Via Annie Snyder (maybe behind a paywall?), the new crew in Washington has apparently realized we need those people at Reclamation who know how to operate dams and stuff:
The Trump administration is pulling back on staff firings at the federal agency that runs California’s sprawling water system after the cuts threatened undercut President Donald Trump’s order to maximize water deliveries to farms, according to three agency staffers.
Tag team.
There was a playful glee, like he knew he was getting away with something, something frowned upon yet worth doing, with Richard Parker’s “development days.”
Richard and I were youngsters, 30-something kids who had been handed the keys to a metaphorical roadster, and we wanted to see how fast it would go. I looked up to him as an experienced elder, though I realize in reading his obituary this morning that he was four years younger than I.
He was in D.C., the Albuquerque Journal’s Washington correspondent, when I was learning the craft of journalism three decades ago on the Albuquerque side of what amounted to a shared beat covering the cauldron of federal defense policy. New Mexico is a military-industrial colony, and the flow of federal funding to design and maintain nuclear weapons, to fly jets and sometimes drop bombs, to clean up Cold War environmental messes, was a fiercely challenging journalistic training ground.
When I would visit D.C. (those were the days of newsroom travel budgets), Richard would take me to bars with ridiculously expensive cocktails. I don’t drink.
The metaphorical roadster was the big printing presses in the back, and a distribution system that involved people staying up all night printing up whatever we had to say and then driving around town throwing it on a hundred thousand driveways. A hundred thousand driveways! Senators and their staffers read every word we wrote. Senators!
The mentoring – did it work that way, was Richard mentoring me? – involved the impish confidence with which Richard would seize a story. I watched and modeled, learned that our job was to decide what the story was and let our editors know, not wait for them. We needed to drive the roadster, but (and here the metaphor breaks down) make our bosses think that they were at the wheel.
I loved federal budget release day with Richard, the rush of a pile of new documents with tables of data and an obligation to our community to help make sense of it all – “disconcerting jolts that shook the Air Force have stopped for now,” “a shift in spending away from dam construction at the Department of the Interior.” It was a dance, a lovely dance.
“Development days” were Richard’s way of blowing it all off to think about stuff. Or maybe he was just going to the National Gallery to see the Matisse cutouts, I dunno. He was half a continent away, it was the time before mobile phones, it was hard to keep track of him, which he used to full advantage.
Richard Parker
Richard had long since left D.C. and returned to his beloved borderlands. We’ve stayed in sporadic touch in the decades since, but we didn’t remain close. I’m lousy at that.
Last fall Richard sent me the pdf of the page proofs of his new book The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story, but a pdf is no way to read an old friend’s book, so I’ve been waiting for my copy of the book.
The El Paso Matters obituary (thanks, Diego) makes clear Richard knew he was dying, but he made it to Literarity, an El Paso bookstore, to sign copies of the book.
I look forward to reading it.
The preliminary March 1 runoff forecast from Karl Wetlaufer, the federal government employee at the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service who provides vital information to help us make informed water management decisions, is yikes:
February brought another month of well below median precipitation across the entire Rio Grande basin. As one would anticipate this generally led to lowered forecast volumes over a month ago. It is worth noting that similar to last month there remains a broad gap between current percent of median snowpack and water year precipitation. This is a result of a wet October and early November followed by several months of dry conditions. These persistent dry conditions have led to record lowest or otherwise very low rankings of snowpack compared to the period of record for March 1st.
As Wetlaufer noted in the email discussion he distributes each month to New Mexico water managers, it’s a bit tricky this year, because early precipitation last fall fell as rain, not snow. That helps the runoff by wetting soils in the high watersheds, but doesn’t show up in the snowpack numbers. So yes it’s bad, but not quite as bad as it appears if you only look at the snowpack.
The midpoint flow estimate for Otowi on the Rio Grande is 205,000 acre feet, 36 percent of the long term average. It could be higher or lower, depending on what happens in the next few months. But as Friend of Inkstain Rolf Schmidt-Petersen pointed out in the comments last month:
The median assumes near average conditions going forward but that sure hasn’t been the case for several months and no one I know is predicting a turnaround to wet this Spring.
