Water is different than other industrial raw materials, but how, and why?

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NPR’s Dan Charles had a nice piece on California’s drought this week digging down a layer into how farmers are actually responding to California’s drought.

They are:

  • Fallowing fields of annual crops like corn to ensure they have enough water for their permanent crops, like almonds.

Sarah Woolf takes me on a tour of her family’s farm, and points toward one dry field. “It had onions in it last year, and we’re not farming it at all, because we don’t have enough water supply,” she says.

  • Pumping groundwater to make up for surface water shortfalls.

According to a new report from the University of California, Davis, the extra water that farmers will pump from their wells this year will make up for about 75 percent of the cutbacks in water from dams and reservoirs.

Of course this cannot go on forever. Groundwater levels are dropping:

Woolf tells me that just this morning, she heard about problems at one of their wells. “We have to actually drill down and drop the well deeper, which is a very bad sign,” she says. It means that the water table is dropping; the aquifer is drying up.

I’m intrigued by the question of how this is different than other extractive human activities that depend on fluctuating availabilities of raw materials needed to do the things we do in a modern world.

Earlier this month, Lissa and I spent days wandering aimlessly around the San Juan Basin, the desert country where the Four Corners states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet. It’s an area that lives with the ups and downs of oil and gas production, and it’s been down lately, bypassed by the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing boom.

Source: New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department

Source: New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department

As my Albuquerque Journal colleague Kevin Robinson-Avila has written, there’s a rock layer called the Mancos shale that has shown promise using the new techniques, and as Lissa and I were wandering the back roads, we saw a lot of activity – drill rigs, fancy new oilfield services pickups. And there’s some indication in state data that there’s been an uptick in oil production in New Mexico’s San Juan County in the last six-plus months.

Here’s my question: Why is the societal conversation about the ebbs and flows of one natural resource (water/drought) so different from the other at issue here (oil production)? In both cases you have communities dependent on the resource that rise and fall in response to its availability, and adjust to its presence or lack.

In California’s central valley, farmers adjust to changing water available by adopting new techniques and changed cropping practices. In some cases, as the resource disappears completely (I’m thinking here of depletion of groundwater that can be economically extracted for farming), this particular human activity will simply go away. In other cases, farmers will adapt, shifting cropping patterns, as we’ve seen on the high plains. This looks a lot like an oil and gas economy of the type Lissa and I saw in northwest New Mexico.

I’ve catalogued some similarities here. What are the differences? Why are the societal conversations about the two resource issues so different?

update, Brian Jordan had some comments on twitter:

You can’t use negative water – the dilemma of water policy planning by projection

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Kyle Mittan had some nice straight talk recently in the Tucson Weekly from the University of Arizona’s Sharon Megdal about Arizona’s projections that it’ll need another million acre feet per year of water by 2060:

“A million acre-feet is a lot of water,” she said. “But is that the right number, or is that symbolic of the fact that if communities in the state wish to grow and develop in the ways they’re anticipating now, there’s going to be a need to figure out how to meet the water needs?”

Embedded in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2012 Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study is a lot of questionable data of the following form:

Arizona's historic and projected water use. Source: USBR

Arizona’s historic and projected water use. Source: USBR

You can see that for a decade, Arizona’s water use flat-lined. And yet the projections call for a big jump and continued rise in water use, well above the state’s available Colorado River apportionment. That obviously can’t happen, and in response one of a number of things will happen. Arizona’s water use will stop rising (which seems to be supported by the history of the past decade) or Arizona will find more water.

I don’t mean to single out Arizona here. Its water use projections in the Basin study are among the least daft. Consider my own state of New Mexico:

Historical and projected future Colorado Basin water use in New Mexico. Source: USBR

Historical and projected future Colorado Basin water use in New Mexico. Source: USBR

A projected 50 percent increase in water demand over a five year period, after a decade that’s been mostly flatlined? That’s crazy!

