Water is for Fighting Over

by John Fleck

  This did not sit well. While the US effort to find the funding dragged on, the conflict festered. The US government did additional reviews of the project’s environmental impacts, but refused to consult with the Mexican government.17 On the Mexican side of the border, public opposition rose all the way to the nation’s president, Felipe Calderón, who said during a speech in Tijuana that the canal lining would “cause enormous damage to the environment and the economy of the Baja California border.”18 In 2005, as construction was finally set to begin, a coalition of US environmental groups and Mexicali Valley civic organizations sued.

  They lost, but the US approach to the action “drove the US-Mexico border water relationship to a new low,” wrote US water attorneys Jonathan King and Peter Culp and Mexican researcher Carlos de la Parra, “and provided an excellent example of the resentment that the continued, arms-length water-management relationship could generate.”19

  It was not the first time the Mexicans had been left out. As we saw earlier, for example, solving the problems of the Wellton-Mohawk Valley required a callous willingness on the part of US water managers to dump salty water onto the irrigation and municipal intakes of their southern neighbors. Similarly, attempts to conserve “wasted” water by building temporary reservoir storage near the US-Mexico border to capture water that would otherwise be spilled from the Colorado River itself into Mexico came at the expense of downstream natural habitat that eked out a meager survival on the surplus water.

  The end of abundance was forcing US water managers to tighten up the operation of their system, so reducing the “waste” of water made sense. But one person’s waste was another’s bounty, and all the losers in this zero-sum game were on the southern side of the US-Mexico border, left out of the discussions.

  Environmental Values and the Surplus Guidelines

  I’ve described the negotiations that led in the early 2000s to reductions in California’s Colorado River water use as a success, and—measured by the standards of those driving the process—they were. The old “water buffalos,” the representatives of the agencies responsible for moving water out of the Colorado River and putting it to human use, dominated the discussions and defined the goals. By their criteria, creating a framework to address the problem of California’s overuse of Colorado River water was astoundingly successful. But the only way to get the deal’s hydrologic equations to balance was to sidestep environmental issues in a process that illustrates the shortcomings of insulated negotiations. If you can only solve your problem by cutting water to stakeholders who are excluded from the process, you’ve got a serious shortcoming, and the resulting side effects are likely to linger. That is what happened with environmental interests in the 1990s, and some of the problems created then are still around today.

  You can see the failure in an exchange of correspondence in 2000 between a coalition of environmental groups and the Bureau of Reclamation. It began with a plea in February of that year from the groups that the Bureau’s new river rules should not ignore water for the desiccated Colorado River Delta. For years, the groups had been pushing without success to improve natural habitat in the delta. Now, the Bureau of Reclamation was contemplating changes in its river management that had the potential to make the already bad delta environmental situation even worse.

  To meet the delicate balancing act of providing a “soft landing” for California, the new Bureau plan would capture the last bits of “surplus” that had occasionally still flowed down the river channel to the delta, choking off what little water was left and diverting it as well. The environment was left bearing the cost of California’s overuse.20 The groups reminded Bureau officials of the tremendous amount of Colorado River Delta habitat that had already been lost as upstream rivers choked off the Colorado, diverting the vast majority of the water to farms and cities in the United States.

  In light of what followed, the environmentalists’ February 2000 letter looks like a hopeless, strident, and naive demand. “Environmental needs must be met before any quantity of discretionary water is dedicated to consumptive users. Until then it is not truly ‘surplus,’” the groups wrote.21

  The Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen, who has become a quintessential example of the environmentalists now admitted into the inner sanctum of Colorado River Basin policy debates, laughed when I reminded him of the combative tone of the letter that he and his colleagues had written more than a decade earlier. “We were young,” he said.22

  The “we” consisted of the most prominent environmental groups on the US side of the border, including American Rivers, the Environmental Defense Fund (then known as “Environmental Defense”), and the Sierra Club. They offered up a proposal that, they argued, could meet California’s needs while at the same time freeing up water for environmental flows in the river’s channel in the Colorado River in Mexico. Their proposal included a strict requirement: that the US secretary of interior would not be permitted to declare any waters surplus and available for human use in California or elsewhere until there were scientific assurances that there would be enough water to maintain environmental flows in the delta.

  The federal government would have none of it, arguing that it had no responsibility for the environmental impacts of its actions in Mexico. “The delivery of surplus water to Mexico is beyond the purpose and need for interim surplus criteria,” the Bureau of Reclamation wrote in a formal response to the proposal.23 But by the time the official response had been issued in late 2000, it was already too late. A smaller group of US environmentalists, joined by colleagues across the border, had already filed suit, charging that US water managers were ignoring the environmental impacts on the Colorado River Delta of Mexico.24 Excluded from the decision-making process, the groups saw no alternative but to take the matter to court. They lost. The basin’s water managers seemed free to ignore this critical constituency.