With that in mind, I give you the four-week Evaporative Drought Demand Index, which federal scientists at NOAA and the National Integrated Drought Information System provide to help us make good decisions about water management:
Thanks, federal workforce!
“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.”
I’m obsessed with this quote from the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in a New Yorker piece last month. He somehow packed doom, hope, and obligation into those twelve words.
Abdurraqib is riffing on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which eerily presaged this year’s L.A. fires, and the deep reality of owning our fates:
It’s not the fires or drug use or tumbling literacy rates that she invented—all of those problems were simply there for her to see. What “Sower” imagines, rather, is a future in which surviving the seemingly unsurvivable requires people to show some emotional dexterity, some ability to surrender whatever selfishness they’ve been harboring and see if they have something that someone else needs. This is the starting point of mutual aid: What do I have that someone else may need? Butler’s work is outlining a future where posing that question is a requirement. “Sower” isn’t just about a time and a fire and a place; it’s about people deciding what kind of apocalypse they are going to have, and then deciding how to live in its aftermath.
I used the quote as a repeated riff in a talk I gave a few weeks ago in Las Cruces about how people have to engage in the small-d democratic work to decide, together, what we want our communities to look like as we adapt to climate change. I meant to just use the quote once, but the scrap of paper on which I’d written it poked up above the rest of my notes, and I kept returning to it, a preacher’s call.
We’ve long ago moved past the option of not having to adapt to climate change, of not facing a village, town, city, farm, or river that has less water than we would prefer. It’s on us now to make good choices, or less bad choices, and doing that requires finding ways to come together in community to wrestle our way through the competing and conflicting values.
This is hard.
This is at the heart of water management even without climate change, and we can do it well or poorly, in ways that respect shared values or trample them. The book Bob Berrens and I are writing (have written? book time is weird) about Albuquerque’ relationship with the Rio Grande is really an attempt to untangle the history of precisely this, a century of messy community conversations about how we want our river and our community to look, to interact with one another. Before we had to wrestle with apocalypse we had to wrestle with what kind of community we wanted to have. The results were messy, but in the process we built the sort of institutional framework we must now call on to help us with the next step.
By “institutional framework” I am not talking about government agencies, or not only talking about government agencies. I’m talking about a way of being in the world.
I’ve had reason of late to return to some intellectual roots, John Dewey’s 1927 The Public and Its Problems. I read Dewey as a youngster, assimilated the basic pragmatist framework, and charged out in the world to use it. Philosophy! Now I’m back 45 years later to reflect on how that went.
Dewey’s 1927 book lays out an argument that I find appealing in this fraught moment: that what we mean by “democracy” is not a structure of government, with voting and stuff, but rather a way of being in community:
Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a community. But association itself is physical and organic, while communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained.
A decade later, in a talk entitled “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” Dewey said this:
[T]o get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and to acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life is to realize that democracy is a moral ideal.
This seems like pretty weighty stuff when I just want better regulations around domestic groundwater wells, or the simplification of the regulatory hurdles faced by water agencies that want to do aquifer storage and recovery, or a way to meet our Rio Grande Compact obligations to those folks down in Las Cruces I was talking to last month. But Dewey’s point is that we can’t just hand off the governing thing to a handful of elected officials in Santa Fe or Washington, D.C., and expect them to manage the apocalypse for us.
It’s on us to engage in the big, messy conversations about what we want that apocalypse to look like.
Going back to look at Abdurraqib’s essay as I put together a talk for this week’s Land and Water Summit in Albuquerque, I realized that the version I’d been using for my glossy pull quote elides something really important.
I’m the optimist, right! It’s why y’all bought that book (and thanks for reading!). I love the Land and Water Summit crowd, people with the sort of care for engagement with their community in search of a better future, the kind of action Dewey was talking about.
But here’s the full quote, with emphasis added:
Like Butler’s characters, we get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have, and you can’t drag everyone to a better place. Not everyone can get there.
