Yemen and Water

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Our national discussion about what to do with prisoners currently held in Guantanamo has focused a lot of attention of late on Yemen, the Arab world’s oil-poor sibling.

It is increasingly seen as a haven for the sort of bad guys we, as a nation, worry about. Is the story of Yemen’s problems really a story of water problems? Laura Kasinof caught my eye with a piece on this last month, which seems all the more relevant in light of all the Yemen coverage I’ve seen recently:

While domestic insurgencies chip away at the control of Yemen’s central government and an Al Qaeda branch gains strength in regions beyond the government’s reach, another crisis — one that affects Yemen’s entire population — has the potential to contribute to the country’s instability and potential trajectory toward failure.

Yemen is running out of water – fast.

But the water crisis and the rise of militancy are not unrelated perils said Abdulrahman Al Eryani, Yemen’s minister of Water and Environment, in an interview. Much of the country’s rising militancy, he argues, is a conflict over resources.

“They manifest themselves in very different ways: tribal conflicts, sectarian conflicts, political conflicts. Really they are all about sharing and participating in the resources of the country, either oil, or water and land,” said Minister Eryani. “Some researchers from Sanaa University had very alarming figures. They said that between 70-80 percent of all rural conflicts in Yemen are related to water.”

I’m reminded of my October conversations with Howard Passell at Sandia Labs, about which I wrote this:

Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues.

Science Saturday

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It’s Science Saturday in the Albuquerque Journal. By which I mean that, when editors wander the halls looking for copy to fill the holiday news doldrums, there’s always an extra science feature on offer. (sub/ad req if you follow the links)

VLA gets an upgrade:

Rick Perley had a big smile on his face as he climbed up inside Antenna No. 24 at the Very Large Array.

“This is cool,” Perley said as he looked up at the new set of “eyeglasses” technicians had just finished installing on the giant radio telescope.

Those eyeglasses — actually sophisticated radio receivers — are the front end of an upgrade that will make the 30-year-old telescope 10 times more powerful than it is today.

Bonus material – birdwatching and “citizen science”:

Sei Tokuda counted off the big gray birds standing in the field north of the Rio Grande Nature Center.

Snow drifted down from the north as the retired immunologist and two other volunteer bird counters made their way methodically through the Nature Center.

“Fourteen, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,” he said. “I see 19 cranes here.”

His daughter, Kathleen Tokuda, added the sandhill crane count to the clipboard she was carrying.

Walking quietly into the nearby trees, Sei Tokuda spotted six doves high in a cottonwood, huddled against the morning cold.

I know, I know. Birdwatching with the Nature Center crew on a beautiful cold, snowy December morning, counting all those cranes, was rough duty. But someone had to do it!

Holiday ’09 and the Magic of Cell Phones

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The tail end of 2009 has frankly been pretty crappy in the Heineman-Fleck household. My car battery died, and some other stuff I won’t burden y’all with. The net is that the Christmas tree we bought two weeks ago is still sitting in the backyard, where we placed it fully intending to bring it in to decorate.

But it’s Christmas eve and the neighborhood is lit up in with luminarias in what is a quiet Albuquerque tradition.

It’s cold, but we took the dog out for a quick walk to see the lights, and now we’re cocooned. Our daughter, Nora, has assembled for us a delightful Christmas music playlist that settled on just the right note with some metal band (Twisted Sister?) doing White Christmas and Spinal Tap’s Christmas with the Devil, and at some point this evening I began slipping into what must be a more honest holiday spirit.

Here’s the thing that finally made me smile.

At one point in the cascade of family crisis over the last two weeks, my wife, Lissa, had to jet off to St. Louis to deal with some stuff (not the car battery).

We’re a no land line, two cell phone family. My phone has great battery life, and I typically only need to charge it about once a week. But while Lissa  was in St. Louis, I was obsessed. As soon as I got home from work every evening while she was gone, I would plug it in immediately, and leave it plugged in until I left for work the next morning, turning the ringer up really loud.

I mentioned this in passing to Lissa this evening. She smiled, and said she was similarly obsessed the whole time she was in St. Louis – carrying her cell phone in one pocket and her charger in the other so she’d be sure to be able to plug the phone in if she needed to.

The technology lifeline mattered so much because family matters so much. The tree may still be sitting in the backyard, but it looked awful pretty out there in the snow Wednesday morning. And no need for cell phones because Lissa’s in that chair, right over there.

It won’t be easy, but it’ll be OK.

Shocked

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In Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom tells the story of the way some Southern Californians solved the problem of competitive groundwater overpumping. Cities and private water companies realized that if everyone kept pumping like nutso, their aquifer would go dry and they’d all be screwed. So they got together in a sometimes painful, expensive and time-consuming set of processes to come up with a way of jointly managing the resource.

