Several
miles from Phantom Ranch, Grand Canyon, Arizona, April 2013 – Down
here, at the bottom of the continent’s most spectacular canyon, the
Colorado River growls past our sandy beach in a wet monotone. Our group
of 24 is one week into a 225-mile, 18-day voyage on inflatable rafts
from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek. We settle in for the night. Above us,
the canyon walls part like a pair of maloccluded jaws, and moonlight
streams between them, bright enough to read by.
One remarkable
feature of the modern Colorado, the great whitewater rollercoaster that
carved the Grand Canyon, is that it is a tidal river. Before heading for
our sleeping bags, we need to retie our six boats to allow for the ebb.
These
days, the tides of the Colorado are not lunar but Phoenician. Yes, I’m
talking about Phoenix, Arizona. On this April night, when the air
conditioners in America’s
merely
hum, Glen Canyon Dam, immediately upstream from the canyon, will run
about 6,500 cubic feet of water through its turbines every second.
Tomorrow,
as the sun begins its daily broiling of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa,
Tempe, and the rest of central Arizona, the engineers at Glen Canyon
will crank the dam’s maw wider until it sucks down 11,000 cubic feet per
second (cfs). That boost in flow will enable its hydroelectric
generators to deliver “peaking power” to several million air
conditioners and cooling plants in Phoenix’s Valley of the Sun. And the
flow of the river will therefore nearly double.
It takes time for
these dam-controlled tidal pulses to travel downstream. Where we are
now, just above Zoroaster Rapid, the river is roughly in phase with the
dam: low at night, high in the daytime. Head a few days down the river
and it will be the reverse.
By mid-summer, temperatures in Phoenix
will routinely soar above 110°F, and power demands will rise to
monstrous heights, day and night. The dam will respond:
will gush through the generators by the light of the moon, 18,000 while an implacable sun rules the sky.
Such
are the cycles — driven by heat, comfort, and human necessity — of the
river at the bottom of the continent’s grandest canyon.
The
crucial question for Phoenix, for the Colorado, and for the greater part
of the American West is this: How long will the water hold out?
Major Powell’s Main Point
Every trip down the river — and there are
more than 1,000 like
ours yearly — partly reenacts the legendary descent of the Colorado by
the one-armed explorer and Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell. The
Major, as he preferred to be known, plunged into the Great Unknown with
10 companions in 1869. They started out in four boats from Green River,
Wyoming, but one of the men walked out early after nearly drowning in
the stretch of whitewater that Powell named Disaster Falls, and three
died in the desert after the expedition fractured in its final miles.
That left Powell and six others to reach the Mormon settlements on the
Virgin River in the vicinity of present-day Las Vegas, Nevada.
Powell’s
exploits on the Colorado brought him fame and celebrity, which he
parlayed into a career that turned out to be controversial and
illustrious in equal measure. As geologist, geographer, and ethnologist,
Powell became one of the nation’s most influential scientists. He also
excelled as an institution-builder, bureaucrat, political in-fighter,
and national scold.
Most famously, and in bold opposition to the boomers and boosters then cheerleading America’s westward migration, he
warned that
the defining characteristic of western lands was their aridity.
Settlement of the West, he wrote, would have to respect the limits
aridity imposed.
He was half right.
The subsequent story of
the West can indeed be read as an unending duel between society’s thirst
and the dryness of the land, but in downtown Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Los
Angeles you’d hardly know it.
By the middle years of the
twentieth century, western Americans had created a kind of miracle in
the desert, successfully conjuring abundance from Powell’s aridity.
Thanks to reservoirs large and small, and scores of dams including
colossi like Hoover and Glen Canyon, as well as more than 1,000 miles of
aqueducts and countless pumps, siphons, tunnels, and diversions, the
West has by now been thoroughly re-rivered and re-engineered. It has
been given the plumbing system of a giant water-delivery machine, and in
the process, its liquid resources have been stretched far beyond
anything the Major might have imagined.
Today the Colorado River, the most fully harnessed of the West’s great waterways,
provides water
to some 40 million people and irrigates nearly 5.5 million acres of
farmland. It also touches 22 Indian reservations, seven National
Wildlife Reservations, and at least 15 units of the National Park
System, including the Grand Canyon.