Elevated from the comments, observations from former Reclamation manager Doug Blatchford:
WHEN I joined the Reclamation team in 2005 as the River Operation Manager on the Colorado River, part of my duties was to prepare a business plan to direct future business decisions based on the operations budget and services required (like delivering water to 20 million people). Part of the business plan was succession planning; I estimated it took at least 5 years to hire a replacement for say, the oracle data base manager, and that hire would shadow the retiree to affect a smooth transition. Just letting experienced (20, 30, 40 yr employees…) retire without planning was difficult enough inside the Federal system, let alone just taking a wrecking ball and eliminating 40 percent of the work force.
So what could happen? What kept me up at night was mostly public safety, meaning what could go wrong that would threaten life and limb because of faulty operations, much like managing an air traffic control system, except less dynamic. Imagine :
–an overworked field crew in 120 degree heat installs the a gage shaft encoder that reads the lake going up, instead of going down as it should
–screwing up the distribution of flows at Imperial Dam to Arizona, California, and/or excess flow to Mexico
–not having the modeling staff to provide the 5-yr probabilistic forecast
–reduced skill level in the forecast from CBRFC
–foregoing special requests to raise or lower Havasu water surface elevations, such as the parade of lights
–not being able to respond quickly enough to dynamic operations during a monsoon or hurricane event, and accidentally releasing more water /and or not retaining the water behind the dams, or worse, an atomospheric river that hits a higher water surface elevation at Havasu that pulses the lake over the top of the dam
and on and on and on …not to mention staff moral, which is a from a dedication based on service, less on monetary incentive
We’re starting to see dimly the outlines of what it means for the federal government to no longer be a reliable partner in western water management. Here’s Annie Snider and Camille Von Kaenel on what’s happening in California’s Reclamation operations:
DOGE’s cuts are already hurting Reclamation’s ability to move water through a sprawling system of pumps, canals and reservoirs to roughly a third of the state’s farmland — and impeding the agency’s ability to ratchet up deliveries in line with Trump’s demand, the people said.
And this, which should make the rest of us across the west extremely nervous:
The firing of probationary employees hit Reclamation’s California office particularly hard because it had staffed up over the past year to fill what had been a 30 percent vacancy rate. Now, Reclamation as a whole is drawing up plans for a 40 percent reduction in staffing on orders from DOGE, the three people said.
The federal government does stuff in water management and so many other places that we’ve optimized entire human and infrastructural systems around. What happens when the federal government steps away, is no longer the reliable partner on whom we’ve come to depend?
Again, this is not “They shouldn’t do that!” rhetoric. This is a call to my water management community: how can we prepare to blunt the worst impact of this shitshow on our ability get water to our headgates and taps?
The mere search for confirmation of one’s prior beliefs is a timid and unambitious kind of science; the unexpected observation and the unlikely explanation are the most interesting.
I got a text message yesterday afternoon about this, which is nuts:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-Albuquerque District announced today that an unintended water release from Cochiti Dam may increase flood risk on the Rio Grande in the river channel, riverbanks, and floodway.
The cause of the unintended water release was a procedural error during routine maintenance.
Accidentally dumping 8,000 cubic feet per second into a river channel that hasn’t seen that much water since 1985 is a big deal. The gage data suggests the river level rose four feet basically instantaneously.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stuff the federal government does in water management in the United States that we used to be able to take for granted, like, for example safely operate the dams.
We all love to complain about the federal government’s water management work, but the complaints are based on narrow questions and presume a broad societal consensus that there’s a bunch of stuff the federal government can be reliably counted on to do while we argue over details. Reclamation and the Corps are gonna operate the dams, for example. The details we argue about are at important margins, but they’re at the margins, based on the presumption that the basic stuff will get done.
Like, for example, spending the money that Congress approved to help us manage shortages in the Colorado River Basin. Which money has now been yanked out from under us by the autocrats who think they know better, as Alex Hager reported yesterday.
HAGER: Colorado River user groups are being told that payments in exchange for their water are on pause for now. It’s unclear if those payments scheduled to arrive in coming months will actually show up.
BART FISHER: It’s unnerving to think that maybe come August 1, all of our plans will need to suddenly change.