  There are other cases like this. The failure to include communities that could be harmed by the decline of the Salton Sea may be the most important. Conflict between water managers and the electric-power community over changes to the operation of Glen Canyon Dam is another.25 All these cases raise questions of environmental justice and suggest that water managers need to find ways to make their efforts more inclusive. But even if you ignore those moral questions, exclusion poses a risk. Parties left out, who are harmed by decisions made by insular circles, can derail important efforts to solve the basin’s problems.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Beaver Returns to the Delta

  DANIEL TREMBLEY MACDOUGAL, boating through the Colorado River’s great delta in 1905, found a landscape incongruous to a New Yorker—in the midst of a great desert, a jungle “sufficient to support a vast amount of native animal life.” Spread over some 3,000 square miles, the delta seemed impervious to the forces that were reshaping the landscape of western North America. He wrote: “The countless millions of young willow and poplar shoots supply food for the beaver, which bids well to hold out long in the impassable bayous and swamps against the trapper foe.”1

  The landscape today would be unrecognizable to MacDougal. Scraggly salt cedars, a Eurasian invasive, have taken the willows’ place, flanking a largely dry channel, more desert wash than great American river. But as one of the greatest challenges to environmental river management in the United States and Mexico, that dusty river channel also offers one of the greatest signs of hope.

  Two hydrologic facts shaped the landscape that MacDougal described more than a century ago. The first was the tremendous volume of water the Colorado River offered up as it spread across the desert before reaching the Sea of Cortez. Aldo Leopold’s poetic description of the river as it slowed in its last miles through the labyrinth of its distributary delta is often quoted. He and his brother had canoed the delta in 1922, before upstream dams changed it forever—“a hundred green lagoons” teeming with life: “For the last word in procrastination, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his freedom to the sea.”2

&n
bsp; The second hydrologic fact was the annual cycle, the rise and fall of the river as it flooded with the runoff from the Rocky Mountains’ melting snow, then dwindled in the quiet of winter. MacDougal described water “a height of a hundred feet above low-water mark” by mid-summer as snowmelt submerged the landscape. Some 70 percent of the river’s entire flow would pass through the delta between May and July. James Ohio Pattie, an early beaver trapper, described the river bottoms as being six to ten miles wide and “subject to inundation in the flush waters of June.”3

  The trappers had made token efforts. One of the first English-language accounts we have of the delta comes from Pattie, who tried his hand there in the 1820s. Floating down from the Gila River in current-day Arizona into the delta, Pattie and his party caught so many beavers that they had to build an extra canoe to carry their haul.4

  When MacDougal saw the beavers, he imagined “the trapper foe” to be their biggest enemy, never considering the real threat to the beaver—that the river itself might disappear. Yet by the 1960s, with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam, flows to the delta dropped to nearly nothing. Only in times so wet that the great reservoirs upstream “filled and spilled”—for a few years in the 1980s, and again in the late 1990s—did water make it past Morelos Dam on the US-Mexico border and into the delta, to occasionally reach all the way down the river channel to the Sea of Cortez.

  This is not to say there is no water in the region. Water diverted from the river at Morelos Dam, along with pumped groundwater, irrigates at least 450,000 acres, an area slightly larger than the Imperial Irrigation District on the northern side of the border.5 Like their neighbors in the United States, the government and people of Mexico decided to use their share of the Colorado River to fuel a modern agricultural and urban economy. Like the Imperial Valley, the resulting landscape has been turned into incredibly productive farmland as a result, with wheat, cotton, and alfalfa the dominant crops on the Mexican side of the border. As in the United States, agriculture uses most of the water—91 percent by one estimate.6 There is usually no water left for the river itself.

  Scientific data is scant, but locals say beavers were nearly completely gone from the region during the dry times that came with the closure of Glen Canyon Dam and the diversion of the river’s entire flow. But on the few occasions that the delta flooded, the beavers would reappear, perhaps following the flow down from refuges upstream.7

  And so it was again, in the spring of 2014. A small flow of excess agricultural water flowed past willows through a human-built environmental restoration site. As soon as the water arrived, delivered through irrigation canals in an early phase of the river restoration efforts, beavers materialized out of the ecological mists, damming the little channel. They had found their way back.

  By mid-summer, the beavers did not have to depend on the excess farm water. For a brief few weeks, Colorado River water flowing back down the river’s main channel reached the environmental restoration site and a real river brought water to the delta’s beavers.