These achievements come at a
cost. The Colorado River no longer flows to the sea, and down here in
the bowels of the canyon, its diminishment is everywhere in evidence. In
many places, the riverbanks wear a tutu of tamarisk trees along their
edge. They have been able to dress up, now that the river, constrained
from major flooding, no longer rips their clothes off.
The daily
hydroelectric tides gradually wash away the sandbars and beaches that
natural floods used to build with the river’s silt and bed load (the
sands and gravels that roll along its bottom). Nowadays, nearly all that
cargo is trapped in Lake Powell, the enormous reservoir behind Glen
Canyon Dam. The water the dam releases is clear and cold (drawn from the
depths of the lake), which is just the thing for nonnative trout, but
bad news for homegrown chubs and suckers, which evolved, quite
literally, in the murk of ages past. Some of the canyon’s native fish
species have been
extirpated from
the canyon; others cling to life by a thread, helped by the protection
of the Endangered Species Act. In the last few days, we’ve seen more
fisheries biologists along the river and its side-streams than we have
tourists.
The Shrinking Cornucopia
In the
arid lands of the American West, abundance has a troublesome way of
leading back again to scarcity. If you have a lot of something, you find
a way to use it up — at least, that’s the history of the “development”
of the Colorado Basin.
Until now, the ever-more-complex water
delivery systems of that basin have managed to meet the escalating needs
of their users. This is true in part because the states of the Upper
Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico) were slower to develop
than their downstream cousins. Under the
Colorado River Compact of
1922, the Upper and Lower Basins divided the river with the Upper Basin
assuring the Lower of an average of 7.5 million acre-feet (maf) of
water per year delivered to Lees Ferry Arizona, the dividing point
between the two. The Upper Basin would use the rest. Until recently,
however, it left a large share of its water in the river, which
California, and secondarily Arizona and Nevada, happily put to use.
Those
days are gone. The Lower Basin states now get only their annual
entitlement and no more. Unfortunately for them, it’s not enough, and
never will be.
Currently, the Lower Basin lives beyond its means —
to the tune of about 1.3 maf per year, essentially consuming 117% of
its allocation.
That 1.3 maf overage consists of evaporation,
system losses, and the Lower Basin’s share of the annual U.S. obligation
to Mexico of 1.5 maf. As it happens, the region budgets for none of
these “costs” of doing business, and if pressed, some of its leaders
will argue that the Mexican treaty is actually a federal responsibility,
toward which the Lower Basin need not contribute water.
The Lower
Basin funds its deficit by drawing on the accumulated water surplus
held in the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, which backs up behind
Hoover Dam. Unfortunately, with the Lower Basin using more water than
it receives, the surplus there can’t last forever, and maybe not for
long. In November 2010, the water level of the lake
fell to
its lowest elevation ever — 1,082 feet above sea level, a foot lower
than its previous nadir during the fierce drought of the 1950s.
Had the dry weather held — and
increasing doses of
such weather are predicted for the region in the future — the reservoir
would have soon fallen another seven feet and triggered the threshold
for mandatory (but inadequate) cutbacks in water delivery to the Lower
Basin states. Instead, heavy snowfall in the northern Rockies bailed out
the system by producing a mighty runoff, lifting the reservoir a
whopping 52 feet.
Since then, however, weather throughout the
Colorado Basin has been relentlessly dry, and the lake has resumed its
precipitous fall. It now stands at
1,106 feet, which translates to roughly 47% of capacity. Lake Powell, Mead’s alter ego, is in about the same condition.
Another
dry year or two, and the Colorado system will be back where it was in
2010, staring down a crisis. There is, however, a consolation — of
sorts. The Colorado is nowhere near as badly off as New Mexico and the
Rio Grande.
How Dry I Am This Side of the Pecos
In May, New Mexico
marked the
close of the driest two-year period in the 120 years since records
began to be kept. Its largest reservoir, Elephant Butte, which stores
water from the Rio Grande, is effectively dry.
