Water is for Fighting Over

by John Fleck

  These stories are crucial in part because they show communities working with the cards they were dealt. When fighting over water, it is easy to say, “We can no longer afford to grow alfalfa in the desert,” or “We can no longer afford a Phoenix or Las Vegas.” Simply cutting off a few limbs would eliminate the deficit that causes the reservoirs to keep dropping. I reject that approach for two reasons. First, there are questions of justice and equity in deciding which communities stay and continue to use water and which communities must go. Second, though, and more important, we have no omniscient power giving us the ability to decide which water uses will continue. When we decide our future, the Imperial Valley and Las Vegas are at the table, defending their right to exist. As a result, the only tractable plans are ones that work with current water users.

  That reality points toward the second type of success story. At the scale of the entire Colorado River Basin, in the messy complex of governance that manages decisions about who gets how much of the big river’s water, we have made tremendous progress. Governments have banded together to come up with a plan to reduce California’s overuse of the river, and they’ve developed a deal with Mexico to share surpluses and shortages, and even to spare some precious water to return flows to the Colorado’s parched channel through its old Mexican delta. This was rarely easy, but it resulted in deals that benefited a spectrum of water users and community values.

  Underlying both of these models of success is a willingness to recognize water problems and collaborate in solving them, often across geographic, political, and organizational boundaries. Conflict is sometimes a part of these processes, but ultimately success comes by avoiding fights over water.

  But these successes have not been enough, something that can be seen most clearly in Lake Mead itself, the first great reservoir that stores the Colorado River’s water for millions of people downstream. Despite the hope offered by the success stories described above, we have not done enough. Lake Mead continues to shrink. Water users continue to take more out of the Colorado River system than nature puts in, keeping us on an unsustainable path.

  Just as importantly, westerners have failed to notice their own successes. Seeing Lake Mead drop should encourage water users to redouble their efforts, to build on the extraordinary conservation programs they have created. But too often, it instead triggers fear, fueling the myths in a dangerous feedback loop. If I think I need more water, I am more likely to be willing to fight for it.

  Egret on the Lower Colorado River (© Lissa Heineman).

  San Luis Río Colorado

  Beyond the water banking agreements and lawn buyback programs and agriculture-to-urban transfers that will be needed to succeed is a fuzzy, at times difficult to grasp, often imperfect but nevertheless critical element to solving the Colorado River’s problems. Participants have come to call it “the network.”

  The network is a sometimes formal but often informal group of lawyers, engineers, hydrologists, farmers, water managers, diplomats, and environmentalists who have been working together on these issues, often for decades. Meeting in conferences, on river trips, and in hotel bars, they must hold the seemingly contradictory goals of zealously guarding their own communities’ water supplies while at the same time figuring out how we all can share as shortage looms.

  This disparate group keeps what one participant has described as a “laser-like focus” on the big problems posed by the dropping reservoirs. They are the ones who have to figure out how our society can live with less water. This is where our adaptive capacity must come from.

  Social scientists who study big, complex, sprawling problems like this call such collective problem solving “network governance.” The web of relationships among the people who carry it out is more expansively characterized as “social capital.” It is the people themselves, but also their bonds. They have a shared understanding of the resources, of one another’s needs, and of the complex set of rules that govern water’s use. They have built trust and reciprocity over years of working together across difficult boundaries. Social capital is every bit as important and worthy of investment as physical capital: the pumps, dams, and ditches we build to manage and move our water.

  The very existence of such a “network” can be problematic. What does it take to get admitted to the club, and who gets left out? What will that mean to the way we solve the river’s problems? I recognize the risk that important stakeholders can be left out of the network, leaving their interests unprotected as the scarce water is divided up. But after years of studying management of the Colorado River I’ve come to believe that it is better than the alternative, which is the risk of constant conflict. A free-for-all could crash our system and leave someone the loser—it is hard to know who—without the water on which the community has come to depend.

  The first time I wrote about Terry Fulp, a key manager with the Bureau of Reclamation, I described him as “the closest thing we have to a guy with his hand on the tap that controls the vast plumbing system built over the past century to distribute the Colorado’s waters.”9 But I have come to realize in the years since I published that line in 2009 that, in reality, no one has their hand on the tap, and nobody has the ability to turn it down. Instead, we’ve built a decentralized system with no one in charge. This means that the only possible solutions are those that can emerge from the collaboration of the network.

  That is why the scene I stumbled on one late afternoon in March 2014, in the sandy bed of the Colorado River near the Mexican town of San Luis Río Colorado, was so heartening.

  For those brief few weeks, water was flowing and the residents converged on the normally dry riverbed for a rollicking, soccer-ball-kicking, four-wheel-driving, beer-drinking party. The reason was the network in action—a complex deal that opened the door to settling old water management controversies with Mexico, and won important benefits for US cities. And most importantly, it created a little pulse of water that returned the Colorado River to its historic channel past the city of San Luis. Remarkably, the Colorado River Basin’s managers had all agreed to lower Lake Mead just a bit, to release some of their precious water, in order to bring a dead river channel in Mexico back to life.