When I was a youngster, during the dawning of my Earth Day consciousness in the early 1970s, I was a maniac about recycling because I heard we were going to run out of landfill space within, like, a decade or something. Of course we didn’t, because we built new landfills. That realization – hey, people adapt by building new landfills! – drives a lot of my thinking about water today. We obviously can’t use negative water, so the graphs you frequently see showing water demand outstripping supply – a million acre feet! – are crazy talk. Faced with hard choices, Arizonans (and New Mexicans and everyone else) will either figure out how to get more water, which seems expensive and hard, or figure out how to use less, which so far has been a very successful path, as the graphs above demonstrate. At least the left-hand sides of the graphs showing actual historical use. The right-hand sides of the graphs seem to me like a bizarre unreality.

I don’t mean to criticize the Basin Study here, because I think it’s done an enormously valuable service. The study’s authors simply asked the states what they thought they would need, and worked through the results. It’s an incredibly useful exercise if we take the right message away from planning exercises like these – what people say they think they will need is a good starting point for thought exercise Megdal suggests.

Endangered species and the question of federal discretion

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Simply put, no environmental law has had as much impact on western rivers–or created as much controversy–as section 7 of the ESA.

– Reed Benson

I’m on record as arguing that the Endangered Species Act is a terrible water management tool, while simultaneously being not terribly effective as an environmental tool. But you manage water and environmental values with the tools you have, not the ones you might wish to have. So the screw has a Phillips head and all you’ve got in your pocket is a regular screwdriver. Reed Benson, quoted above, is more clever than I am about how to use the tools already in your pocket.

In this case, he’s writing about the recent decision in NRDC v. Jewell (pdf), regarding Central Valley Project water delivery contract renewals, and the question of where the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s “discretion” might lie:

For most projects, the question will be whether Reclamation has enough discretion in operations–that is, in storing and releasing water for irrigation and/or other purposes–that it can make changes for the benefit of listed species affected by those operations.

Discretion remains murky, but Reed’s arguing that the USBR has more of it than we might think.

 

CLEAN ARGE R OO MS

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Ruins of the Desert Sun Motel on old 66, Grants, NM

Ruins of the Desert Sun Motel on old 66, Grants, NM

CL EAN ARG

CL EAN ARGE R OO MS

The Desert Sun Motel is frozen at $19.95 a night (and up):

CLEAN ARGE R OO MS

$19/95& UP

FREE COF EE

CABLE TV HBO ESP

VACANCY

It looks like a project stalled in mid-renovation, though it’s hard to see how this could have ended well if the owners had continued to spend money. It’s on old Route 66 on the east end of Grants, New Mexico. I expect that it was a product of the best intentions of Route 66 tourism nostalgia. German tourists renting Harleys love this stuff. The doors were standing open, and the windows had all been removed. In a few of the rooms, I saw fresh drywall, as if the carpenter was due back any day. Just down the road at the freeway interchange was a fresh-looking Quality Inn and Suites, a Super 8 and a Travelodge. Tough to compete with the freeway-close brand names, I guess.

Still, the old place had ESP? For $19.95 a night? Such a deal.

Water in the Desert, San Juan River edition II

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When last we met, I showed you the San Juan River looking like the only water for miles (and not much water at that) as it flows across the Ute Mountain Ute Nation near Four Corners. Today, after miles of driving around the high country of the Four Corners region (vacation road trip) I have a happy update: if you look hard enough, you can find enough water on the San Juan for houseboats!

Houseboats on Navajo Reservoir, May 2014, by John Fleck

Houseboats on Navajo Reservoir, May 2014, by John Fleck

This is the reservoir behind Navajo Dam in northwestern New Mexico, a unit of the Colorado River Storage Project, completed in 1962, “BUILT FOR AND BY THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES,” as the plaque atop the dam explains. Some of those people subsequently plopped houseboats into the reservoir, and they will be happy to learn that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects the reservoir will be up 20 feet (pdf) at the end of the current water year as compared to 2013.

