What 30 seconds of Heart-pounding Arizona Whitewater Can Reveal about Our Water Supply Future
Warming temperatures and sustained drought conditions across the all-important Colorado River Basin are projected to reduce annual flow in this iconic western river by as much as 31% over the next 30 years. With roughly half of Denver and the Front Range’s domestic water supplies originating in the basin, the potential looms for serious water shortages and mass dislocation across the region.
It’s mid-October. In many places, the soft light and chill air of autumn are just beginning to make their presence felt.
But not here. Not on the Colorado River, 179 miles along its course through the Grand Canyon. Not at the margin of this surging eddy just below the tail waves of one of North America’s biggest “big drop” rapids, through which moments before I had rowed my raft packed with food and gear sufficient to support a three-week-long odyssey down 225 miles of the American West’s wildest wilderness river.
Lava Falls is one of the last and unquestionably the most notorious of the Grand Canyon’s 70-plus named rapids. Roderick Nash, acclaimed author, environmental historian, and veteran river runner has described “Lava” as having “a strong claim to being the most difficult stretch of runnable whitewater in the West.”
Bailey, Trent. Grand Canyon (01). 2019
No, here on the river just below Lava, I certainly don’t feel cold. Anything but, in fact, with my adrenaline meter still redlining after my close encounter with the rapid’s huge initial drop into a chaotic jumble of 12-foot tall standing waves and gigantic “holes” capable of swallowing your average SUV. I rest on the oars here in the eddy at the bottom of the rapid, positively on fire with the exaltation of the moment.
But for all the thrill and satisfaction of accomplishing something that’s been occupying a disproportionate share of my waking mental energy for weeks now, I can’t quite shake a feeling that ricochets between deflation and grief. The deflation is understandable. The anticipation and build-up to the 30 seconds required to descend Lava’s quarter-mile-long maelstrom was nothing if not monumental. And now it’s behind me. Done and dusted. Where’s my beer?
More difficult to parse is a nagging sensation of sadness…or emptiness…or...I don’t quite know what. Shouldn’t I feel unalloyed elation? Something isn’t adding up. Under the influence of the sun, the beer, or both, I regain focus and start the hard work of rowing out of the eddy back into the river’s main flow. Enthusiasm replaces ennui and in no time I’m free of the eddy, energetically pushing on the oars in a motion that over the past 18 days on the river has become as familiar as walking. But despite my efforts to ignore it, the sensation of emptiness persists, like feelings experienced in the past upon the death of someone with whom I’d been close.
In casting about for explanations to convey the odd feeling of emptiness that had elbowed its way into my adrenaline-aided exultation below Lava, I chose to label it “grief.”
Grief signifies loss and profound loss at that. Yet by the time I’d found time to catch my breath in the eddy below Lava, it was clear that nothing had been lost, at least nothing readily apparent. We hadn’t flipped. No one had been tossed out of the raft for an involuntary and potentially dangerous swim. In fact, all our rafts and their loads of people and river gear had emerged unscathed. What, then, possibly could have been lost?
Bailey, Trent. Grand Canyon (02). 2019
At first, it occurs to me that my post-Lava feelings are in reaction to what society has done to this magnificent river. Impounded on either end by the two largest dams and reservoirs on the North American continent, the portion of the Colorado River that flows through the Grand Canyon and connects Lake Powell upstream of the Canyon to Lake Mead downstream is but a pale reflection of the wild river Major John Wesley Powell and his eight companions encountered 151 years ago on their storied first descent of what was then an unexplored, unknown, and mystery-laden river bisecting the last unmapped region of the American West.
Powell’s first-hand account of his 1869 expedition – down the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado, and then on through Cataract Canyon, Glen Canyon (now submerged under Lake Powell), and Grand Canyon to the Virgin River confluence near present-day Las Vegas (a confluence now submerged under Lake Mead) – is an adventurer’s adventure story, one which I can’t recommend highly enough.
