American cities became much healthier in the early twentieth century because they were spending as much on water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal service.
Edward Glaeser, writing in Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
Albuquerque is not a city, even as its metropolitan-area population approaches one million. That is, it cannot imagine itself a city because to do so would negate its reason for being, its biggest draw for tourists and refugees from Los Angeles and other large cities. Despite the sprawl, it thinks of itself as a town, a provincial way station set between a mountain and a mesa, bisected by the Rio Grande and its verdant cottonwood “bosque”.
Rubén Martínez, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West
Most read this year:
Over at Goodreads, Dave gave Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” three stars (out of a possible five):
The depth of his research is incredible.
Jen was not so kind:
I was amazed at how much Darwin simply wanted to believe in the evolutionary process.
Water Scarcity: Impacts on Western Agriculture
Given the findings of the recent federal-state Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, it’s useful to look back at what other efforts at sussing out the region’s water problems and solutions have found. It’s especially interesting given the (to me) striking assertion in the Basin Study that building a pipeline from the Missouri, or towing icebergs down from Alaska, is not the answer.
In September 1982, Harvey Banks*, one of the fathers of the great plumbing system that moves water around California, was among a group of water experts who gathered in Monterey to take stock of the water problems in the western United States. Banks was lead author of the chapter in the resulting conference proceedings** on “Developing New Water Supplies”. The study looked, among other things, at the possibility of importing water from the Missouri River. Banks’ conclusion:
[T]he probabilities for large-scale new water supplies or developments for the region in the foreseeable future are not great. The potentials for significant breakthroughs in local water supply enhancement or any large-scale water importation for the semiarid West are limited.
That was 30 years ago. Though, to be fair, Banks and his colleagues didn’t give the iceberg thing a serious look.
** Water Scarcity: Impacts on Western Agriculture, edited by Ernest A. Engelbert, University of California Press, 1984
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the coming trouble among farming, fish, cities and water in the Rio Grande:
[W]ith farms and cities diverting water from the river to meet their needs, leaving enough for the fish and the ecosystem on which it depends while at the same time meeting human needs has become an increasingly contentious issue.
“Water drives the economy,” explained Estevan López, head of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.
How to strike the balance is the subject of discussions under way, largely behind closed doors, among the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. The agencies are working against a March 1 deadline, when the current 10-year plan for managing the river under the federal Endangered Species Act expires.
The water agencies appear intent on finding a way to keep the species alive and encourage its recovery even during periods with lower flows in the river than we see today. Critics contend that is unrealistic – that the Rio Grande’s human water users need to learn to do with less, so that more water can be left for the river.
From the Joe Mozingo at the LA Times:
The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats of the North Coast and other parts of California. With little or no oversight, farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat for sprawling greenhouses, dispersed poisons and pesticides, drained streams and polluted watersheds.
If one allows mining of a nonrenewable source, it is disingenuous to argue that the source should never be polluted if the economic activity causing the pollution is necessary to sustain employment. Suppose that two individuals proposed to extract water from a nonrenewable aquifer. The first agreed he would farm and by doing so dry up the aquifer. This use would generate 100 jobs over 45 years. Suppose the latter agreed he would utilize the water for industrial purposes, consume none of it, and reinject it into the ground after he was done. This use of the water would generate 4,500 jobs over 45 years. When reinjected into the aquifer, however, the water would be mildly toxic and, given current technology, unusable for other purposes. In which case is the public welfare best served? The debate over nondegradation versus measured rates of degradation rages on….
From DuMars and Minnis, New Mexico Water Law: Determining Public Welfare Values in Water Rights Allocation, 31 Ariz. L. Rev. 817 (1989).
California had one of its memorable (and important for water supply) “atmospheric river” storms earlier this month. The folks at NASA have posted a particularly beautiful image of one of the results:
Sediment from the Eel River, courtesy NASA
That’s a huge blast of sediment flowing out the mouth of the Eel River in northern California following the storm.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about University of Colorado law school professor Doug Kenney’s argument that the states of the Colorado River’s Upper Basin (UB) faced a very real risk under climate change – that to the extent the river shrinks across the 21st century, the Upper Basin states will have the eat the shortfall:
If there are shortages on the river, New Mexico and the other states of the upper basin could be forced to curtail their water use, passing the water downstream for Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
“For a state like New Mexico, it means that satisfying current uses might be impractical, let alone thinking about new uses,” Kenney told me.
After I argued in a post yesterday that the new Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study suggests the real vulnerability to shortfalls is in the Lower Basin, Doug sent me this (posted with permission):
Even if the UB is able to meet its delivery obligation, that is very different from suggesting the UB is not experiencing any sort of shortage. Rather, making the delivery obligation ensures the UB is in a state of perpetual shortage (to the extent they never get their “half”). Thus, to the extent that the flow of the river is somehow enhanced, that could have UB benefits. In the short term, thus, this is a Lower Basin problem, but long term (especially under a severe climate change scenario), it is primarily an Upper Basin problem. The Lower Basin has some belt tightening to do, but it is a modest, predictable, and stable amount of belt tightening, whereas the problem for the UB just grows and grows.