Water in the desert, San Juan River edition

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My search for water in the desert took Lissa and I this afternoon up US 160 from Teec Nos Pos in Arizona’s far northeastern corner, past the Four Corners Monument and into Colorado, where the highway crosses the San Juan River. Teec Nos Pos has a weather station that averages 8.09 inches (20.55 cm) of precipitation a year, but this landscape looks far drier. I feel like I’m zeroing in on what water in the desert looks like:

San Juan River north of Teec Nos Pos, Arizona. By John Fleck, May 2014

San Juan River north of Teec Nos Pos, Arizona. By John Fleck, May 2014

Big Foot and the Two Grey Hills Rug

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Delores Brown, center, holding one of her mother's rugs in a picture taken a long time ago.

Delores Brown, center, holding one of her mother’s rugs in a picture taken a long time ago. From the bulletin board at the Toadlena Trading Post

tl;dr Lissa and I met a man today who saw Big Foot in the foothills of the Chuska Mountains on the Navajo Nation west of Newcomb, New Mexico. He could neither hear nor speak, but we have no reason to doubt his story. Lissa misplaced her purse, which was easily found, and we bought a Two Grey Hills rug. The ice cream man no longer delivers to Toadlena. These things are all connected.

TOADLENA – Of this much I am sure. Arthur J. Belone from Toadlena Mountain saw Big Foot on the piñon-juniper hillside behind the Toadlena Trading Post in the foothills of the Chuska Mountains on May 14, 2013. There were two inches of snow on the ground.

Because Arthur can neither hear nor speak, the details are murky, but we have no reason to doubt Arthur’s story. He gestured easily to his ears and mouth to make clear the communication challenge, but didn’t hesitate to initiate a conversation anyway. He pointed to his foot, raised it, and gestured with his hand to indicate the size of a much larger foot. Then he pointed to the hillside.

We were sitting on a low wall outside the Toadlena Trading Post, 12 miles off US 491 near Newcomb on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. The trading post is one of those old stone buildings that in this part of the country sit at the intersection between traditional culture and the cash economy. Inside, in a warren of rug rooms, are gorgeous Two Grey Hills weavings.

Delores Brown, who was minding the store, said the ice cream man no longer delivers here, at the end of this long road. When we stopped by late in the afternoon to recover Lissa’s misplaced purse, we had just missed Delores’s mother and sister, who had been by a few minutes earlier to bring the ice cream. Her mother, Violet Brown, is a weaver of some renown, as was her grandmother, the late Yazzie Blackhorse. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Arthur J. Belone's are the shoes of a runner

Arthur J. Belone’s are the shoes of a runner

Arthur had the lean build of a runner – Delores mentioned marathons – but he sadly pointed to his knee. He carried a Bic ballpoint, tucked into a glasses case clipped to the collar of his t-shirt from the 15th Annual Toadlena Challenge (8k and 2 mile). He used the pen when gestures fell short. “I can’t run any more,” he wrote in the margin of a copy of the Navajo Times Lissa had been carrying.

It was via that technique – his ballpoint or my mechanical pencil, and Lissa’s Navajo Times or my yellow Rite in the Rain notebook – that he clarified the Big Foot story – the date, the depth of snow. He also shared some family history that I won’t go into, and described either deer or elk coming down from the mountains, hopping the fence and eating crab apples from the orchard across the road. Delores described Arthur as being remarkably chatty for a man who can neither hear nor speak. I could not disagree.

It was only several hours later, when we had stopped at the Saturday flea market up the road in Shiprock, that Lissa realized she must have left her purse in one of the rug rooms where we had been sitting on the floor laying out rugs and dreaming. It wasn’t all that much bother, because we were just wandering, so we wandered back down US 491 to the turnoff north of Newcomb and headed back out the road to Toadlena. There had been sheep on the road earlier. We hoped to see them again.

Delores was happy to see us. She said she’d been uncomfortable poking through Lissa’s purse to figure out who it belonged to, found a phone number and left a message. It wouldn’t have helped. The cell phone was in the purse. And then Delores started telling stories – about the few grandmothers who still go up in the mountains in the summer with the sheep, about the time her mother tried to teach her to weave, about snakes and growing squash, about the ice cream problem and that it was too bad, we’d just missed meeting her mother.

Lissa asked if they had any of her mother’s weavings. Delores said yes. And so it was that we became the owners of a beautiful Violet Brown weaving.

Violet Brown weaving

Violet Brown weaving