Still magical at the start of the 21st century’s third decade, the canyons of the Colorado Plateau region and the River to which they owe their existence must have been almost beyond description in 1869 when the one-armed Civil War veteran-turned-college professor who had been raised on bucolic midwestern farms first encountered them. Having been a Powell devotee for longer than I care to say as I slide with increasing speed toward my 60s, I hardly could be blamed for wondering about, and even mourning, the peerless scenic splendor and wondrous life – shaped by millions of years of physical and evolutionary processes – that Powell describes in his Journal but which are now lost beneath the cold stagnant waters of Lakes Mead and Powell.
Further reflection, however, during our trip’s final three days, as we quietly drift and gently row the Canyon’s final 50 miles before our takeout at Diamond Creek, reveal to me another, different explanation for my post-Lava emotional thud. After all, I conclude, the River and its Canyon don’t care a lick about the actions of humanity. They dominated the continent’s southwestern landscapes long before the touch of homo sapien was felt, and they will persist long after our species has gone the way of the dinosaurs. No, the emptiness I experienced below Lava Falls -- the grief -- had much more to do with people than landscape, with the human loss to come rather than the natural places already profoundly altered.
Climate Change: a Stake through the Nation’s Arid Heart?
Adams, Robert. The Center of Denver, Colorado, Ten Miles Distant. 1968-71. Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut. https://bit.ly/32M0kc6
You see, my now 30-year old career has involved the development of public policies and implementation measures for the protection, conservation, allocation, and use of water resources in Colorado and elsewhere in the western United States. Having once served as Colorado’s director of water policy in Governor Romer’s administration, I happen to know a thing or two amount about the arcane topic of how water, the West’s scarcest and most precious resource, is allocated, including how much of it goes to which uses, how these uses are and have been fundamental to the region’s economies and stratospheric growth rates, and how little water remains available for uses yet to materialize but which assuredly are just beyond our gaze. I also happen to know a fair amount about risks our Planet’s warming climate poses to these present and future water uses and to the legal “infrastructure” which divvies up the West’s limited water supplies among these uses.
Based on what I know, society – more accurately, “us” – is in for a world of hurt.
You’d have to be utterly numb to events taking place around the globe recently to be unaware of the broad discussion and concerns surrounding the planet’s warming climate. It’s a topic that’s crept out of the closets of scientists and environmentalists onto presidential debate stages, into sophisticated investment analyses and insurance premium calculations, and through the doors of corporate boardrooms and elite gatherings of international policymakers. It’s become so pervasive that its absence – indeed, its current banishment – from thoughtful deliberation by those occupying key public decision-making positions in the White House and U.S. Senate makes it all the more conspicuous, real, and worthy of concern by every last one of us, not least of whom include the most powerful and influential among us.
You don’t have to be dodging sparks in Australia, owning flood-prone land along the lower Mississippi River, bearing witness, routinely, to tidally flooded streets on sunny days in Miami, or tasting smoke rather than wine on your recent California vacation to know that climate change and its pernicious effects are no longer assignable to some abstract future probability of occurrence. Climate change is real, and its inescapable effects are here today, like it or not. Yet for many of us, especially those in a position to do something about it, climate change remains an abstraction, even a distraction, if only because life’s daily rhythms haven’t yet been altered sufficiently to induce much more than passing concern and empathy for those more directly affected.
Shaw, Samuel. Future Townhome Complex, Superior. 2020
Consider, for a moment, the very River down which I float. Draining an area that’s about one-twelfth of the lower 48’s landmass, the Colorado River currently helps to sustain the water supply needs of about 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico, including members of 22 federally recognized Native American tribes. Its waters help irrigate crops grown on about 5.5 million acres of land in two countries and on Native American reservations. Annual flow in its main stem and tributaries, though small by the standards of rivers draining wetter regions in North America, plays an outsized role in sustaining an incredible trove of water-dependent environmental and recreational resources and ecological services, including unique geological and biological features that support an impressive array of plant, fish and animal species found nowhere else on Earth.
Diving more deeply into some of these broad measures, even in the most basic way, reveals even more about the River’s significance.
Locally, for example, about 50 percent of the raw water supplies that sustain the Denver metropolitan area each year come from the Colorado River via a complex system of tunnels, aqueducts, pumping stations, and reservoirs owned and operated by Colorado’s two biggest public water utilities – Denver Water and Aurora Water. Water is moved by this massive plumbing system from the western side of the Continental Divide where it is comparatively plentiful to the drier eastern side where the bulk of the State’s population resides.
