The Incredible Shrinking River

In which I go looking for answers about the future of the Colorado River.

“There is a narrowing window of opportunity to shift pathways towards more climate resilient development futures” – IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report

If, like me, you find yourself waking from dreams about the world running out of water, you may have one eye fixed on the Colorado River at the moment. Or perhaps you’ve just heard snippets about it in the news.

The bottom line: The river’s two large reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, have hit historic lows in recent years, and there’s a very real possibility that either or both could hit “dead pool”—the point at which they will stop running downstream—in the near future. Despite a boost from this year’s wetter-than-average winter, the combination of reduced precipitation and increased evaporation is radically reducing the amount of water available to farms and cities in the Southwest.

The newsy part: Last week, the three states that make up the Colorado River’s lower basin—California, Arizona and Nevada—agreed on a plan to use less water. It came a month after the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) announced it would impose its own cuts if the states did not act. And while the three-state deal is being described as “unprecedented,” the cuts are considerably smaller than what the Feds have said is necessary to maintain the health of the river. The lower basin states use 7.5 million acre-feet every year, and the USBR recommends cutting that number by 2–4 million acre-feet per year. Instead, the states are proposing cutting just 3 million total over three years. (This graphic explainer helped me envision exactly what that number looks like.)

Luke Runyon has been on the Colorado River beat for the last five years at Colorado’s NPR affiliate KUNC, and more recently as a Ted Scripps fellow at the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism. His new podcast, Thirst Gap: Learning to Live with Less on the Colorado River, takes listeners on a six-part journey down the length of the river, and was inspired by an actual six-day road trip Runyon took in 2021 from Grand Junction, Colorado—where he lives and works—down into northern Mexico.

Photo by SILKE from Pixabay.

I have been thinking a lot about the river and the new plan so I reached out to Runyon last week, right after the final episode of Thirst Gap aired to ask for his expert opinion. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation:

In the podcast, you talk about sacrifice. Who's willing to sacrifice, and what are they willing to sacrifice? If I'm reading it right, it really doesn't seem like there's much sacrifice going on in this recent three-state agreement. What’s your take?

So, it depends on what you consider a sacrifice. It’s going to vary among all the different water users, how they actually take these cuts. Just look at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the water agency for the greater Los Angeles area. They're just going to switch to take more water from the State Water Project, which originates in the Sierra Nevada region, and forego some of their water deliveries from the Colorado River. There’s a lot of water in the State Water Project this year, and that counts as conservation because they're leaving water in Lake Mead. In some other parts of the watershed, [conservation] is going to mean direct payments to irrigation districts [to pay farmers to fallow their fields]. And that's all money that's coming from the Inflation Reduction Act. But we’ll learn a lot more about who's getting the money, how much, and what they’re going to do with it over the next few months.

It seems like there’s a lot magical thinking happening, not unlike what happened with the Colorado River Compact, where they literally conjured up more water on paper in order to avoid conflict. Now the states seem to be forecasting into the future in a way that’s just not based in the current reality.

Oh, totally. I interviewed all these water managers this week and the talking point was, “This agreement is what's going to get us to 2026, when we can really have the hard conversation.” We've heard that in the last few agreements, and it hasn't been enough, because climate change continues to sap the river of its water, and we're not able to curb our demand.

It seems very similar to the UN’s COPs on climate change, where those in power keep kicking the can down the road on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes. That's why last summer was so interesting to watch on the river, because you had dire federal models and federal scientists who were saying, "This is our future." I went to a Bureau of Reclamation webinar where they were showing photos of Hoover Dam with no water behind it, saying, "If we don't make changes, this is our future.” The state's commitments now are way less than what those federal models said was actually necessary to stabilize the river. But nobody seems to want to come to the table and talk about how to you conserve 2–4 million acre-feet per year for the next few years.

And it seems like political suicide, to be the person saying, “Here's the reality, this is what we actually have to do.”

And then there’s the question of who really owns the problem. That was one of the big issues that came up in these conversations between the states and the federal government. There are all these state negotiators who really own it, and the feds were reluctantly being the adults in the room saying, "Okay, we're gonna have to make some very hard decisions, but we'd really rather the states did it.”

It strikes me that in 2026 we may have a totally different administration and the people involved may not want to be the adults in the room.

It's true. Now that this agreement has come together, everyone is going to be pivoting to this big agreement for 2026. By then we could have an administration that has different priorities, and different constituencies in the Southwest. So yeah, that could put a huge wrench in things.

Real question: Do you ever just want to bang your head against the wall?

No, not really. I’ve talked to a lot of really smart people about this, and there is still slack in the system in terms of water that can be conserved. In the podcast, what I wanted to get across is that we as a society in the Southwest have the agency to take control of this problem. It can be easy for people to feel like, "Oh, no, this is something that's happening to us and we’re helpless." But we have lots of ways to reduce our demand for water. Some places have had to, like Las Vegas. They've had a limited water supply for a long time. And if they wanted to keep growing, they had to institute hard conservation limits. In other parts of the basin there just hasn't been the need to really do that yet, at least not in a major way.

