Chasing Water

A Guide for Moving from Scarcity to Sustainability

Brian Richter

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781610915373
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Science générale

Water scarcity is spreading and intensifying in many regions of the world, with dire consequences for local communities, economies, and freshwater ecosystems. Current approaches tend to rely on policies crafted at the state or national level, which on their own have proved insufficient to arrest water scarcity. To be durable and effective, water plans must be informed by the culture, economics, and varied needs of affected community members.International water expert Brian Richter argues that sustainable water sharing in the twenty-first century can only happen through open, democratic dialogue and local collective action. In Chasing Water, Richter tells a cohesive and complete story of water scarcity: where it is happening, what is causing it, and how it can be addressed. Through his engaging and nontechnical style, he strips away the complexities of water management to its bare essentials, providing information and practical examples that will empower community leaders, activists, and students to develop successful and long-lasting water programs. Chasing Water will provide local stakeholders with the tools and knowledge they need to take an active role in the watershed-based planning and implementation that are essential for water supplies to remain sustainable in perpetuity.

CHAPTER ONE

Running Out of Water

In March 1934, Benjamin Baker Moeur, then governor of the state of Arizona in the United States, became extremely agitated upon hearing that the neighboring state of California was preparing to build a dam on the Colorado River to deliver more water to growing cities in Southern California. The river, which in its lower reaches forms the border between California and Arizona, had recently shriveled to a fifth of its normal water flow after 5 years of parching drought across the western part of the country.

Moeur had not been advised of any plans to build a dam on the lower Colorado, and he worried that California was going to take more than its fair share of a river that was already showing signs of strain.

Upon hearing the news of the dam’s construction, the governor immediately sent six members of the Arizona National Guard to investigate. They traveled upriver from Yuma aboard a ramshackle ferryboat named the Nellie Jo, newly christened as the “Arizona Navy” for its reconnaissance mission. In an escapade reminiscent of the Three Stooges comedies that began appearing in movie theaters that same year, the Nellie Jo ran aground on a sandbar just below the dam construction site, and the guardsmen had to be rescued by construction workers.

The guardsmen continued to monitor the dam work for 7 months, sending daily dispatches to the governor by radio. When the guardsmen reported that construction activities had finally touched upon Arizona’s shore, Moeur became incensed. He invoked martial law, issued a proclamation to “Repel an Invasion,” and sent out a 100-man militia unit in eighteen trucks, some with mounted machine guns, to halt construction.¹ Another seventeen truckloads of troops were prepared to head upriver in a ferryboat flotilla when U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes stepped in, asking Moeur to back down, and pacifying him with assurances that all dam construction would be stopped until the dispute could be settled.

But Ickes was livid over Moeur’s aggressive actions, and he retaliated by suing Arizona in the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the state from interfering with the construction of Parker Dam. After all, he reasoned, California’s right to divert water from the Colorado had been explicitly authorized by Congress in 1922 through the Colorado River Compact, also known as the “Law of the River,” which allocated portions of the river to each of the seven states through which the river flows.

Much to Ickes’s surprise, the Supreme Court ruled in Arizona’s favor. The court noted that Parker Dam, to be built by a federal water agency, had never been formally authorized by the U.S. Congress, and Arizona had not yet signed the Colorado River Compact, because it disagreed with the small amount of water it was being given through the compact.

Eventually, Moeur dropped his opposition to Parker Dam in exchange for a commitment from Ickes to provide federal funding for substantially expanding irrigation projects in Arizona with water from the Colorado. Arizona subsequently signed the Colorado River Compact in 1944.

The drought of the 1930s came and went, but water development projects sanctioned in that decade fixed the fate of the Colorado River for the century that would follow (fig. 1-1). Hoover Dam, when completed in 1936, became the largest dam in the world at the time. Parker Dam was finally completed in 1938. The Colorado River Aqueduct built in 1939 connected the reservoir created by Parker Dam with city taps in Southern California. Other canals sent enormous volumes of water to irrigation projects in California’s Imperial Valley and the Gila Valley of Arizona.

The increasingly heavy use of the Colorado’s water over the past 80 years has created a highly precarious and contentious situation for all that depend on the river today. Phillip Fradkin, writing in his book A River No More,² described the Colorado as “the most used, most dramatic, and most highly litigated and politicized river in this country.” The interstate water compact of 1922 set the stage for a litigious drama that continues to this day. That agreement, which sliced the Colorado’s water pie into seven pieces for the states sharing the river, was based on an estimate that the river carried 21.6 billion cubic meters (17.5 million acre-feet³) of water each year on average. The compact allocated 19.7 billion cubic meters (16 million acre-feet) among the seven states, with roughly half of it going to the states sharing the upper river, and the other half to the downstream states.⁴

Figure 1-1. Map of the Colorado River system.

In hindsight, it is easy to see that there were defects in the architecture of the compact. Granting rights to consume more than 90 percent of the river’s average flow was a recipe for disaster from the beginning: What would happen in years when the river carried less than the average volume? What about Mexico’s needs, where the river emptied into the Gulf of California, nourishing fisheries and watering delta farms along the way? The compact acknowledged the need to negotiate water sharing with Mexico in the future, but did its authors really think that leaving just a trickle of water to its downstream neighbor would be a fair bargain?

To make matters worse, we now know that the engineers of the day had overestimated the river’s average water bounty when the compact was drafted. The period used as the basis for calculating the average flow of the river—1905 to 1922—included periods of abnormally high rainfall. Recent scientific assessments based on a much longer period of measurements now place the river’s average flow at least 15 percent lower, somewhere between 17.6 and 18.5 billion cubic meters (14.3 and 15 million acre-feet), and climate scientists now caution that the river is headed for even drier times.⁵ The bottom line: the river was overallocated from the very beginning.