HAGER: Water experts say these projects don’t seem to conflict with the Trump administration’s executive orders. Anne Castle helped manage water under presidents Biden and Obama.
ANNE CASTLE: These are not woke environmental programs. These are essential to continued ability to divert water…. Having this appropriated funding suddenly taken away undoes years and years of very careful collaboration among the states in the Colorado River Basin and threatens the sustainability of the entire system.
I have no idea what happened at Cochiti Dam yesterday, whether the person who made the “procedural error” was new because the old timer who knows how to run the dam took the early buyout and bailed. But I do know that is exactly the “what if” scenario I was gonna lay out in a blog post that’s been percolating in my head about this question of how we in the West go forward in water management when the federal government suddenly becomes an unreliable partner.
I am not saying this because complaining about the stunningly arrogant idiots crashing through the federal government right now is great clickbait. I’m tired of all the angry clickbait, frankly, which is why I hadn’t written the blog post until today.
My point here is a serious question, not a rhetorical one: What would it mean for us in Western water management if the federal government becomes an unreliable partner? What must we do to prepare? What does that even look like?
Sandhill cranes like to hang out with the cows sometimes. Photo by L. Heineman.
BERNARDO, NEW MEXICO – The juniper pollen has cranked up early this year, and the irrigators with groundwater pumps (legal or not, it’s hard to know) are firing them up, but the most telling sign of spring was the kettling sandhill cranes this morning.
The term comes from the boiling water in a kettle, as a flock of cranes spirals up in the thermals to conserve energy while they gain altitude for their northward migration. We’d gone down to the state Game and Fish land at Bernardo south of Albuquerque just because, packed lunches and drove down the Rio Grande Valley to look at stuff. We’d seen flocks of snow geese last week when we were driving down to Las Cruces, which triggered a return trip on a lazy family Wednesday.
We saw a few snow goose stragglers at the Bernardo wetland, but their fellows were mostly gone. I worry about stragglers. The cranes, though, were just packing up and heading out, a cacophony as they kettled over the refuge for the trip north.
When we first moved to Albuquerque, in the fall of 1990, we were at a state park along the Rio Grande north of town when we first heard them. I was looking out across the landscape for a turkey farm before I looked up and realized it was these vast flocks, hundreds (thousands?) of huge birds lazing down the flyway to their winter homes.
The cranes are a success story. Near extinction in the 1930s because of human stuff (habitat loss, hunting), the birds are back , hanging out on wildlife refuges, game refuges (they’re popular with hunters) and farms. Check out Lissa’s picture above of the cranes hanging out with the cows at a dairy farm outside Los Lunas. They number now in the tens of thousands now in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley each winter.
Heading to a cooler, wetter place. Photo by L. Heineman
This winter has been dry in the headwaters, and the latest forecast calls for just half of normal flows on the Rio Grande entering New Mexico’s “Middle Valley,” where the cranes and I live. The forecast models, peering out into the middle of March look warm and dry. Beyond that we live in lovestruck hope, but wise planning suggests we should prepare for our hearts to be broken. The cranes are smart enough to head to summer homes in a cooler, wetter place, but we’re stuck here.
It’s too early to do much more than arm-wave about the impact of the low runoff, but this is a blog, so arm-waving is the point. I expect short deliveries to irrigators this year, and I would not be surprised if Albuquerque once again has to switch over to groundwater pumping to keep the taps flowing – my taps – through the heat of summer.
We’ll be fine. We’re used to this. Irrigators will troop down to the irrigation district board meeting the second Monday of each month to complain about not getting water to grow stuff, but there’s a sad resignation to the ritual. We live in a desert. Water is a blessing when it comes, but the reality of desert living requires a stoicism of stubborn acceptance.
The fate of the cranes – from the brink of extinction to the huge kettling flocks we saw this morning at Bernardo – gives me hope, or at least animates my stoic acceptance.
Pooling our resources to discover new truths about the universe so that we can all have better lives, to strike back against disease, suffering, poverty, and violence, to reduce ignorance for the benefit of all—that’s literally the most badass thing we do.