I said some things about Utah and the Colorado River

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The AP’s Sophia Eppolito did a nice job of pulling a single bit of business from a lengthy interview that captured the key point of my thoughts on Utah’s approach to Colorado River governance and water management:

The river supplies Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Mexico as well as a $5 billion-a-year agricultural industry. As the states face a dire environmental future and negotiations over a new plan to protect the waterway from drought, it’s forced a shift in thinking.

The goal of renegotiating is figuring out how to use less, “not staking out political turf to try to figure out how to use more,” said John Fleck, director of University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program.

“It’s just not clear Utah has a willingness to do that,” he said.

Full story here.

Water Wars – What are they Good For? Webinar, March 15

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I’ll be joining Tim Quinn, former executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies; and Tracy Quinn, Director, California Urban Water Policy, Healthy People & Thriving Communities Program at the NRDC (and also a board of of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California) in a webinar to talk about collaboration and conflict around water:

A week doesn’t go by without someone saying there are water wars underway or about to kick off in California. How we manage and govern water is critically important to people, the environment, and the economy. But, are we really at war? Really? Do we believe there are always victors and vanquished? What is the impact of telling ourselves and others this is warfare, when in reality it is simply the messiness of working together in community?

So, we’ve gathered a panel to answer the question: Water wars, what are they good for?

Chris Austin (California’s Water Maven), along with the super interesting Mike Antos, a social scientist smart in the ways of water collaboration, plus the always fascinating Lisa Beutler. (Mike and Lisa are with Stantec.)

After a super interesting brainstorming call this afternoon with the five of them, I’m really excited about the conversation. This’ll be fun, please join us, sign up here.

Together Again

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Robert and Elizabeth Fleck, together again

My sister, Lisa, and I had an amusing exchange this morning as we drove home from the funeral home with Mom’s ashes.

She was pretty sure I had Dad’s ashes at my house, but I had no memory of where we’d stashed them. That’s the way it has ever been between us – she’s the one who remembers things.

Turns out he was on the bookshelf in my bedroom, so I dusted the top and put Mom in her resting place next to him.

Together again.

The clash between the expectations and reality of grief, since my mother died three weeks ago at the age of 100, have been a struggle for me. We’ve been doing what a friend described as “pre-grieving” for a long time now as Mom’s dementia robbed her of any apparent awareness of the world around her, and Dad’s for many years before that.

It’s been more than a decade of long, slow grieving.

Lisa, who has a grace about these things, visited Mom almost daily anyway, talking in case there was still a Mom brain inside there who could hear. I have less grace, but Lisa fortified what I had and we would still visit, together, once a week, wheeling Mom into the nursing home garden when the weather was warm enough and talking in a way that included her when we could.

Covid lockdown – two days before Mom’s 100th birthday last March – robbed us of this. But when we got the mid-February call that Mom’s body was finally shutting down for good – not of Covid, she’d already survived that – the folks at the nursing home arranged a few last visits for us to say goodbye.

I’m the writer in the family, so I offered to write the obituary, then wallowed in the task, suffering a bout of writer’s block as agonizing as any I’ve experienced. “It is impossible,” Elliott wrote in Prufrock, “to say just what I mean.”

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
     “That is not it at all,
     That is not what I meant, at all.”

It is hard say this with confidence, my memory not being as crisp as Lisa’s, but in my telling my mother is the reason,  or at least half the reason, I am a writer. Her gift, first and foremost, was to bestow upon me the unerring confidence that I could do whatever I wanted. From the beginning I wanted to be a writer, because she had wanted to be one.

My father was the other half of the reason, an artist who labored joyfully at his craft his whole life.

Often I do not fully know just what I mean until I try to write it, to find a voice in which to say just what I mean.

It made me so very happy, and grateful, this morning to see them together again.

 

 

The dogs of the cul-de-sacs of Albuquerque’s South Valley

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A recent South Valley ride. Blue bits are streets I’ve not ridden in “the GPS era”. Note the stubs.

Apologies that I don’t have any pictures of the dogs.