Those who depend on the Colorado River are still living with the consequences of a 1920s compact based on wrong data and exclusively utilitarian objectives. The sterile accounting of cubic meters of water does not begin to describe the social strain and economic pain experienced by the river’s dependents when the river’s performance is below average. During the recent drought of 1999–2003, electricity generation from the big hydropower dams on the river dropped by more than 20 percent, sending a shock wave through electricity bills across the southwestern United States.⁶ Farmers watched their irrigation canals run dry and their crops wither. Lowered water levels in Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam, left boat marinas high and dry, leading to 900,000 fewer tourist visits and lost revenues of $28 million, along with a loss of 680 jobs in the area.⁷

The most telling measure of the compact’s failings is the fact that the river today runs completely dry before reaching the sea—not just in dry years, but in virtually every year. Many would assert that fully consuming a river’s water is our manifest destiny, or the logical conclusion of using a precious resource to its fullest potential. But others see much more than cubic meters and kilowatts in a river.

In describing the Colorado River Compact in a Los Angeles Times editorial in 2012, water scientist and author Sandra Postel lamented, “All seven U.S. states in the basin were represented, but two voices were missing. One was that of Mexico. The other was the river itself.”⁸

With every available crumb of the Colorado’s water pie being consumed, the river has lost much of its once legendary ecological richness. In the river’s delta, a place that the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold once described as a “wilderness of milk and honey” punctuated with deep green lagoons and marshes full of waterfowl and fish, now only a sunbaked, salt-caked barren wasteland remains. As the river ran dry, fisheries in the delta and the Gulf of California in Mexico were decimated, including a large population of totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), a fish that can grow to more than 100 kilograms (250 pounds). Any visitor to the desiccated delta today would find it very difficult to envision a behemoth fish like the totoaba swimming there. It would be like trying to imagine life on other planets.

The overallocated river has spawned social inequity as well. For more than a 1,000 years, an indigenous tribe of Cucapá—the “people of the river”—has relied on fishing and subsistence farming in the delta. When the river compact was being negotiated in 1922, no messenger was sent to the delta to invite the Cucapá to the bargaining table. When Mexico in 1944 wrestled with the United States for rights to the last of the river’s dregs, Mexican officials were seeking water to grow asparagus and cotton in Mexicali, not fish or melons to feed the Cucapá. The river’s natural bounty once supported more than 6,000 Cucapá. Fewer than 600 remain.⁹

History has in many ways validated Governor Moeur’s anxieties of nearly a century ago: there are limits to what a river can give, and great care must be given to judgments about sharing water, because those decisions can bind like a knot and become difficult to untie. As the states sharing the river continue to negotiate its future, they should ask a question never asked as the Colorado River Compact was being negotiated 90 years ago: Do we really want to take it all?

Figure 1-2. The Colorado River now dries up completely in the sands of its delta, breaking its fluid connection with the Gulf of California in Mexico. Can a river still be a river when the water is all gone? (Photo by Pete McBride.)

We possess the means to wring every last drop from the planet’s rivers and lakes, or to suck its aquifers dry, but is that what we want to do? Or do we instead want to leave some water alone, enough to fuel the biological engines of our planet, or to serve as a hedge against dry times and an uncertain future, or simply to irrigate our souls with the intrinsic beauty of flowing water? Can a river still be a river when the water is all gone (fig. 1-2)?

Those questions are now increasingly being asked and answered for depleted rivers, lakes, and aquifers around the world. Australia’s minister of water, Tony Burke, put it this way in explaining the goals of the 2012 Basin Plan for the Murray-Darling system: “Everybody needs to have healthy rivers. No one wins when our rivers die. And what’s been happening for a long time now is that we’ve pulled so much water out of the rivers that they’re living as though it’s drought, ages before any drought actually arrives.”¹⁰

When rivers and other freshwater ecosystems are maintained in healthy ecological condition, they provide myriad benefits and services to society. Natural vegetation such as floodplain forests and wetlands slow the flow of water, reducing its destructive force. As the water slows, it is cleansed by biological processes and can recharge groundwater aquifers. The freshwater moving through a river ecosystem to coastal areas maintains proper salt balances and carries nutrients to estuaries, enabling fish, shellfish, and other animals to breed and grow. The sediment carried by rivers forms and replenishes coastal beaches and barrier islands that buffer the shoreline against ocean storms. Nature does this invaluable work for free, but only if we leave enough water to nature to allow it to function properly.

We did not adequately understand these natural processes and their importance to our well-being in 1922 when the entirety of the Colorado River was allocated for human use, nor have these natural ecosystem services been adequately considered as so many other rivers, lakes, and aquifers have been depleted. Scientists are now much better able to quantify how much water must be left to sustain nature’s health. Fortunately, consideration of those ecosystem needs is finally beginning to appear in water-sharing plans and agreements around the world.¹¹

A Lifetime of Worrying over Water

Colorado River water ran through my own veins for the first two decades of my life, which I suspect left me imprinted with an awareness of water scarcity. My father became smitten with San Diego while spending 4 years there during his service in the U.S. Navy in the early 1950s. When he left the navy in 1955, he went back home to Texas, married my mother, drove her to San Diego on their honeymoon, and then welcomed me into the world a year later. My parents had escaped Texas in the nick of time. The worst drought in history was wracking the state, killing hundreds of thousands of cows and leaving stunted corn rotting in the fields. That drought drove half of all Texas ranchers and farmers into bankruptcy, and the rest into near madness.

My family rode the wave of optimism and population growth in San Diego that was unleashed by the redirected flow o...