  I rolled up around suppertime after a day with a group of scientists and journalists. There seemed no finer place on Earth at that moment than the party beneath the San Luis Bridge.

  There, amid the festivities, with no tie, barefoot, his suit jacket off and the legs of his dress pants rolled up, I found Terry Fulp with a group of friends, wading in the Colorado River. Fulp had been part of a stuffy official delegation earlier in the day, driven in armored State Department Chevrolet Suburbans to tour the newly flowing river. But at their last stop, Fulp bailed out of the official caravan to get a ride home with his friends, a group of environmentalists who had been working for more than a decade toward this day.

  This was the network—old friends on opposite sides of what were once great divides: the conflict between environmentalists and the West’s great water management agency, the conflict between Mexico and the United States, and the conflict between farms and cities for scarce water. They were standing, smiling themselves silly, in a river channel in Mexico, sharing a historic moment as a river slipped past them on a trip to rejoin the sea.

  CHAPTER 2

  Water Squandered on a Cow

  THE WATER THAT IRRIGATES Corky Herkenhoff’s alfalfa fields travels through dams and tunnels across two states to San Acacia, New Mexico. The path is long, but it is important to be clear about where it ends: as food for a cow.

  San Acacia sits on the west bank of the Rio Grande. In other words, it already had a river of its own. But the natural flow of the Rio Grande is sparse and highly variable. So in keeping with the “you can never have too much” philosophy of water management in the West, New Mexicans used politics and money to grab more, building the San Juan–Chama Project to pipe water from Colorado River tributaries into the Rio Grande. Much of this imported water goes to th
e Santa Fe and Albuquerque metro areas, supplying showers, flushing toilets, watering golf courses and lawns. Some ends up in agricultural irrigation ditches. Some of that ends up on Herkenhoff’s farm, growing alfalfa, most of which gets shipped out as feed to dairies on New Mexico’s eastern plains.

  As farming in the western United States goes, this is marginal stuff. In this stretch of the Rio Grande Valley, the 2012 net farm income—the amount farmers made after deducting expenses—was negative.1 Herkenhoff is relatively successful, but, explaining his family history at San Acacia, he joked that he is “the fourth generation to go broke on this operation.” His father, who made a living as an engineer in the city, had advised against going into agriculture. “I didn’t take his advice,” Herkenhoff said.

  Alfalfa in the Palo Verde Valley, grown with Colorado River water (© John Fleck).

  Herkenhoff has tried all sorts of things on this land. One year he grew cantaloupes, but the market collapsed so he decided to feed them to his pigs. But the market for pork was lousy too: “That didn’t work out for me, either.” Over time, cheap land, cheap water, and a growing market in New Mexico’s dairies has made alfalfa Herkenhoff’s crop of choice.2

  This is water subsidized, dammed, channeled, and diverted, so that it might be squandered on a cow.

  On the grand scale of dams and diversions, the San Juan–Chama Project is tiny, taking less than 1 percent of the Colorado River’s water. But if you want to understand the problems facing the Colorado River Basin, you have to start at places like Herkenhoff’s fields, and especially with alfalfa, because thousands of farms across the West are where most of the water goes.

  The River

  Rising from snowmelt on the spine of the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River travels 1,450 miles, draining 246,000 square miles.3 Physicists talk about “potential energy,” embodied in the pull of gravity on an object. The higher something is—like snow, for example, resting in winter drifts high in the mountains—the greater the potential. For the snowpack in the Rockies, that potential is a gift of the sun. Lifted by the sun’s energy from oceans into clouds, the water falls as snow on the high peaks, then melts and flows down, first by trickles, then joining into streams and rivers, turning the potential into actual energy of enormous power—to shape landscapes and, turned to human needs, to build a society.

  It is easy to take this for granted today, but European settlers moving west across North America in the 1800s were encountering something new. Whereas in the eastern half of the continent the rain that fell from the sky was enough to build farms and towns, in the West the rain was sparse, the land was barren, and the water trapped in that snowmelt flowed through deep canyons. It would take the collective action of human communities to capture and channel the water, to put it to what law, policy, and history have come to call “beneficial use.”

  To do that required vast works of physical plumbing. The first major step was Hoover Dam, astride a deep canyon between Arizona and Nevada, completed in 1936. One of the great engineering achievements of its or any age, Hoover Dam was able to capture floods and store years’ worth of water during wet times to supply downstream farms and cities during the dry times. Less than three decades later, the plumbers added Glen Canyon Dam nearly 400 miles upstream, doubling the system’s water-storage capacity.

  Smaller dams and canals to distribute the water splayed out across the basin until, by the late twentieth century, we had turned a river into a grand water-distribution machine. Farm communities and cities, from Denver and Albuquerque in the east to Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles in the south and west, grew up dependent on the water the Colorado River could now provide.

  Alongside the physical plumbing, we built a vast institutional and legal apparatus to manage the water’s distribution. In 1922, a “compact” among the states sketched out who was entitled to how much of the river’s water. Legislation followed to clarify the water distribution rules, and more importantly, to authorize the massive federal subsidies needed to turn the western desert into something that resembled the cities and farms back east.