Via the wonderful Wandrer, I’ve been playing a new cycling game that involves trying to ride on all the streets. For a modest fee, you can connect Wandrer to a cloud-stored archive of all your GPS-recorded bike rides, and it’ll keep keep track of which roads you’ve ridden, and which you haven’t.

I’ve long been somewhat catholic in my cycling (in one of the old senses of the word – “entire, without exception”), trying to ride everywhere. When I first signed up for Wandrer, it told me I’d already logged 25 percent of the ~5,000 miles of roadways in Bernalillo County, where I live. But boy howdy, had I been missing the stub streets in the valley!

Late 20th century urban design would call them “cul-de-sacs”, the primary purpose of which is street basketball hoops. But Albuquerque’s valley floor communities, overlaid on a web of irrigation ditches, has had them for far longer. Bridging the ditch is expensive, so lots of streets just stub when they reach it.

I’d already been riding these streets, because often the stub will allow the pedestrian or cyclist a connecting path to walk or ride on the ditchbank. (Urban planners seem to call this “filtered permeability“.) But with Wandrer, I’ve a new motivation to seek them out.

The best part? The dogs!

On a street with regular bicycle traffic, the dogs become blasé. We are ordinary. A few desultory barks from behind the fence, or a glare and snarl from the driveway if they’re loose.

But on the stub streets, my presence is a source of delightful excitement, dogs given the chance to pursue their prime directive, which is to chase me away. They race frantically up and down their front fences, a riot of righteous barking.

Occasionally I’ll encounter an unfenced dog – far more frequently than on through streets, but still rare. This requires great care on both our parts, but the dogs seem clever enough to put on the show without actually running the risk catching me.

I have, on occasion, been happy for the filtered permeability of an escape route on the ditchbank, so that I didn’t have to run the gauntlet of a loose dog riding back out of the cul-de-sac. I’ve only had one encounter on the ditchbank itself.

Apologies that I don’t have any pictures. The modest illustrations on this blog are a point of pride. I hope you can understand that the delicacy of the encounters doesn’t really leave time to stop and pull out my phone.

The problem of expectations

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Felicia Marcus on the West’s water problems:

The problem with vast water negotiations like the Colorado River Compact, said Marcus, the Stanford water policy expert, is that every entity, from governments down to people watering their lawns, come to expect the current amount of available water — even if that availability is an outlier or set to change. “Farmers can’t expect that they can plant whatever they want or not expect water to be expensive,” she said. “Urban areas need to get way more efficient, people need to ditch way more lawns.”

Via Nick Bowlin/HCN

How Albuquerque’s Rio Grande looks now, and what to expect this spring and summer

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Rio Grande in Albuquerque, looking north from the Gail Ryba Bridge, Feb. 20, 2021

We stopped on Saturday’s bike ride for one of my favorite views of the Rio Grande, looking north from the Gail Ryba Bridge (the bike bridge that parallels Interstate 40). The Rio Grande looks great right now, but looks can be deceiving.

This time of year there’s always “base flow” – the basic winter flow in the river, before the snowmelt season starts. But while it looks like a healthy flow, it’s not. Normal flow this time of year is 800 cubic feet per second. Right now it’s around 500 cubic feet per second. That’s still enough to fill the river bank to bank, so it looks fine, but it’s a lot less than it should be in mid-February, around the 10th percentile.

That’s now. What to expect come spring?

First, the snowpack

This is the place where we’re really seeing climate change bite, now. As my friend Dave Gutzler, UNM’s climate science guy, pointed out in a Zoom call a couple of weeks ago with a group of climate adaptation people, the snowpack isn’t all that bad, but for a given amount of snow, we’re seeing a lot less water in the river over the last few decades. So the snowmelt runoff forecast, flows into the Albuquerque reach of the valley from March through July when we usually see the highest flows, are forecast to be 59 percent of the long term average.

Second, the upstream reservoir storage

It’s basically empty. We used it all up last year, with very little carryover storage. So our usual trick for propping up the river during a dry year like this – store water in wet years to use in years like this – isn’t available. In the last few similar years (2020 and 2018), it was use of this storage water that kept the river from going dry through Albuquerque.

