The Real Crisis - Water
When we examine what we need to live in this life, it comes down to a few things….and to disabuse you of where I am going, I don’t mean the internet, bike paths, or the Broncos making the playoffs.
The Ancients thought of all existence as being contained in the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Although the current zero carbon movement is trying to eliminate Fire and its byproduct, CO2, today we will focus on water, an essential element of life which has always been a blessing but also a curse. Too little, we die of thirst. Too much, we have floods, and we drown.
It has been reported that the western United States is entering its 22nd year of drought. The problem has been relegated to climate change to be solved with more windmills, solar panels and electric vehicles, but I would suggest that this is not the first drought or climate change that the world has experienced nor will it be the last, and more renewable energy is not the answer.
Around 2500 B.C, a climate change (a shift in temperatures and weather patterns) occurred over the Indus River Valley causing the summer monsoon rains to gradually dry up, making agriculture difficult to impossible. The Indus River Valley, located in present Pakistan and northwest India, was home to a civilization known as the Harappans. It was characterized by large, well-planned cities with advanced municipal sanitation systems and a written language that has never been deciphered. As the climate changed. the Harappans seemed to slowly lose their urban cohesion, and their cities were gradually abandoned. It resulted in millions fleeing to more hospitable environments ending the Harappan civilization.
The decline of Bronze-Age civilizations in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia has been attributed to another long-term drought that began around 2000 BC. In our very own southwestern part of the United States, the Anasazi Indians had built an empire centered in the 4 corners region of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Although not conclusive, it appears that a drought like the one that we are currently experiencing arose from 1000 to 1200 causing the Anasazi to abandon their cities and homes in one generation from 1275 to1300.
These civilizations and their destruction may provide some lessons for us and our future where we will have to deal with our own climate change. We have to ask ourselves, is it just our turn?
So, a little bit on how we got into this current mess or let’s say how we may have made it worse. Even before the Civil War, Americans and immigrants to America were urged to settle the West. It was our manifest destiny to rule our continent, and there also was a lot of money to be made. The East was overcrowded. There wasn’t enough land to satisfy the aspirations of potential American farmers. We all remember (well at least some of us may remember) New York Herald Journalist, Horace Greeley, (for whom Greeley Colorado is named) imploring people to “Go West Young Man, Go West!”.
1862 was a big year for development of the West as Congress passed the Homestead Act to provide 160 acres of free land to those who would farm it for 5 years. Also in 1862, the Congress passed funding to build the transcontinental railroad and passed the Morrill Act, which allocated to each member of Congress 30,000 acres of federal land to fund land grant colleges.
While Americans went West in droves, it turned out that settlement of the West was harder than the proponents thought. Not only were American Indians already living on these lands but, the water needed to sustain crops and lives was not as abundant as in the East.
As is the practice today, Congress and their developer supporters thought they could solve these problems with legislation. In 1877, Congress amended the Homestead Act by passing the “Desert Land Act” which was designed to give more free land in semi-arid areas if the farmers would find water to irrigate it and make it habitable, and then they passed the Carey Act in 1894, each of which only marginally increased irrigation.
One unintended (I am being kind) consequence is that when Congress passed the Desert Land Act, they forgot one little restriction that had been in the Homestead Act which had required the claimant to live on the land while the improvements were made. This omission led to a significant amount of fraud, where land speculators acquired tens of thousands of acres by hiring what were called "dummy entrymen" to make false claims of settlement. Some of the areas that we know of today began as land patented under the Desert Land Act including the Salt River (Phoenix), the Imperial Valley in California, and the Snake River in Idaho.
Eventually in 1902 Congress passed the National Reclamation Act which channeled large scale federal funding from the sale of western public lands, into irrigation projects on public or private land in the arid West particularly in California, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada. The Congressmen who passed the law, as well as their wealthy friends, supported Western irrigation because it would increase American exports, reclaim the West, and push the Eastern poor out West in search of a better life.
At this point you may be asking yourself, “Self! What does this have to do with me?” The snow falls in Colorado so all the water we Coloradoans want should be ours and the other states are just going to have to suck it up? Right? Well…no.
That takes us to water law. For those readers on the East Coast, I am sure you have no idea what I am about to talk about (unless you are a water law aficionado) since there is plenty of water (sometimes too much). In the East, water is governed by the doctrine of riparian rights which essentially says if the water touches your property, it’s yours to use as long as you don’t waste it.
However, for some 17 dry western states, the law of who has rights to water is determined under the “appropriation” doctrine. Some say it arose out of Roman civil law, others say it is as a result of grants of water or local custom. Yet others point to the Mormons who settled on the lands in Utah or the gold miners in California who developed a system of their own by resolving the conflicts that arose because of lack of water. They decided whoever got there first and used the water got to use it in the future to the exclusion of other “junior” water rights holders. The only caveat to this first in time and first to use principle, was that it be reasonable and be used for a beneficial purpose. Also the water was not attached to the land that it flowed through. It could be sold.
However, as they say in the West, “Whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting” and the fighting has been done primarily by the lawyers over 100 years, creating all kinds of exceptions and caveats that are way more complicated than my brief recitation of the law here. (In Colorado, it is so complicated we have our own specialized water courts.)
In 1919, the League of the Southwest created an alliance among the States in the basin of the Colorado River to once again promote development, in particular the irrigation of crop land for agriculture along the river. One of the reasons for this effort by the States was a concern that absent an agreement among themselves, the federal government would decide who got what water which would have made everyone unhappy except the winner. In 1921, Congress conceded, authorizing the States to negotiate an agreement for allocation of the Colorado River water leading to the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
The Compact divided the river basin into two areas, the Upper Division (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and the Lower Division (Nevada, Arizona and California). Based on rainfall patterns observed in the years before the Compact’s signing in 1922, the amount specified in the agreement (15 million acre feet) was assumed to allow a roughly equal division of water between the two Divisions.
