We have enough water, its just going to the wrong places. It is going to irrigate pastures at 8000 feet, grow cotton in the high desert and rice in the low desert. It is going to golf courses, playing fields and your front lawn. It’s going to long showers, teeth brushing and shaving flows. Why don’t we just grow cows in Texas, cotton in Alabama or rice in Vietnam. Why don’t we golf off of mats, play ball on Astro turf or xeriscape our front lawns. Why don’t we take short showers or turn the water off when we shave or brush our teeth.
Because we don’t want to. We don’t have to. Push has not come to shove. The tap has not run dry. We have not run out, our streams are still flowing, our wells have not run dry, our lakes have not dried up, completely. Water is cheap, subsidized, we have not had to pay for what our water is worth. Water flows towards money. If you have money you have water. There is no need to limit population, immigration or growth, water use, waste or consumption. Water keeps flowing.
It is not quiet a commodity to be bought and sold and traded with a price and a worth but it is not quite a public resource for the common good and general welfare. It is regulated by the state for beneficial use and economic development without real regard or priority for what it is used for. Alfalfa, microchips, people - it is all the same.
I used to think that water would limit growth in Park City
but we did too good a job of water regionalization in the City and the County. I asked why St George needs a pipeline from
Lake Powell; so they can grow to half a million people. Why would you possibly want that and enable
it to happen. Why should everyone in
the state pay for that new Lake Powell pipe when they have ground water and use more water than
anyone.
The basic archaic premise remains the same for water; use it
or loose it, to save it is anathema to the old system. If you save it someone will use your
share. Conservation used to mean using
it all up, our original goal, now conservation just allows for more development
and growth. If you leave water in the
stream or ground, the next in line will take it. Now more of it is going to cities and people. Now it is waste it or taste it.
The priority system;
first in time, first in right is supposed to take care of distribution in times
of scarcity. When you run out of surface
water, you stop farming. When you run
out of groundwater, you dig a deeper well.
Our basin aquifers, full of ancient, one time historical water, are dropping like
stones and yet we keep pumping like there is no bottom or there is no tomorrow. Out of sight out of mind. Now it is first in time, first in line.
So what’s the big deal, what’s all the hub bub about. Is it all a big media game pursued by the
water owner and water developers, to give them higher prices or give them
things to do? Is this the kind of news
that they sell to us, like weather and sports to keep us tuned in? Or is there a real crisis of unlimited demand
and shrinking supply, a crisis of conservation, a crisis of climate, a crisis of confidence.
Matt, as you know, we’re dealing with a legal framework from the 1860s that was set up to encourage mining and development in California. Unfortunately that system has become engrained in law and is not readily changeable in the current climate. Perhaps climate change will finally force society to deal with reality. Water is a limited resource.
ReplyDeleteDoug
Matt, you seem agitated!
ReplyDeleteWhy does the Colorado River system deliver water from Green River Lakes to Los Angeles, while they shut down nuclear power plants which could desalinate the Pacific Ocean? Water equals electricity.
Where should people live? Politically, culturally, ecologically, why not St. George? Utah signed the Colorado Compact with a little bit for the upper basin states...
I agree with you, I think, that every circle rig in the desert makes me cringe a bit. The incentives being what they are, it doesn't seem possible to not overdraft. And go back to desert....
There is now a lot, awright, some noise about drought in the Colorado River System and the End Of Times. I can't think that anyone but journalists are surprised, or confused, or alarmed. Farmers know that they are first, second, or third in line. They know that cotton and alfalfa are grown in hot places with cheap water, and that there are other uses for expensive water.
Lake Powell is dead! Fill Mead First! Isaac and family braved the congestion at Wahweap and spent the weekend at Oak Bay, with a sojourn up Escalante. Gregory Arch has two feet of air, and they swam through it! Cathedral In The Desert is all up in the air, with a hundred happy Mormon kids frolicking on the dunes! All is not lost.
Among various scientific rules of thumb is Reversion to the Mean. Do you think the Colorado River will get drier or wetter? And for how long? And on what evidence? Wouldn't it have been something to be a Paiute at fish camp on the west side of Lake Bonneville when it cut through at Preston and drained the lake by two-thirds in a month? Wouldn't it have been something to be a Shoshone at fish camp around Weiser about the same time?
We had a Non-soon last year in Northern Arizona. Pastures looked bleak. Is it possible to kill off Grama grass? This year we got 150% of average for the monsoon. Our grama is lovely. It has also been a germination year-- we have several million new baby elm trees, less than that of Russian Olives, a bounty of White Horehound, my personal nemesis, and the Kochia is very happy. What should I anticipate for next year?
Did you guys go to the auction and buy the house at Mesa? Tell Tracey it took me half an hour to spot the trash can! That damned Douthett eyesight...
Love you guys.
J&L
Aww Man,
ReplyDeleteI started reviewing my perceptions about various events around the Great Basin, all before my time, and looks like the above scenario is unsubstantiated.
Wikipedia says the high water downcut at Red Rock Pass when Lake Bonneville dropped 430' in a year was 18K years ago; also that it probably ran into the Snake for a thousand years before lake balance dropped enough to shut that off.
Says that the Missoulan floods were 15-13K years ago, when the glacial lakes intermittently dumped into the Snake and Columbia system. The Bering land bridge, perhaps the vector for humans into north America, dates at 13K years ago. So there were not likely people around to see either, any of these wild events.
I have in library a couple of texts which indicate quite rapid aridification of the Great Basin and Mojave in the period after 5K years ago, with people around. But Wikipedia says that Lake Bonneville and the other Great Basin lakes were not part of the deglaciation story, that only minimal inflow had to do with glaciers or their decline, that the dynamic was about inflow versus evaporation of lakes with no outflow, and that for 90% of the last 800K years the Great Basin has been pretty much as we see it.
Haven't heard whether you got the place in Mesa. Maybe just as well -- Grand Junction must be reeling with the news that BLM is going back home!
Whoa! The archies or paleos down at White Sands say they have footprints dated at 23,000 years. This puts people at fish camp, at Lake Bonneville, when the shoreline suddenly moved fifty miles. WTF? Got yer climate change right here, pal!
ReplyDelete