Our irrigation district has postponed its season from the usual March 1 start to April 1. I’m not sure, but I believe this is something they’ve never done. They’ve also warned farmers of very short supplies, and told them that if they can, don’t plant. They’ve never done that before either.

Best case scenario

We get a some good storms through May, and/or farmers fallow enough land to keep some water in the river through Albuquerque.

Worst case scenario

The river goes dry or nearly through Albuquerque for the first time since the 1980s.

On the value of Colorado River Beat reporting

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Tony Davis at the Grand Canyon, February 2018, courtesy Ry Rivard

On a Zoom call with a group of Colorado River brain trusters this morning, there was a realization that we’d all been talking in recent weeks to the same reporters.

Sometimes it’s someone new to the issues, looking for help with a single story. With dropping reservoirs, several pressing near-term political and policy questions, and a lousy runoff forecast, there’s a lot of that.

Often it’s one of the regulars – beat reporters who have been on this story for a while, who know its nuances well, and who offer their readers and listeners continuing coverage rather than a one-off.

In my journalism career, I did both kinds of work, but I always found far more value in the latter. It’s not simply that beat reporting allows the development and communication of more specialized expertise – although that’s important.

It’s that some kinds of stories demand repetition.

At its heart, the Colorado River story right now is pretty simple:

  • The river was overallocated from the beginning.
  • Climate change is making the problem worse.
  • We have to figure out how to use less water.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

This is the antithesis of traditional newsroom culture’s definitions. “But we said that already,” the editor asks. “What’s new here?”

The value of repetition is a lesson I internalized from one of my Albuquerque Journal editors. I’d been writing about an environmental contamination issue here in Albuquerque, and at one point she said to me, “This is important, John. Find a way to keep it in the paper.”

We’d find some new “news peg” – a new set of sampling reports, a bureaucratic process step – and in the course of adding this new bit of information we’d also, by way of filling in the background, remind readers of all the old stuff. It was our way of saying, “Hey, look over here, this is important!”

This is why I loved Tony Davis’s story in the Arizona Daily Star over the weekend.

Less water for the Central Arizona Project — but not zero water.

Even more competition between farms and cities for dwindling Colorado River supplies than there is now.

More urgency to cut water use rather than wait for seven river basin states to approve new guidelines in 2025 for operating the river’s reservoirs.

That’s where Arizona and the Southwest are heading with water, say experts and environmental advocates following publication of a dire new academic study on the Colorado River’s future.

That fourth point is the news peg – “NEW STUDY SAYS“. And the study, by the Utah State Colorado River team, is great, a really important contribution to framing the issues we face going forward. But the three points before it are just versions of things Tony and the other Colorado River reporters have said before. Before. Before.

I think it’s accurate to say Tony has been writing about the Colorado River longer than anyone working today. I treasure my conversations with him – so smart about Colorado River issues, so smart about Arizona water issues, so smart about journalism issues. Every time I talk to him he’s already thinking two or three stories ahead. Tony’s a reporter’s reporter.

No one story solves the information problems of a busy audience being pulled in a million directions. It’s repetition that matters. “Oh wow, that Colorado River thing is in the paper again, it must be important!” Which is why the beat work by people like Tony is such an important service.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The “novel ecosystem” of Albuquerque’s valley ditches

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The novel ecosystem that is the Los Griegos Lateral includes this very big, very old cottonwood

This morning’s Downtown Albuquerque News (some of my favorite Albuquerque journalisms, worth ever $ spent to subscribe) has an item on Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District board member Barbara Baca’s thoughts on ditchbank vegetation:

Through its vast network of irrigation ditches, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District is primarily in the water delivery business, but a big part of that job actually involves tending to the vegetation that grows next to the water. The area north of Central near the BUGarium saw a rather dramatic example of this recently when crews cleared out dozens of non-native trees along the ditch (DAN, 1/27/21) in an effort to blunt the advance of tree roots, which can erode ditch banks.

But what is good for the ditches does not necessarily look good when the job is done, and all that bare ground has lately been on the mind of MRGCD board member Barbara Baca. She told DAN that she’d like to see native grasses planted on the sides of ditches, on the theory that it would choke out tumbleweeds, discourage the growth of those problematic trees, reduce the need for ongoing maintenance, and maybe (just maybe) result in fewer of those every-obnoxious thorned goatheads.