  It is important not to focus too narrowly on the spring 2014 “pulse flow” when the gates of the Morelos Dam were lifted. The environmental water was part of a historic amendment to the 1944 US-Mexico treaty, which created new rules for managing reservoir storage, shortages, and surpluses on the shared river. Even without the pulse flow, it would stand as a huge breakthrough in Colorado River management, a major step toward bringing the United States and Mexico together into a unified regime for the overstressed Colorado River. But the environmental piece of the agreement carried with it enormous symbolic and substantive value. As we stood at the foot of Morelos Dam in March 2014 watching the first water flow south, environmental attorney Peter Culp, who had helped negotiate the deal, said it was the first time two nations had used water to provide environmental flows across an international boundary.8

  “Wasted Water”

  Indeed, environmental flows had long been at the bottom of the priority list. If anything, water managers’ efforts to use every last drop over the first decade of the twenty-first century had been making things worse for the delta. No project better illustrated the tension between environmental and water-management goals than the Drop 2 reservoir, off Interstate 8 in the Imperial Valley of southeastern California. As a water-conservation measure, Drop 2 was brilliant. Until the reservoir’s construction was completed in 2010, a rainstorm in the Lower Colorado River Basin desert could perversely result in “wasted” water. Farmers would order water from Lake Mead, but if it rained during the three days it took the water to travel from the dam to their field, storm water from desert arroyos would add to the river’s flows. At the same time, farmers’ demand would drop because of the rain on their fields, resulting in extra water in the Colorado’s channel. The result was water slipped past Imperial Dam and into Mexico unused, “wasted” in the eyes of US water users.9 The amount thus “wasted” was small.10 But it represented some of the only water that reached the otherwise dry riverbed south of Morelos Dam.

  For cities desperate for every last drop, the potential for savings could not be ignored. The new Drop 2 reservoir (later renamed Warren H. Brock Reservoir after a pioneering Imperial Valley farmer),11 was built to capture the unused water. The next time the Imperial Irrigation District needed water, they could take some out of the new reservoir, leaving a like amount in Lake Mead.

  The big urban water agencies, primarily Las Vegas, paid the reservoir’s $200 million cost in return for credits for the saved water.12 It was a clever water-management innovation, but it meant the end of some of the meager accidental environmental flows that otherwise wound up headed toward the delta.

  For residents of Mexico as well as US environmentalists trying to figure out how to put water back into the delta for its own sake, this seemed like a step in the wrong direction. But at the same time as the Drop 2 project was moving forward, quiet discussions among water agencies and between the United States and Mexico were beginning to gain momentum. In the summer of 2007, US interior secretary Dirk Kempthorne and Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, met in Washington, DC, for what one of the participants described as “a very frank, informed, and thoughtful dialogue on the need for better Colorado River relationships between the two nations.” Those discussions led to the issuance of a joint statement pledging to do something about the delta’s environment in the context of broader US-Mexican negotiations to sort out unresolved differences over the Colorado River. The statement sketched out a broad agenda, from climate change to the possibility of seawater desalination to augment supplies. But it also made the most explicit acknowledgment to date that the delta mattered, highlighting “environmental priorities, including Colorado River Delta habitat protection and enhancement” as one of the key priorities for the talks to come.13

  The statement promised “expedite(d) discussions” in a matter of weeks. The discussions began. A deal took longer. But the process was under way.

  The United States and Mexico Start Talking

  The steps that led to the beavers’ water flowing back down the Colorado River’s channel are a case study in how Colorado River Basin problem solving can succeed—including the part about how it will not be easy.

  Philip Fradkin’s 1981 classic A River No More framed much of the debate that followed, leaving a lasting impression of a delta lost for good. Fradkin called his closing chapter “Death in the Desert,” describing a sad search through a wasteland of mudflats for the river’s terminus.14 Elsewhere the problems of North America’s great estuaries—the Chesapeake Bay, the Everglades, the Sacramento–San Joaquin delta—triggered societal handwringing. As upstream users diverted their water and polluted what was left, the fate of these wetlands remained uncertain, but at least there was a societal conversation about them, with arguments over Endangered Species Act obligations and federal funding to try to fix the problems. But each of those estuaries lay entirely within the United States. In western North America, the convenience of a
n international border allowed us to largely ignore the Colorado River Delta, using the river’s water on both sides of the border while ignoring the environmental and cultural consequences downstream.

  Yet when the Colorado’s great reservoirs “filled and spilled” in the late 1990s, scientists were amazed at the results. With a relatively small amount of water briefly returned to the river’s main channel, it took little time for cottonwoods and willows along the old river’s banks to begin popping back. The hopelessness of Fradkin’s powerful account was unwarranted, scientists and environmentalists realized. While tearing down the big dams and replumbing the societies in both countries that depended on them was obviously unrealistic, the events of the 1990s made it clear that the amount of water needed to bring some semblance of life back to the delta river channel seemed within reach.

  Environmentalists and scientists like the University of Arizona’s Karl Flessa committed themselves to the goal of moving beyond the occasional accidental flows when the upstream reservoirs were full to creating a formal program to routinely put small amounts of water back in the delta’s river. Even a modest pulse flow released from Morelos Dam down the main river channel, they argued, could bring the ecosystem back to life, albeit modestly. But the political entanglements of two nations, a border, and unsettled legal questions about who was entitled to how much water left the deal just out of reach.