Occasionally for lunch I slip away from the office, grab a sandwich from one of the places across the street, and head over to a little flood control pond about a mile from my office to check out the birds.

The sandwiches are messy, and inevitably little bits of lettuce spill out on the ground around me. Which, I’ve noticed, the local ants particularly love. I can only assume it’s the water content, since iceberg lettuce has very little nutritional value.

Imperial Valley farmland, courtesy Doc Searls

As I watched an ant struggle the other day with a piece of lettuce as large as itself, I was struck by the way this bit of virtual water had been made actual.

“Virtual water” is the term of art for importation of a water-intensive product. We don’t have enough water here in New Mexico to grow iceberg lettuce, so we import it from the Imperial Valley, along the Lower Colorado River. It’s a lot cheaper and less hassle to just import the lettuce, rather than schlepping the water all the way across the continental divide. It’s sunny in the Imperial Valley, and thanks to accidents of geography, law and history, the valley’s farmers have an awful lot of cheap water at their disposal for the growing of lettuce.

So here we have this vast apparatus of irrigation infrastructure in the Imperial Valley, refrigerated shipping to get the lettuce to Albuquerque, a sandwich shop, me – all to bring a bit of water to an ant. There are doubtless more efficient ways, but it has a sort of Rube Goldberg charm.

(photo courtesy Doc Searls, some rights reserved)

When I started making noises about some sort of Colorado River project, one of the water wonks I know pointed me toward the delta, arguing it was a) central to understanding the Colorado, and b) widely ignored.

The problem, in short, is that essentially no fresh water flows there any more. An ecosystem once sustained by annual flows well in excess of 10 million acre feet per year now gets bubkes. Instead, I’m drinking it. I mean that quite literally. The glass of water to the right of my computer right now. Had my community not built a series of dams and a tunnel beneath the continental divide to convey this water to my drinking glass, said water would instead have dribbled into the delta. Think dead clams.

There’s some journalistic traction to the story right now, however. The water mavens of the Lower Colorado are not satisfied with taking almost all of the water. There’s one salty stream left, some frankly really crappy agricultural runoff from the farms around Yuma, too gross to put into the Colorado, so a drain was built to funnel them into what were barren salt flats. But, as an old Italian Catholic lady I knew in South Pasadena used to say, “The life force is strong.” At the end of the drain, a lovely wetland has grown up. But the mavens want that water, too.

Which is a long way of introducing Randal Archibold’s story in today’s New York Times about the struggle over the future of Cienega de Santa Clara:

But now the protracted drought in the Southwest has led water managers to rethink the possibilities for the wastewater, placing the preservation of the wetland, the Ciénega de Santa Clara, at the center of a delicate balancing act between the growing thirst of California, Nevada and Arizona and the delta’s ecology.

The biggest challenge involves a plan to take some of the wastewater, purify it at a desalination plant and direct it to other uses under a treaty that proportions the Colorado River among the Western states and Mexico.

I spend a lot of time these days reading water news. When I read something good, I often blurt it out on my twitter feed, which is good for that sort of link sharing. But one of the problems with the disjointed nature of social media right now is the way different communities use different social media in different ways. We’ve got cool new tools, but divergence in terms of who uses which ones. Some folks interact via email lists, some via interlocking blog conversations, some via Facebook, some via twitter, some via some overlapping set of the above.

What follows is an experiment in sharing these squibs here as well which, if it works, may become a regular feature. Or not:

• From the LA Times, drought in Mexico: “The sparse rainfall nationwide has made 2009 the driest in 69 years of government record-keeping, Arreguin said.”
• Peter Gleick on an example of questionable federal cost-benefit analysis of a proposed dam: “The people receiving the benefits are not the people bearing the costs, many of which are public, environment, and cultural.” (h/t WaterWired)
• The AP’s Ben Neary has been doing great work on entrepreneur Aaron Million’s proposal to pipe water from Wyoming to Colorado’s Front Range cities. Reporting out of Cheyenne, Neary reported this weekend that Million is considering scaling back the project: “Million said he is re-evaluating what would be a reasonable size for the pipeline project. He said he doesn’t have a figure yet of how much water he may apply to take from the river if he reduces his application.”