Does drought matter any more?

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In Southern California, the link between weather and water has been inextricably broken. Here’s Bettina Boxall on why L.A.’s driest year, ever, doesn’t matter all that much:

Although this year’s No. 1 ranking makes for an interesting conversation piece, it has little practical effect. As anyone driving around Los Angeles can see, lawns are still green, swimming pools are full. Southland water officials aren’t sounding the alarm bells.

It has been a century since Angelenos relied primarily on local sources for their water. The city is mostly sustained by imports from other parts of California and the Colorado River. And though it has been dry all over, regional water managers say they have ample supplies in reserve.

 

 

The shortcomings of the Endangered Species Act in western water

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Reed Benson:

[I]n places where there is no river-dependent species listed as threatened or endangered, environmental factors often carry little weight in water management. Without a listed species, water allocation and management often ignore the health of the river. And even where listed species do exist, focusing on the needs of a single species (as the ESA does) may do little or nothing for other wildlife, or for river recreation. In short, the ESA protects only one of the important values that rivers provide.

Also, a discussion of the critical question of what counts as a “discretionary action” by a federal actor in an ESA drama.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico water planning

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I wrote a story in this morning’s newspaper about New Mexico’s efforts to revive its moribund state water planning process:

Ten years after New Mexico officials last took a stab at developing a state water plan, they are reviving their effort to calculate the gaps between New Mexico’s finite water supplies and the needs of a growing population. The goal, officials say, is a tool to help prioritize state projects and policies to deal with the gaps.

But criticisms have plagued the project from the outset, including the charge that the state’s top-down approach is bypassing the voices of local water users. Critics also claim a failure to consider the effects of climate change on the state’s water supplies will undercut the validity of the results.

Unsurprisingly, the part about climate change has been click bait. But that’s a subset of a more subtle question that I explored in a bloggy takeout this morning – the loading dock problem. Is the state’s process of formulating the numbers to be used in water planning cutting out communities’ expression of their own needs – simply dumping the numbers on the loading dock?

 

 

Here’s a new western water blog worth adding to your RSS feed

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Reed Benson, a University of New Mexico law professor whose patient explanations and deep writing have been extraordinarily helpful to my understand of things like the doctrine of prior appropriation and the Endangered Species Act, has joined the blogoworld:

It has come to my attention … that a lot of people do not read law review articles. This shocked me, of course, because who wouldn’t like reading an in-depth, 60-page analysis of water law, fortified by about 300 footnotes? I am told, however, that there are millions of otherwise decent and reasonable people who forego that pleasure.

His rationale for the choice of the blog’s name – Wester River Law – is instructive:

So why call the blog westernriverlaw, not something more familiar like westernwaterlaw? Partly because traditional “western water law” has an old-school connotation, emphasizing property rights and maximum extractive development of water resources, and this blog will take a broader view of water in the West….

I also chose to call it westernriverlaw because rivers matter for their own sake, not simply as conduits for water supplies. In the West, flowing rivers are important ecologically, economically, and recreationally. Those values have always gotten short shrift in western water law, but today they can no longer be ignored or neglected. The name westernriverlaw suggests that any discussion of water policy needs to have a focus on what it means for the river.

Worth adding to your RSS feed reader.