It seems like the story is often told as, “Things stay the same, or it's a total disaster.” I really appreciated the episode of your podcast where you looked at Lake Powell and spoke to people who want to stay the same alongside the folks who are more interested in seeing Glen Canyon flourish again on its own terms. And that's by no means a disaster, right? It could be a beautiful ecosystem again.

Yeah, I'm always fascinated by how these sorts of events are perceived. You can look at Lake Powell and see it dropping, and it just depends on your perspective how you actually feel about that. If you're a boater, of course you're going to be terrified because you love that place. All of the happiest memories of your life took place there. But if you're an environmentalist who really wants to see Glen Canyon come back, to you it's this amazing thing. 

Lake Powell in 2015. Photo by Don Graham courtesy of the Wikimedia archive.

I appreciated hearing Crystal Telly Cordova, a principal hydrologist in the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, talk about her relationship to the phrase, "Water is Life."

It can be really easy to throw around these phrases that roll off the tongue, like “the lifeblood of the community.” [Cordova] said, “To me, this is an idea and a concept that has been passed down through generations of my Navajo ancestors. It's not just a slogan. It's a whole mindset. It's like a conceptual framework for how I think about this thing that I'm working on all the time.” That was really powerful.

Cordova had some optimism around the fact that the Navajo Nation and other tribal communities are participating in more of the negotiations around water use, but it sounds like it’s still very far from an equitable process. What have you learned in your reporting?

If the [lowest] bar is being included [in the negotiations], we're not even there yet. Some tribes along the Colorado River are included and some are still not. Some have had their water rights quantified, others have not. Some are putting their water rights to use already and some are not. So, it can be difficult to generalize and there are 30 tribes. For so long, [non-Native] representatives from all seven states [in the Colorado River basin] have gone to the negotiating table, and they come up with agreements. And that's been the structure of how this river has been managed for more than a century.

The big question now is, how do you go about making that a more equitable process? Because there are so many views and perspectives that just haven't been part of the conversation at all. And I haven't heard any great answer about how they're going to do that as they're gearing up for this next round of negotiations. There are a lot of promises, but I haven't seen the mechanisms laid out yet.

Who else do you think should be included?

The environmental community has felt like they've been on the outs for a long time. And so much of this conversation is about water for people, for use in cities, in industry, in agriculture. Here in Colorado, you can dry up whole streams, as long as you have the right to do it. And I think there's going to be a strong push in some of these new talks to think about, can we set aside some amount of water just for environmental benefit? That's really not the focus right now. All the water on paper is for people.

A lot of people have shared the graphic from the New York Times showing that 79 percent of the water from the Colorado River is going to agriculture, including 55 percent for livestock feed. And to me, there are really big questions about whether we should be raising livestock in the Southwest, but changing that would require a potentially painful transition for farmers and rural areas. How are you thinking about all that right now?

Well, the short-term fix is paying farmers to stop farming.

Does that feel like a real solution to you?

I don't know. It is a way to conserve water. But for one, it's variable in terms of how much money, how much water? And two, it has all of these unintended consequences, which I don't think are fully accounted for. There are domino effects in the local ag economy. The farmer may be made whole, financially. But what about the tractor suppliers, or the seed companies, or all of these other sorts of ripple effects? Agriculturalists say, “We've created these giant green patches in the desert and if you start drying them up, there's going to be all sorts of problems with dust.” And if you're not mitigating for that, you're going to have all sorts of problems with [dust] in some of these heavily irrigated patches of the desert.

The dust issue is big and potentially frightening. But to me, it goes back to what is happening at Lake Powell. There's the assumption that not farming land also has to mean letting it turn into a dusty wasteland, and that’s not the only option. I loved how, in the final episode of your podcast, you describe an important collaboration happening on the U.S.-Mexico border—where small, regular pulses of water from the river are allowing native plants and animals to make a comeback thanks to careful tending. But that kind of effort isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s not what happens when you cut off the water from land cold turkey.

I mean, that has been the story of the Salton Sea, essentially. When it the runoff from a nearby irrigation district was cutoff, the sea shrank, and now there are all of these dust issues in the surrounding communities. People there have asthma and other health problems. And [in the recent water negotiations] California was saying, “If you want us to come to the table and commit to reducing our use even more, we need more money to mitigate these kinds of effects.”

It seems to me that story could play out all over the Southwest, with the big question being, how can we find equilibrium within the natural world that will be sustainable?

Yeah, that's where we're at right now—trying to figure that out. And it's messy and complicated and there are all sorts of actors involved.

But ultimately, you seem to have hope that we'll get there, which is heartening.

I think so. I tend to be a pretty optimistic person, so maybe I'm too Pollyanna about the whole thing. But I do think we can get there.

Climate news you may have missed

1. Wetlands are us (and we are our wetlands)

Speaking of water, last week’s U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruling said if wetlands are not directly adjoining larger bodies of water, they no longer need protection under the Clean Water Act, meaning landowners and developers will essentially be able to drain, fill, and pollute nearly a million acres of wetlands without consequence.