  The Colorado River’s problem is simple: there is not enough water to enable everyone to use the amount to which they are legally entitled. The river is like a company with contractual obligations to pay out more money than it is taking in. Sooner or later in such a situation there are two options: either a negotiated bankruptcy, in which creditors take less than their full entitlement and the company stays afloat, or the whole thing collapses. The former seems preferable to the latter, but negotiating such a deal is hard.

  The roots of the problem lie in mistakes made in the early twentieth century. At the time the Colorado River Compact was negotiated, streamflow data was sketchy, based primarily on a single gauge at Yuma, Arizona, near the bottom end of the river system. But twenty years of data was sufficient to give the compact’s negotiators confidence that they had at least 17 million acre-feet per year on average to work with, and likely more.4 “The hydrographers and experts advise me that a twenty-year record on a river is adequate in its completeness and includes enough years to warrant an assumption that the average there deduced would be the average flow of the river in the future,” Colorado lawyer Delphus Carpenter, the compact’s chief architect, told his colleagues at the commission’s meeting on November 12, 1922.5

  That seemed like plenty. The commission allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water for the states of the Upper Basin—Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico—and 7.5 million acre-feet for the states of the Lower Basin—Nevada, Arizona, and California. A treaty between the United States and Mexico signed in 1944 added another 1.5 million acre-feet of rights for water users in Sonora and Baja California, bringing the total to 16.5 million acre-feet.

  What they did not grasp until years later was that their twenty-year baseline was unusual. How unusual? With the advent of tree-ring reconstructions of past climate, we now know it was the wettest twenty-year period in at least 500 years.6

  As early as the late 1920s, before the first of the river’s big dams was built, there were signs that the planners had made a mistake, that there was in fact less water in the river than they thought.7 But political expediency trumped hydrologic doubt, and the institutional plumbers continued to rely on the old numbers as they divided up the river’s flow and built the infrastructure to put the water to use.

  For most of the next century, water use in the basin grew slowly enough to mask the problem. But as consumption grew into the original allocations and drought set in as the twenty-first century began, the shrinking reservoirs left the early institutional plumbers’ mistakes on display for all to see. In the years since the compact was signed, the river has averaged just 15.5 million acre-feet per year, while water use has inexorably grown.8

  The problems were compounded by a deep and persistent drought that began in the year 2000. Only three of the years from 2000 to 2015 had above-average streamflow, with overall flow during that period 16 percent below the long-term average. Scientists first predicted in 1993 that climate change caused by rising greenhouse gases was likely to reduce the Colorado River’s flow. As the studies projecting shortages mounted, by the 2000s it appeared evident that the change was under way. But despite the warning signs, the basin’s big users continued to take their full allotments from Lake Mead. By the summer of 2015 the big reservoir had dropped to record low levels, with shoreline emerging that had not been above the waterline since the reservoir was first filled in the 1930s.9

  Graph of Colorado River water supply and use.

  The bank account was on the brink of being overdrawn.

  Embracing Alfalfa

  The most important legal principal undergirding the Colorado River’s water allocations asserts that the first communities to put water to “beneficial use” get first dibs in times of scarcity. It is called “the doctrine of prior appropriation,” and in the West, that most often means agriculture. The result is that half of the Colorado River’s water is consumed
by pasture and cattle feed crops, especially alfalfa.10 Per dollar invested and gallon of water used, alfalfa in particular and pasture crops in general are the West’s lowest-value major crop. But rather than seeing this as a problem, and arguing that it makes no sense, it’s better to view alfalfa as part of the solution.

  We can debate whether it was a good idea throughout the twentieth century to allocate so much water in this way. But that’s done. Farmers like Herkenhoff in places like San Acacia made good-faith decisions about where to build their homes and how to make a living based on a national policy of subsidizing irrigation water and the infrastructure needed to deliver it. Change requires that we come to grips with the reality that the Colorado’s history has made it a working, agricultural river, and that communities built their lives around those choices.

  When the grand project that became the development of the Colorado River was launched in 1902 with the Newlands Reclamation Act, there was little notion that the water being impounded by the dams and distributed through the canals would fuel cities in the arid West. The plumbing was for farming, a concept embedded in the very name of the agency the law created, the US Reclamation Service. Money was “to be used in the examination and survey for and the construction and maintenance of irrigation works for the storage, diversion, and development of waters for the reclamation of arid and semiarid lands.” Reclamation meant turning useless desert into productive farms. Francis Newlands, the Nevada congressman whose name the act bears, could not have imagined a Las Vegas metro area holding most of his state’s population. He thought irrigated agriculture was the only way to halt what was then a decline in Nevada’s population.11

  Thus it was that farmers, and the irrigation system managers who helped them, developed the basic architecture of the West’s desert plumbing, the physical parts that moved the water from rivers as well as the institutional part that managed that process. Farmers told me this, often, when I came calling as a city dweller trying to understand their world. Long before the big inland cities were even a gleam in developers’ eyes, farmers and their irrigation agencies, led by the Reclamation Service (later elevated to the “Bureau of Reclamation”) were damming and diverting the water to make lives on the arid landscape. They built the superstructure on which our hydraulic empire was erected.