The Compact required the Upper Basin states make sure that one-half, 7.5 million acre-feet of water, went to the lower basin states. The division point for you water tourists is Lee’s Ferry, a point in the mainstem of the Colorado River about 30 river miles south of the Utah-Arizona boundary, just downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam. The upper basin states and the lower basin states negotiated among themselves as to how much each would receive of the 7.5-million-acre feet allotments. (One acre foot is the volume of water that would cover a one-acre area of land one foot deep).
The Compact was successful, enabling the widespread development of irrigation in the Southwest, as well as state and federal water works projects such the Hoover Dam, creating Lake Mead and the Glen Canyon Dam, creating Lake Powell.
But there was a problem…. The “science” that assumed the 15-million-acre feet of water that the River Basin was going to generate was …well… wrong. The rainfall patterns that were used for the calculations were some of the wettest years in known history. The Colorado River Basin rarely produced the 15-million-acre feet as predicted and sometimes produced only a third of that amount.
As a practical matter, this error was not immediately important since as the years went on, the upper basin was not using its 7.5-million-acre feet allotment of water. As one of the faster developing states, California had been using the surplus water that was not used by other states. However, with the increasing population growth in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Las Vegas, there developed a concern that this surplus water would no longer be available for California.
In 2001, Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, signed an interim agreement, determining how water surplus from the Colorado River would be allocated among the states, and created a 15-year period to allow California time to put conservation methods in place to reduce its water usage and dependence on Colorado River water. It didn’t.
As you will remember, the purpose of this Compact and the water that was apportioned among the states was primarily for agriculture to enhance the development of the arid Southwest. However, in the 100 years since the Colorado River Compact was signed, the use of the river and the reliance on its water had changed. Now not only did it serve for drinking water, showers and domestic use of for 40,000,000 people and irrigation of 5,500,000 million acres of farmland, but it also provided water for extensive grass lawns, golf courses and parks. As a result of the dams that had been built, bodies of water were created generating a multi-billion-dollar recreation and tourist industry for rafting, kayaking, boating and other water fun. It has sustained the trout fishing industry and decorative water features in communities up and down the Colorado River.
And of particular importance, the dams and the river created the opportunity for the generation of electrical power. The Hoover Dam serves some 8 million people in Southern California and Las Vegas.
So now comes Mother Nature. It’s not like we weren’t warned. As I said earlier, we are in the 22nd year of a drought which just may be the new norm for this part of the country. We may be experiencing what the residents of the Indus Valley civilization, the farmers in the Bronze Age, or the Anasazi Empire experienced years ago.
Since 2000, water levels in Lake Mead have been reduced by 170 feet and is only at 28% capacity. Further reductions in elevation will be much quicker since the lake is a V shape, and there is much less volume of water in the lake that is remaining. The current elevation of the water in Lake Mead is at 1040 ft. If the elevation reduces to 895 feet, it creates a situation called a “dead pool” at which no more water can go through the dam and all electric generation for 8 million people stops.
As Lake Mead has been draining, there have been calls on the upper reservoir at Lake Powell to provide water so that the lights stay on in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, but the water levels in Lake Powell are also dangerously low. Lake Powell is at 27% capacity. Right now, the water stands at 3,553 feet just 8 feet above a buffer pool that must be maintained in order to keep that reservoir’s power turbines running.
In June, the Bureau of Reclamation asked the states in the Colorado River Compact to come up with a plan to reduce its water usage by 2-to-4-million-acre feet. The Upper Basin states complained that it had already reduced its usage and currently were using only 3.5-million-acre feet while the lower basin states were using 8.5-million-acre feet, and they weren’t going to commit to any further reductions. Arizona and Nevada had come up with a plan to reduce 2-million-acre feet, but California refused. In light of the failed negotiations, in August, the Bureau of Reclamation directed that the water allocation for Arizona be reduced by 21% (592,000-acre feet), Nevada by 8% (25,000-acre feet), and Mexico by 7% (104,000-acre feet) for a total of 721,000-acre feet (not enough). California would not be reduced at all. Remember that California has the senior water right under that appropriation doctrine and everyone junior gets dried up before they do.
$4 billion was allocated for “drought relief” under the recent Inflation Reduction Act. Other than general funding for projects that will “reduce water use” (whatever that means), the Inflation Act provides money to pay farmers not to plant crops that need water. Good idea, but how long can you pay someone not to produce anything?
What does this mean for all of us in the Colorado River Basin? We are facing a permanent change of life for many in the Southwest. The possibilities are that farms will be dried up, and we will have to find other sources for food. We love our fishing, boating and the sheer beauty of our reservoirs, but the reservoirs may disappear. Our lawns may go away. We will not go rafting or catch any more fish. The electricity will be turned off. We will have to quit luring people to live in the Southwest. Whose livelihoods do we destroy? Whose way of life do we change forever?
We have developed the arid land to sustain life, house people, and grow crops that were never suited by nature for that purpose. For many years, we have been able to turn the desert into a garden; an arable, livable land sustained by water which is no longer flowing for a growing number of inhabitants that it can no longer sustain. We have been living in the desert and doing things that Mother Nature never intended us to do. Now we have been caught.
Our best shot appears to be that we can hope and pray for rain and a snowy winter. In the meantime, we need to quit obsessing over our pronouns, whether Trump is going to run for President, or what the temperature of the earth is going to be in 2100. We need to focus our attention on what is immediately before us. How are we going to share our water and sustain our civilization in the great Southwest so that we do not go the way of the Harappans, Mesopotamians or Anasazi; so that we and our Empire do not disappear.