Experts say the ruling will also have implication for the Biden administration’s Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule. Even Brett Kavanaugh, the conservative judge who sided with the liberal wing of the court this time, said the ruling would have “significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”

Over the last few years, I’ve come to really see wetlands—like peatlands, farm soil and other less visibly exciting natural spaces—as incredibly important in mitigating and adapting to the extreme effects of climate change. They also serve as giant filters for groundwater and are homes to many species of plants, animals and birds, so it’s a huge deal that their protection will now often lie almost entirely with landowners like Michael and Chantell Sackett of Priest Lake, Idaho—the couple who tried to fill in a wetland because they wanted to build a house overlooking a lake.  

Of course, after watching the re-emergence of Lake Tulare in California’s Central Valley (it’s now nearly as large as Lake Tahoe), the flooding in Yellowstone National Park last year, and other similar examples where water returns to the places it once inhabited, I’m also reminded of what journalist Erica Gies has been saying for a while: Despite what humans do to control it, water always has the last say.

2. Connecting the dots between fossil fuel companies and climate reparations

There’s a lot of math involved in calculating the cost of climate crisis, and I can find it disheartening that even the enormous costs of climate disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires (an average of $148 billion a year) haven’t been significant enough drivers of policy change to prevent things like new drilling for oil and gas.

But here’s some math I can get behind: A new peer-reviewed paper identified 90 companies—83 of them fossil fuel producers—responsible for the bulk of the emissions before 2010. It argues that those companies should pay a total of $5.4 trillion in climate reparations over a period of 26 years.

“ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco [Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company], and Shell—the companies most often accused of delaying action on climate change—would have the first, third, and fourth highest reparations,” reads the report. The money would go toward mitigating emissions, funding adaptation, and compensating “climate migrants and refugees, Indigenous peoples, racial and ethnic minority communities, people with disabilities and people who are socially and economically disadvantaged.”

Although it’s well-known that people in poor countries and under-resourced parts of this country are bearing the brunt of the crisis, the conversation about how and whether those people should be compensated has often lacked teeth. Whether or not these companies will feel any added pressure to take responsibility for their role in the rapidly devolving mess that is climate crisis, it is nonetheless worth holding on to—and proliferating—the idea that they can, and should, be held accountable.

3. Solar farms versus solar rooftops

I’ve been thinking a lot about the survey that Sammy Roth took via the LA Times climate newsletter “Boiling Point” last week. In it, he asked: “If you wouldn’t want to see a solar farm, wind turbine or power line in your backyard, what would it take to change your mind? And what, if anything, could private companies or government agencies do to make the renewable energy infrastructure a worthwhile trade-off for you?”

Many of the respondents have likely seen stories like this one about the massive solar farms that are already blanketing places like the Mojave desert, and the impacts they’re having on real estate prices and air quality.

Not surprisingly, many of the respondents said some version of: “Only when we’ve covered our existing buildings with solar panels should we be considering putting them on public lands.” I tend to agree, and the only way to get there is to better incentivize that kind of transition, so that even the homeowners and businesses who aren’t committed to reducing fossil fuel use will see short-term benefits from adding solar panels to their properties. We’ll all benefit in the long term.

On Civil Eats, the site I edit, we’ve published two recent stories about the way green energy is being perceived as at-odds with food production. One story is about how solar may be driving up the cost of farmland, making it less accessible for young farmers, and the other story is about the way fishers are pushing back against offshore wind farms, and in both case I’ve been struck by just how fast we need to scale up green energy projects and how difficult it can be to drive while paving the road. That’s not a reason not to do it, but it makes sense that the transition will be messy.

I’m still partial to the idea of covering some parts of California’s irrigation canals with solar panels, a project that is currently in a pilot phase but would simultaneously shade the water and slow rates of evaporation while covering a sizable amount of space.

4. Whose carbon footprints matter most?

Does your carbon footprint matter? It depends somewhat on where you land in the economic class strata. Dr. Genevieve Guenther has a useful essay in Noema magazine that pulls some of this apart. She writes:

Talking about individual carbon footprints, activists argue, is, at best, a distraction from the essential work of raising a climate movement and, at worst, a naive and counterproductive embrace of propaganda developed by oil and gas companies to dishearten people and divert them from building a movement for collective action. But this view of climate communication and carbon footprints rests on the mistaken idea that there is a universal individual whose personal carbon footprint is always an irrelevant distraction. The truth is we need to talk about curbing the individual carbon footprints of the rich in order to halt global heating.

5. Orcas don’t have to think like us to deserve agency

Orcas have been sinking boats off the coast of Spain, and a flood of internet memes have resulted from the news. Like many, I have been tempted to anthropomorphize animals who are increasingly being impacted by warmer, more crowded oceans. But I appreciated Sabrina Imbler’s effort, over at Defector, to slow our collective roll and acknowledge that while the orcas’ behaviors may fit into human narratives, it’s important to stay curious and tune into their actual experiences and motivations.

The visual(s)

1. Bright green fir tips via Marina Anderson.

2. The Sclater's lemur lives in Madagascar and pollinates flowers (!) via Dr. Tom Montgomery.

4. Global biodiversity decline 1970-2018 in stripes vis biodiversitystripes.info

Thanks for reading and take good care,

Twilight

Top banner by Mara Greenaway.