotten. The luminarias, so quintessentially Southwestern Spanish-Catholic, are said to have come too by way of China, via Spanish merchants who loved Chinese paper lanterns. It’s all a mashup.

The headline for the post comes from a holiday letter that arrived today. I am not religious, but I was touched by a bit of wisdom my friend Elizabeth Sanford shared in her annual family greeting. “We go forward,” wrote Elizabeth, who is deeply religious, “with a pledge to ‘hold others in the light,’ a Quaker term that we were introduced to this year and have become fond of.”

Elizabeth’s husband, Jim Timmermann, died this year. Jim and I were young together many years ago, with all that entails. I was then, as I am now, crisp and certain in my atheism. Jim was deeply Catholic. We worked together each day to make a newspaper, and we’d wander many days with our lunches to the leafy campus of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, a couple of blocks from the office.

Our religious differences were far from an impediment to our friendship. Quite the opposite. We were each fascinated with the others’ views. I could never quite understand his faith, and Jim could never quite understand my lack of it. So we talked.

I cannot begin to do justice to Quaker theology, but “holding others in the light” seems to carry its own weight on this quiet holiday evening.

Merry Christmas.

Prepping the snow shovel

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When I was in newspaper journalism, I always viewed the holiday season as a target of opportunity. Papers were relatively fat, propped up by holiday ad content, and news was thin, so editors were desperate for copy. As the end of the year approached, I’d queue up story ideas, knowing that it was a chance to get stuff in the paper that would be a harder sell at any other time of year.

My "arctic blast"

My “arctic blast”

Some of it was substantive, but this also as the birth of my “White Christmas” tradition, an increasingly elaborate annual ritual built around Bing Crosby and the modern pop culture self-creation of American myths. The final edition, published a few days before Christmas last year, was a bittersweet joy – written a few weeks after I had decided to leave three decades of newspaper journalism, but before anyone but family and a handful of close friends knew.

I wrote about my snow shovel:

I have a snow shovel.

It’s not just any snow shovel, either. It’s an “Arctic Blast” brand shovel, with an oversized grip for my big puffy red winter mittens. It is covered with cobwebs.

It is my fantasy to get up early on Christmas morning, the last of the luminarias in my Albuquerque neighborhood long burned out, and shovel the walk before visitors arrive.

The joke was always on the romantic notion of snow here in the high desert valley of Albuquerque, matched against climatological reality:

As they do most years, my friends at the National Weather Service crushed my spirit Monday, saying that this wish will likely again go unfulfilled. “If you’re looking for snow to fall on Christmas, it’s probably not your year,” meteorologist Jennifer Palucki said.

Over the years, I’ve riffed several times off of Jody Rosen’s lovely little book White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, including this:

Our fondness for a “white Christmas” seems to be one of those curious yet richly rewarding examples of American self-invention, for which we apparently have songwriter Irving Berlin to thank.

“The longing for Christmas snowfall, now keenly felt everywhere from New Hampshire to New Guinea,” music critic Jody Rosen wrote, “seems to have originated with Berlin’s song.”

Rosen, author of the delightful book “White Christmas: The Story of An American Song,” might have added New Mexico to the list.

Written by a Russian Jewish immigrant in celebration of that most secularized of Christian holidays, “White Christmas” became a hit during World War II as a nation craved normalcy. Then it improbably endured, shaping our nostalgia for the Christmas we “used to know” by inventing it.

This morning, I went out in the backyard to strategically pre-position the snow shovel. The GFS forecast model suggests that, by the weekend, I might have a chance to use it:

Courtesy Tropical Tidbits

Courtesy Tropical Tidbits

New Mexico forest restoration acreage rising

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New Mexico forest acreage cleared to protect the state’s watersheds and water supply tripled this year:

The Rio Grande Water Fund was started in July 2014. In conjunction with its 45 investor partners, the water fund thinned 10,130 acres of forest during its first year.

That’s up from an average of 3,000 acres per year thinned in recent years.

Students in our UNM Water Resources Program have spent time looking at this because a) watersheds are so important to water supply, and b) overcoming the institutional difficulties of dealing with forest health are a great case study in the difficult governance and management problems the students will confront when they go out into the water management world to try to fix things.

This is, as much as anything else, an institutional issue. Forest lands are fragmented across many different ownerships – some private, some federal, some state, some local government. Laura McCarthy at The Nature Conservancy has been been building a new overarching public-private framework, the Rio Grande Water Fund, to try to cross those difficult boundaries.

Water fund partners are a diverse group. They range from Bernalillo County to Kellys Brew Pub, the U.S. Forest Service to the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, the LOR Foundation to the Taos Ski Valley Foundation, the last of which announced earlier this month that it was donating $125,000 to the water fund.

During the fund’s first year, this coalition put $1 million into actual on-the-ground restoration work in places such as the northern Manzano Mountains, south of Albuquerque, and the Tusas Mountains in Rio Arriba County.

“Every investor and agency has the opportunity to double or triple the impact of their money by coordinating their effort,” McCarthy said. “They see their money go farther because they see it being pooled with other people’s money.”

“More Slices Than Pie: Structural Deficit on the Colorado”

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I’m not sure who came up with the “More Slices than Pie” title for the panel discussion I moderated Thursday at the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, but it had a nice ring. A big thanks to Tom McCann from the Central Arizona Project for putting the panel together and inviting me to help out. Important audience, important messages about the risks if basin water managers can’t come to grips with the need to stop draining their reservoirs so quickly.

There’s some important signaling here. For a long time, this thing we have come to call the “structural deficit” – the reality that paper allocations on the river exceed actual water supply – was an elephant in the room. It’s not that the overallocation problem was ignored in official discussions. People both inside and outside the basin’s water management institutions have talked about this for years.