“I think it’s just a smarter way to maintain the ditch banks – and a beautiful way too.”

Revegetation has not traditionally been a large focus of the conservancy district, she said, but she hopes to move the issue toward the front burner in the coming months.

“We need to have the conversation with the community,” Baca said. “I think there are some real possibilities.”

Where the river once meandered a broad valley flood plain, we now distribute its water through a spiderweb of channels across the developed valley floor – and in fact we have been doing so for hundreds of years. It’s a novel ecosystem, but a deeply historical one, and I love that Barbara is pushing for a mindful conversation about our desired future conditions for it.

 

A bad year on the Rio Grande: climate adaptation in real time

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A bad start to 2021 on the Rio Grande

With another abysmal runoff forecast on the Rio Grande, New Mexico is entering a fascinating experiment, playing out in real time, in climate change adaptation.

The latest model runoff forecast, circulated this morning by the folks at NRCS, is for flow of just 59 percent of average where the Rio Grande enters central New Mexico at a place called Otowi. That’s a midpoint forecast, with a big uncertainty range with a couple of months of snow season to go. But even the best case scenario at this point in the model is for below-average flow.

The worst case scenario is awful.

As my UNM colleague Dave Gutzler points out, there’s some really important recognition of the impacts of climate change embedded in these numbers. The snowpack isn’t actually all that bad. But (thanks to many scientists working on this question, but especially Dr. Gutzler and his collaborators here on the Rio Grande) we now understand that we should expect, for a given amount of snow, less water actually ending up in the rivers.

It’s warmer. Plants take up more water, and more evaporates.

What we also see is a sort of policy window opening up. In John Kingdon’s classic work on policy formation (see the indispensable Paul Cairney on this) the political/policy system, with limited capacity to wrestle with all the things before it, ignores lots of stuff until it doesn’t. Attention lurches from thing to thing, and when it lurches in your direction, you’d best be ready. But, importantly, you’ll be much more successful in contributing in that moment if the people doing the lurching already know you’re there. (Dr. Gutzler is a great example of this. He’s been soldiering along for years making himself available to explain this stuff, and doing the research to advance our understanding. Much of my own understanding of climate change came from many hours, during my time as a journalist, sitting in his office in what amounted to a bunch of on-demand graduate seminars.)

On the Rio Grande, one of those lurches is happening, now, in real time.

Consider first the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico. Per Veronica Martinez in the Las Cruces Sun-News:

“Unless conditions improve in the late fall and winter, we can expect 2021 to be a critically low water supply year for the Rio Grande Project, perhaps the worst in the project history,” Phil King, the district’s water resource consultant, said.

Meanwhile upstream in the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the stretch of river where I live, Theresa Davis reports:

The Office of the State Engineer recommends “that farmers along the Rio Chama and in the Middle Valley that don’t absolutely need to farm this year, do not farm,” according to a staff report that Interstate Stream Commission Director Rolf Schmidt-Petersen presented to the Commission earlier this month.

In my crazy new academic life, I’m watching this play out in real time with a couple of students, Tylee Griego and Talisa Barancik, who with funding from the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center have been studying patterns of agricultural water use in the valley.

We’ve been exploring the distinction between commercial and non-commercial farming. There’s a gradation between the two, but the climate adaptation responses and opportunities seem very different. In places dominated by commercial agriculture, farmers seem farm more likely to drill groundwater wells to make up for surface water shortfalls. This is especially the case in the San Luis Valley, up in Colorado, and down in the Elephant Butte Irrigation District of southern New Mexico.

Here in what we call “the middle valley” – the stretch through central New Mexico that includes Albuquerque – the farming is far more likely to be non-commercial. It is people with a small operation and an off-farm job. Maybe it’s supplemental income, or maybe it’s just a “custom and culture” – farming as a thing integrated in a community’s life, rather than as a commercial economic activity. In “custom and culture” farming you see a lot less groundwater pumping.

These are the people more likely to be able to pull off Rolf Schmidt-Petersen’s “do not farm” recommendation.