my interdisciplinary life

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university life

My new life at the University of New Mexico includes teaching in and overseeing an interdisciplinary graduate program for water resources students (Not too early to apply for next fall!). But what does this word “interdisciplinary” mean?

My day thus far:

  • morning phone call with law school faculty member about arcane structure of New Mexico’s Central Arizona Project water allocation (yes, we have one)
  • lunch with geographer, economist, and sociologist about project studying resilience in headwaters communities across the Americas
  • Friday afternoon engineering seminar on hydroponics to grow food
  • serendipitous stop in engineering lab to see bench scale work using reverse osmosis membranes to remove organic contaminants from wastewater
  • happy accident in biology talking to a researcher who studies microbial systems in caves, and also works on science communication

I love my new job.

Some context on the Colorado River and the U.S.-Mexico reset

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Water in the Río Colorado

Rhea Graham, a savvy veteran of western water governance, made an interesting observation about my book over on Goodreads:

One of the few thoughtful discussions of the Lower Colorado River international boundary, it unwittingly becomes context for the reset of USA-Mexico relations begun in 2017.

I spend a good deal of time in Water is For Fighting Over and Other Myths on the evolution of the relationship between the United States and Mexico in the two nations’ joint management (or, in many cases, mismanagement) of the Colorado River.

The stories of mismanagement and conflict include the time in the 1950s and ’60s when the United States sent water across the border so contaminated that it was largely unusable:

The United States government, straight-faced, advanced a boldly cynical argument. The 1944 treaty between the two nations required that the United States deliver 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water per year to Mexico. The treaty said nothing about the quality of that water. Usable or not, the salty Wellton-Mohawk water met our water-delivery obligation.

This did not sit well with farmers and cities in Mexico, as the Wellton-Mohawk drainage water was strangling Mexican crops and leaving municipal water taken from the Colorado River south of the border undrinkable. The Mexicans complained, and by the early 1960s the tension over the issue had grown from a regional water management problem into an international diplomatic conflict.

A negotiated addendum to the 1944 treaty solved that problem, only to yield to the next conflict, as lining of the All-American Canal reduced groundwater that had become an important source of water on the Mexican side of the border:

Stretching from Imperial Dam to the Imperial Valley in the southeastern deserts of California, the canal passes through great fields of sand dunes. Unlined through most of its history, the canal had always leaked. Adding a concrete lining had long been seen as a way to save water and reduce the allocation owing to Imperial without reducing acreage being farmed. But lining would come with a price. The canal seepage was refilling an aquifer that flows south into Mexico, where Mexicali farmers had come to depend on the flow. The seepage also fed some of the few wild wetlands left in the delta region.

The decision to line the canal was far easier because an international border, and the history, politics, and law associated therewith, blocked one of the most important impacted parties from having a seat at the table when the deals were being made.

My book closes on an optimistic note, as the now-famous “Minute 319” agreement shifted the relationship from one of conflict to joint management of the shared river. Mexican water is now stored in U.S. reservoirs, Mexico in return agreed to share in shortages as the river runs low, and water was set aside for environmental flows in the dried up channel of the river in Mexico.

But as Jeremy Jacobs reported Monday for Greenwire, the clash between our new president and our Mexican neighbors is clouding the future of this incredibly important relationship:

A bilateral agreement specifies exactly how much water Mexico receives, as well as other important factors like how those deliveries are reduced in years of exceptional drought.

It is set to expire this year.

The seven Colorado River Basin states — and particularly Lower Basin states Nevada, Arizona and California — say it’s pivotal that the new administration finalize a new agreement.

But many are now worried that U.S.-Mexico relations have already deteriorated to the point where that may be impossible.

Beneath the sturm und drang of our change in government are layers of practical governance where the policy is actually carried out. Some are sturdy and will persist, and some are under threat. This seems to be the latter.