By means of still more “transbasin” infrastructure, the River also provides a substantial amount of water on average each year to meet the needs of residents and businesses in cities scattered throughout the northern Front Range that, like the Denver metro area, are located east of the Continental Divide – cities like Broomfield, Boulder, Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins, and Greeley, in addition to tens of smaller communities that dot the landscape from Ft. Collins south to Thornton and Arvada and east to Fort Morgan.
Were you to stand atop Longs Peak and look east out over the plains and the towns, cities, and the interminable patchwork of new suburban subdivisions that stretch below you, you’d begin to comprehend how vast the collection of communities sustained in whole or in part with water from a single, limited source. Further south, the Colorado River also is the source for a substantial quantity of water delivered annually to residents and businesses in Colorado Springs (over 80 percent in some years) and Pueblo. Finally, sprinkle in the fact that Colorado River water is used to irrigate over 2 million acres of land in Colorado on both the east and west sides of the Continental Divide and you reach a simple, inevitable conclusion: it’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Colorado River in the lives and livelihoods of a great majority of the State’s residents.
Beyond the State’s borders, water from the Colorado River contributes all or a substantial part of the water supplies serving places like Albuquerque, Cheyenne, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Orange County CA, along with communities in the Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora. Lands irrigated with Colorado River water from its headwaters in Colorado and Wyoming to the Lower Colorado River Valley in California, Arizona, Baja California, and Sonora, produce a huge variety and quantity of produce. By some estimates, 80 percent of the winter greens and vegetables sold in the United States are grown on these lands. And millions of acres are irrigated to produce fodder which sustains beef and dairy herds that feed a nation and beyond.
Facts and statistics like these are important to know, but I’ll concede in a heartbeat their capacity to make most people’s eyes glaze over. Suffice it to say that the Colorado River is vitally important to life in Colorado, the American Southwest, and, indeed, the entire nation.
Desert Dreamworks
Adams, Robert. Eden, Interstate 25, Colorado. 1968. SFWeekly. https://www.sfweekly.com/topstories/re-prettification-robert-adams-and-the-american-west/
One bedrock fact simply can’t be glossed over, though. And that’s the essential aridity of the physiographic region the Colorado River drains.
Major Powell understood this. His seminal Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (“Arid Lands Report”), delivered to Congress in 1878 less than a decade after his pioneering first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, was itself another pioneering feat. Having lectured extensively in the years immediately following his Colorado River adventures, Powell quickly rose in prominence as an authoritative voice regarding the vast region west of the Mississippi at a time when public discourse was filled with ideas about how best to promote its settlement. Powell’s Arid Lands Report fed directly into this discourse, with the distinction that, unlike most pronouncements being cast about at the time, it was grounded in experience and careful empirical observation.
Powell’s conclusion? The region’s essentially arid condition imposed real limits on the prospects for the West’s overall growth and the ways in which use of its natural resources ought to proceed. As a consequence, these realities demanded settlement patterns vastly different than those already underway.
But Powell’s focus on water supply scarcity and ecological limits were simply too dissonant with the prevailing mood of the day, a mood captured well in an 1870 statement by William Gilpin, soon-to-be governor of what was then the Colorado Territory. Gilpin described the West as “not a desert, but the opposite ... the cardinal basis of the future empire of commerce and industry now erecting itself upon the North American Continent.” Powell, as you might assume, didn’t share this perspective, something he made all too clear in his Arid Lands Report.
Shaw, Samuel. Sapling Transplant. 2020
Similar acknowledgments in the 140 years since publication of the Arid Lands Report have been few and far between, especially from people with the prominence of a John Wesley Powell, a larger-than-life figure in the latter decades of the 19th century who shortly after his report’s publication went on to lead the United States Geological Survey (USGS), then a new and influential federal agency very much involved in western settlement issues. From the start of his USGS tenure, Powell, despite his credentials, encountered aggressive push-back from powerful economic sectors like the railroads and livestock industry which stood to gain immensely from exploitation of the region’s natural resources, and from western Senators who sought to enable these powerful forces of capitalism and western expansion in general by advocating public policies embracing unlimited growth and development. In the end, Powell’s counsel was ignored.