Meanwhile, parched Texas has
filed suit against
New Mexico in multiple jurisdictions, including the Supreme Court, to
force the state to send more water downstream — water it doesn’t have.
Texas has already
appropriated $5 million to litigate the matter. If it wins, the hit taken by agriculture in south-central New Mexico could be disastrous.
In
eastern New Mexico, the woes of the Pecos River mirror those of the Rio
Grande and pit the Pecos basin’s two largest cities, Carlsbad and
Roswell, directly against each other. These days, the
only thing moving in
the irrigation canals of the Carlsbad Irrigation District is dust. The
canals are bone dry because upstream groundwater pumping in the Roswell
area has deprived the Pecos River of its flow. By pumping heavily from
wells that tap the aquifer under the Pecos River, Roswell’s farmers have
drawn off water that might otherwise find its way to the surface and
flow downstream.
Carlsbad’s water rights are senior to (that is, older than) Roswell’s, so in theory — under the doctrine of
Prior Appropriation –
Carlsbad is entitled to the water Roswell is using. The dispute pits
Carlsbad’s substantial agricultural economy against Roswell’s, which is
twice as big. The bottom line, as with Texas’s lawsuit over the Rio
Grande, is that there simply isn’t enough water to go around.
If
you want to put your money on one surefire bet in the Southwest, it’s
this: one way or another, however these or any other onrushing disputes
turn out, large numbers of farmers are going to go out of business.
Put on Your Rain-Dancing Shoes
New
Mexico’s present struggles, difficult as they may be, will look
small-scale indeed when compared to what will eventually befall the
Colorado. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation expects the river’s 40 million
water-users to grow to
between 49.3 and 76.5 million by
2060. This translates into a thirst for Colorado River water of 18.1 to
20.4 maf — oceans more than its historical yield of 16.4 maf.
And that’s not even the bad news, which is that, compared to
the long-term paleo-record,
the historical average, compiled since the late nineteenth century, is
aberrantly high. Moreover, climate change will undoubtedly take its
toll, and perhaps has already begun to do so. One recent study
forecasts that the yield of the Colorado will decline 10% by about 2030, and it will keep falling after that.
None
of the available remedies inspires much confidence. “Augmentation” —
diverting water from another basin into the Colorado system — is
politically, if not economically, infeasible. Desalination, which can be
effective in specific, local situations, is too expensive and
energy-consuming to slake much of the Southwest’s thirst. Weather
modification, aka rain-making, isn’t much more effective today than it
was in 1956 when Burt Lancaster starred as a water-witching con man in “
The Rainmaker,”
and vegetation management (so that trees and brush will consume less
water) is a non-starter when climate change and epidemic fires are
already reworking the landscape.
Undoubtedly, there will be small
successes squeezing water from unlikely sources here and there, but the
surest prospect for the West? That a bumper harvest of lawsuits is
approaching. Water lawyers in the region can look forward to full
employment for decades to come. Their clients will include irrigation
farmers, thirsty cities, and power companies that need water to cool
their thermal generators and to drive their hydroelectric generators.
Count
on it: the recreation industry, which demands water for boating and
other sports, will be filing its briefs, too, as will environmental
groups struggling to prevent endangered species and whole ecosystems
from blinking out. The people of the West will not only watch them; they
— or rather, we — will all in one way or another be among them as they
gather before various courts in the legal equivalent of circular firing
squads.
Hey, Mister, What’s that Sound?
Here
at the bottom of Grand Canyon, with the river rushing by, we listen for
the boom of the downstream rapids toward which we are headed. Sometimes
they sound like a far-off naval bombardment, sometimes more like the
roar of an oncoming freight train, which is entirely appropriate. After
all, the river, like a railroad, is a delivery system with a valuable
cargo. Think of it as a stream of liquid property, every pint within it
already spoken for, every drop owned by someone and obligated somewhere,
according to a labyrinth of potentially conflicting contracts.
The
owners of those contracts know now that the river can’t supply enough
gallons, pints, and drops to satisfy everybody, and so they are bound to
live the truth of the old western saying: “Whiskey’s for drinkin’, and
water’s for fightin’.”
In the end, Powell was right about at least one thing: aridity bats last.
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