But Ostrom also notes that not everyone is so successful in managing such “common pool resources.” Today’s case in point comes from Bakersfield Californian columnist Lois Henry, who notes the “shocking” (her word) drops in Kern County aquifers:

Shortly after the present drought settled in, around 2007, the City of Bakersfield and two ag water districts noticed a sharp drop in groundwater levels west of town.

The drop coincided with increased groundwater withdrawal by the massive Kern Water Bank, which occupies 32 square miles mostly west of Highway 43 and north of the Kern River all the way to the California Aqueduct.

Members of KWB include the Kern County Water Agency’s Improvement District 4 (ID4), which supplies drinking water to a large swath of town, and a number of other districts, most of which are associated with Paramount Farming (owned by multigazillionaire Stewart Resnick).

I’m reminded of Captain Renault in Casablanca, explaining to Rick why he’s closing down the cafe:

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

At which point one of the casino’s employees hands the good captain his roulette winnings.

What Exactly is a “Watershed” Any More

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John Wesley Powell famously argued in the 19th century that the West’s political jurisdictions should be shaped around watersheds, rather than the often arbitrary rectangles that had been used to establish our governmental geometry as the nation moved across the great plains.

Azotea Tunnel beneath continental divide, Norther New Mexico, courtesy USBR

Azotea Tunnel beneath continental divide, Northern New Mexico, courtesy USBR

In an odd sort of way, we seem to be carrying out Powell’s wishes in reverse – using interbasin transfers to reshape watersheds to fit the boundaries of existing governmental jurisdictions.

Consider Colorado, where the water tends to be on the west slope of the Rockies and the people on the east. But what’s a mountain range when you’ve got modern engineering, as Chris Woodka explains:

The Continental Divide has been breached by ditches or tunnels a couple of dozen times throughout the state’s history, bringing over an average of nearly half a million acre-feet of water annually to the Front Range.

I’ve been thinking about this because because of a comment one of my water friends made suggesting that in some sense at this point you have to link vast areas of the west into a single giant watershed: Northern and Central California, thanks to the diversions to Southern California, which is linked via diversion to the Colorado River. In terms of diversions, Phoenix and Tucson are in some sense “downhill” from the Colorado thanks to the Central Arizona Project, as is Albuquerque via the San Juan-Chama diversion. And of course much of Colorado’s front range urban corridor, as Woodka explains.

Oddly, the one thing we might consider leaving out is the Colorado River Delta in Mexico, since no water actually gets there any more.

Water in the Desert: Ring-Billed Gull Edition

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One of my favorite spots in Albuquerque is the old Alameda Bridge at the north end of town. When they built a new multi-lane bridge across the river, they kept the old one, turning it into a foot-bike-horse bridge. It’s about 10 miles from my house, mostly paved trail, making it a perfect turnaround for a 20-mile ride.

The bridge crosses one of the old sandbar islands in the middle of the river, so you can look down on river and a mess of willows. There’s something about being out on the water that I just love. As a bonus, there’s a USGS stream gage on the river there, so you I can look up the streamflow when I get home from my ride (or, on the days someone on the ride has an iPhone, we can totally geek out by looking it up in real time out on the bridge). This picture, which I took with the cell phone camera last Saturday afternoon, sorry for the crappy quality, is looking north up the west channel. It was an energetic afternoon weather-wise, with a bit of a wild sky, as you can see. This time of year, a big flock of Ring-billed Gulls winters in the river just north of the bridge. You can’t see them, but they’re in the distance in this picture.

Chance of Rain Reviews “Tree Rings’ Tale”

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Emily Green had some kind words for my book in the LA Times:

Many texts about climate change begin with rapidly melting polar ice, but Fleck’s opens instead with the 19th century explorer John Wesley Powell and his navigation of the Colorado River. Ferociously wild in Powell’s time, the Colorado is tamed by dams and is the water source for seven Western states: Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California. We in Southern California rely on it so heavily that our farms and cities use more than one-third of the river’s allotted U.S. flow.

Intermingling the history of the Colorado River with the emerging science behind climate change, Fleck connects the river’s diminishing volume to tree ring data, soil deposition in rock formations, ocean currents and even what kind of leaf pack rats stuffed in their little prehistoric middens. As he does so, it becomes clear how climate has changed and how further changes might affect us in the future.

Still time to order for Christmas!

The Great Unraveling

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Michael Gardner has a nice summary of what’s at stake in the litigation blocking the complex deal under which California agrees to throttle back its use of Colorado River water:

Southern California’s water managers insist it should be easy to overcome the latest challenge to a landmark, seven-state pact to share the Colorado River that also produced a vast new supply of water for the San Diego region.

But nearly a century of litigation and political turmoil has shown that when it comes to water-use conflicts in the West, there are few easy remedies.

The deal includes water transfers from Imperial Valley ag to urban users on the coast, along with money for shoring up the Salton Sea ecosystem. The legal problem is narrow – the question of whether the deal’s open-ended fiscal commitment to the Salton Sea violates the state constitution. But if that is invalidated, essentially the whole complex deal unravels.