New Mexico’s Rio Grande forecast: 50-plus percent above average

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Runoff this year on the Rio Grande at Otowi in northern New Mexico is forecast to be 50 percent above average, according to preliminary numbers out this morning from the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty in the March-July forecast. There’s always a big spread in the forecast this early in the season because of uncertainty in the weather in the next few months. But we’ve had so much snow in the last six weeks that even the “worst case” right now (a one in ten chance) is above average:

  • average over the last 30 years: 720 thousand acre feet (kaf)
  • one-in-ten driest probability: 735 kaf
  • median: 1080 kaf
  • one-in-ten wettest probability: 1,490 kaf

soil moisture and the new forecast for an above-average year on the Colorado River

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A wet January added nearly 3 million acre feet to the Colorado River runoff forecast, with the Feb. 1 forecast update from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center sitting at 9.5 million acre feet for April through July.

That is 34 percent above average.

The snowpack currently sits at 56 percent above average. The dropoff between snowpack and runoff can in part be explained by soil moisture going into the season. As this map of mid-November conditions shows, soils were dry going into the fall:

courtesy CBRFC

That dry soil soaks up a big gulp of water before melting snow can get to the streams and rivers.

that time I wrote about Ed Meese’s unpaid jaywalking ticket

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Going through boxes in the garage, I came across this treasure:

Long Arm of law reaches for Meese – again. John Fleck, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, July 23, 1985

I was a young intern at the late, lamented Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Meese, for those too young to remember, was Attorney General of the United States of America under Ronald Reagan.

Good times.

evidence, policy, and the importance of stories

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Upcoming discussions in my spring University of New Mexico Water Resources Program class about the importance of evidence in policy-making seem freshly relevant.

The class, co-taught with hydrologist Jesse Roach and economist Jingjing Wang, has a pretty nerdy focus on dynamic simulation modeling. Over the course of the semester, the students work through the problem of building a model (we use Powersim) of a river basin. They build in both the physical part – hydrology, climate, etc. – and the human part with Jingjing’s economics component. Alongside all of that, I help the students work through the question of how their technical work interfaces with the political and policy world – how to make their technical work relevant.

A big part of my piece is communication – how to write up what they’re finding for a non-technical audience, the hypothetical mayor or county commissioner who does not have the technical background of the college professor the students are used to writing for.

A big part of that task is understanding way evidence is received in political and policy processes.

In the sciency academic world, there’s a strong and understandable inclination to argue for the supremacy of technical evidence in decision-making. As a result, academics tend to get frustrated with the way things actually work. We are seeing that play out over the past week, as our new president pursues policies that seem to fly in the face of the evidence with respect to the impacts and risks associated with immigrants to the United States.

My core messages is that simply saying, “But evidence!” ever louder, as often is done in these cases, does not work.

Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling in the UK, had a timely post last week in this regard:

Too much ‘post-truth politics’ discussion is self-indulgent. Too many academics are quick to demonise the cynical world of politics and politicians and to romanticise their own causes or objectivity. They need to acknowledge that ideological and emotional thinking is a natural part of life, and a part of life to which they are not immune. ‘Experts’ are storytellers for their own cause, and they tell each other the same story about post-truth politics. What separates them from their competitors is that the latter are better at telling effective stories which manipulate the beliefs and emotions of their audience.

So, what can they do about it? Tell good, positive stories, combining scientific evidence with emotional hooks, to help people understand and care about important political issues.

You can see this in the response to our new president’s executive order regarding refugees and immigration. The evidence crowd offers a strong case that the people impacted by the order pose little risk. But the communication tool that proved successful in this first skirmish of a long battle over this policy was the human stories of the innocent people impacted by the measure.

Some timely lessons playing out here in real time, I recommend reading Cairney’s piece in full.

 

the understandings and misunderstandings of science

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The task of imparting clarity about the understandings and misunderstandings of science is, I have come to realize, one of my important tasks in my new role as university educator. Our students are pursuing masters degrees in water resources (check us out, not too early to start thinking about applying for fall semester!). The curriculum gives them a solid foundation in the water sciences, alongside a strong does of policy stuff. But given my experience struggling to communicate science to non-science audiences, to make it clear and useful, I’m pushing the importance of the science communicator’s task.

This is not about “science communication” in its more obvious sense – the dinosaur museum or newspaper column. This is science communication as an integrated part of the technical work that our students will do in their careers – writing a policy memo for the city council, or a briefing paper for their non-scientist boss.