Doug Kenney, University of Colorado, December 2010

Doug Kenney, University of Colorado, December 2010

This image, for example, is from a 2010 presentation at CRWUA by the University of Colorado’s Doug Kenney pointing out that under normal water supply conditions (never mind drought or climate change) there is not enough water to keep Lake Mead from shrinking. In October of 2010, Lake Mead had dropped to historic lows, but then it got wet (Mead rose 46 feet in 2011) and the pressure was off.

There is a tension in the Colorado River management between the core group of managers operating at the basin scale who are trying to work out ways to deal with the overall shortfall, and water managers working at more local scales back home, who just want the water promised to them on paper by the deals negotiated back in the day. When it gets wet, as it did in the winter of 2010-11, it takes the pressure off of that conflict, because we can simply keep using water and sucking down the reservoirs rather than dealing with the shortfall.

But Mead is back to its record-setting lowest-it’s-been-since-it-filled ways. Thursday’s session putting the basin’s overallocation problem on the main stage at CRWUA for discussion by representatives of four of the major Colorado River Basin water agencies suggests that managing scarcity and risk rather than assuming abundance is, at least for now, the conventional narrative.

Caeser's Palace, the annual meeting place of the Colorado River Water Users Association

Caeser’s Palace, the annual meeting place of the Colorado River Water Users Association

CRWUA is a strange and wonderful thing, an annual gathering that brings all the disparate elements of the disaggregated Colorado River water management community – federal, state, local, farm, city, environmental, recreation – together in one spot. In a system in which no one is in charge, this ritualized annual coming together is critical for the social capital needed to deal with the basin’s tough issues. I wish I had the formal skills of an anthropologist or one of those people who studies formal and informal networks. CRWUA would make a great field study area.

There’s an odd turn of phrase that I’m increasingly hearing in the Colorado River management community in describing the risk of Lake Mead dropping in a hurry – “blowing through 1,020”. It’s an action verb, describing a reservoir in free fall if we don’t get bailed out by whatever the opposite of climate change and drought are. The problem is that as reservoir levels decline, the V-shaped profile of the big Colorado River reservoir means that there’s less water for a given amount of elevation, which means that we shift quickly from dropping five or ten or fifteen feet per year to plummeting from 1,020 to 895 in a hurry. When I started working on Colorado River issues, “895”, the level at which you can’t get water out of Lake Mead, didn’t get talked about much. But the number came up a lot at this year’s CRWUA.

Deputy Secretary of the Interior Mike Connor, in a talk yesterday, said the latest Bureau of Reclamation analyses put the risk of 1,020 in the next five years at somewhere between 11 and 30 percent. At those kinds of low reservoir levels, managing the system becomes far more difficult, and cuts needed to prevent the doomsday scenario are far more extreme.

The trick is for the basin leaders who understand this to craft a deal with the wisdom to make some water use reductions before 1,020 (or 1,030, or 1,040, or whatever) in a way that trades benefits of using that water now for a reduction in future risk.

The immediate problem now is in the Lower Basin, the states of Nevada, California, Arizona, Sonora, and Baja. The Upper Basin has its issues, involving how much water will be available to support future growth, but in the Lower Basin the question is how much water is available to support the farms and cities we’ve already got.

Lake Mead from the air, flying into Las Vegas

Lake Mead from the air, flying into Las Vegas

It’s pretty clear what a Lower Basin deal has to look like in general terms. It’s all about Arizona and California, which are by far the biggest users. Unless each state is willing to reduce its take on Lake Mead, it would be easy to blow through 1,020 in a hurry, as Connor’s numbers suggest. I’m confident (this is a lot of what my book is about) that both states have the capacity to continue to thrive on substantially less less water, both agriculture and cities, if we do it right. My forthcoming book spends a lot of time on what this adaptive capacity already looks like. But if Arizona and California don’t move soon and we blow through 1,020 with the resulting need for cuts that are deep and fast, my confidence about the grace with which we can adapt goes down.

Talks have been underway on this for a while, under the label “drought contingency planning”. (I hate that word – it’s not a drought! This is what normal looks like!) Connor and others suggested at CRWUA that agreement is near. There will be nuances to the deal, in terms of who takes how much reduction at what reservoir levels. The idea, as one of the senior federal officials explained, is a series of voluntary agreements (“At reservoir level X, we agree to take this much less water”) developed within the framework of the basin’s 2007 shortage sharing rules, but with larger reductions to slow the reservoir’s fall. The trick now will be for the negotiators to head back home and convince local water users that those paper water entitlements written into laws over the last hundred years are not real, and that for the health of the system they’ll have to adapt to the reality that there’s less water to go around.

This is the phase of the process I worry about most. There are tensions betweens states, and also among water users within states. Bad water politics back home (“Why are we giving up water just so Arizona/California/Phoenix/LA/Imperial/Yuma can have it!”) could scupper a deal. At that point, we could blow through 1,020 in a hurry.

CRWUA is a good place for that conversation to happen, because it’s a mix of both kinds of water managers – those who work at the basin scale, and those who have to deliver the water to farm gates and shower heads back home.

Lake Mead from the window seat

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Anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money.

– Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert

Lake Mead from the air, flying into Las Vegas

Lake Mead from the air, flying into Las Vegas

My Southwest flight into Las Vegas was nearly empty (a rarity these days), so I had my choice of window seats on either side of the plane and the chance to move back and forth. But the pilot’s descent into Las Vegas was literally directly over Hoover Dam, so we couldn’t see it.

Nice view of all the Lower Basin’s water in Lake Mead, though, just waiting for someone at the Bureau of Reclamation to turn the spigot and send it downstream to grow lettuce or water a golf course. Looks like plenty of water to me!