In that context, this piece by Anita Makri in Nature includes an incredibly important insight at the heart of non-scientists’ misunderstanding of what science is and does:

Much of the science that the public knows about and admires imparts a sense of wonder and fun about the world, or answers big existential questions. It’s in the popularization of physics through the television programmes of physicist Brian Cox and in articles about new fossils and quirky animal behaviour on the websites of newspapers. It is sellable and familiar science: rooted in hypothesis testing, experiments and discovery.

Although this science has its place, it leaves the public (not to mention policymakers) with a different, outdated view to that of scientists of what constitutes science. People expect science to offer authoritative conclusions that correspond to the deterministic model. When there’s incomplete information, imperfect knowledge or changing advice — all part and parcel of science — its authority seems to be undermined. We see this in the public debate over food and health: first, fat was bad and now it’s sugar. A popular conclusion of that shifting scientific ground is that experts don’t know what they’re talking about.

But the questions that people face in their lives typically rely on incremental science, a kind that accumulates evidence about complex systems with numerous variables and fuzzy social parameters. It feeds into policy and decisions about how to handle environmental pollution, vaccine safety, emerging infections, drug risks, food choices or the impacts of climate change.

At its most important, science in the policy realm tackles areas filled with uncertainty that cannot be reduced. This insight is crucial to communicating about it well.

On water quality, New York pursues big experiment

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In a 1932 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court famously opined that…

a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

From that line comes the idea that the U.S. states can function as “laboratories of democracy”.

With the change in U.S. national government that we formalized Friday, there has been much talk among my colleagues working in water – faculty and students at the UNM Water Resources Program where I teach and with friends out in the water management community – about where the locus of action will be in the next few years.

I’ve argued that much authority, especially over water quantity, is already vested with the states rather than the national government. An interesting story out of New York suggests that state’s willingness to go full-on “laboratory of democracy” in the area of water quality as well:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said he wants to address problems … with a $2 billion proposal to improve water quality in the Buffalo Niagara region and the rest of New York State.

Part of the money would be spent on projects beyond gray infrastructure – like replacing water and sewer lines and expanding wastewater plants – and instead pay for ways to prevent water pollution in the first place, proponents said.

The spending Cuomo called for in his State of the State speech last week shocked environmental activists.

“This was an amazing proposal,” said Jessica Ottney Mahar, policy director for the Nature Conservancy. “The level of funding is exciting, and frankly, it surprised me.”

 

Excellent Colorado River snowpack

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At this critical time of year for Colorado River snowpack, things are looking very good. For the first time this year, the April-July runoff forecast has climbed above 10 million acre feet.

Snowpack above Lake Powell, courtesy CBRFC

The snowpack among the sites above Lake Powell where the federal government maintains real-time monitoring equipment is 57 percent above the long term median for this point in the year.

The amount of snow does not translate directly into river water because of a number of mediating factors – dry soils going into the season can soak up some of that, and warmer temperatures mean greater evaporation. That said, however, the latest model runs by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center put April-July runoff at 40 percent above average. That’s the 10maf runoff forecast.

But since a key thing in water management is to enjoy the best but be ready for the worst, the most important thing in the CBRFC forecast is the forecasters’ bad news scenario. They calculate not only the most probable runoff, but also a sort of “worst case”, something you would expect in the driest 10 percent of years. That worst case right now is for above average runoff in the Colorado River Basin.

Here’s how this translates to policy, and why this is especially good news for those in the Lower Colorado River Basin trying to cope with the decline of Lake Mead. The nominal required release (shut up lawyers, I know that’s a contested characterization, let’s just go with it) from Lake Powell to Lake Mead each year is 8.23 million acre feet per year. When there’s more water in Powell, we move “bonus water” downstream, and lately there’s enough for 9 million acre foot releases. The current snowpack pretty greatly increases the probability of 9maf releases for the next couple of years, which makes it much easier to keep Mead from slipping into shortage.

The 1-in-10 best case scenario is nearly 13maf. Under Mead-Powell operating rules, a year like that would mean far more than 9 million acre feet for Lake Mead, which combined with current conservation efforts would buy the Lower Basin years of cushion before shortage.