The fact that the core ideas in the Arid Lands Report failed to gain traction 140 years ago doesn’t mean, though, that Powell – observing, thinking, writing, advocating, occasionally haranguing in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s – was wrong. In fact, his observations about western aridity – often singled out by knowledgeable commentators as the region’s single-most important defining characteristic – remain as true and accurate today as they were then, if not more so.
Powell very legitimately could have limited the scope of the Arid Lands Report to observations regarding the region’s climate and associated landforms, but the boundless energy and curiosity which impelled him to explore the rivers and mesas of Canyon Country also, one can’t help surmise, led him to examine and question the legitimacy of land settlement policies that failed to account for the harsh realities of the western landscape and climate. And so he devoted considerable space in the Arid Lands Report to advocating for sweeping changes to the nation’s existing land settlement laws, devised as they had been by easterners with little direct knowledge of the West and with little understanding, accordingly, of the region’s physical geography, its precipitation patterns, and the very real limits these environmental realities would impose on human uses of the landscape.
Shaw, Samuel. Prospect, CO: The Low 400’s. 2020
Powell’s advocacy for the establishment of smaller irrigated farms and livestock ranches – each with access to water within the watershed where it originated, along with political institutions organized according to drainage basin divides dictated by the flow of water rather than the surveyor’s straight edge – ring as music to the ears of 21st conservation-minded audiences. But his recommendations stood in stark contrast to prevailing land settlement policy in the 1870s and 1880s, enshrined in laws like the Homestead Act (1862), the Timber Culture Act (1873), and the Desert Lands Act (1877), which sought to promote privatization of public lands and their resources in accordance with a land tenure system that had originated and still prevailed in the humid East, with almost no modification for the West’s prevailing arid conditions. Most radical of all, Powell’s deep understanding and respect for ecological limitations and the challenges the region’s ineluctable aridity would pose for those seeking to settle the West was reflected in his advocacy for a less individualistic way of living on the land. Efforts to settle the West would endure, he argued, only if western pioneers were enabled by their political and social institutions to work together and support one another in addressing the inherent challenges of eking out an existence from a landscape so much less hospitable than the humid regions of the East.
But in the face of the prevailing political dogma of the day that embraced almost feverishly the notion that the country’s “manifest destiny” was to expand and settle a wide-open continent without regard to limits, Powell’s proposals fell on deaf ears. Political influence and capital from the East Coast and Europe, aided and abetted by the formal authority of Congress itself, pushed back against the region’s geographic realities. The next several decades revealed that no undertaking to settle the West and control its natural resources was too grand, too expensive, or too detached from the hydrological, meteorological, and topographical signals the western landscape was sending to anyone willing to listen and observe. And so instead of Powell’s vision of political and economic organization in the West that took its cues from the region’s aridity, the nation built, in the words of historian Donald Worster, a “hydraulic empire.”
Constructing a Hydraulic Empire
Lake Mead water levels, 1984 - 2016. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://bit.ly/2DtaGVO
John Wesley Powell died in 1902, the same year Congress authorized establishment of the United States Reclamation Service as a division of the Geological Survey he once led. Later reorganized within the Department of the Interior as a sister agency to USGS but with a more substantial budget of its own, and renamed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Bureau), this federal agency for the next eight decades would be the point of the spear in the national campaign to dam and divert the West’s rivers to fuel its growth. Its name and mission reflected prevailing attitudes regarding the need to “reclaim” the western landscape by deploying the seemingly ever-growing technological capacity and financial resources of the federal government toward the singular purpose of developing water and power projects at a scale previously unimaginable.
From 1902 to the 1980s, with support from influential economic interests throughout the West, Congress appropriated billions of federal dollars to the Bureau so that it could finance, construct, and operate dams, reservoirs, canal and ditch systems, tunnels, pumping stations, and water treatment facilities in virtually every major western river system, altering the landscape in the process as much if not more than any other initiative ever undertaken, public or private. The most impressive of these water projects were located in the Colorado River Basin – Hoover Dam, which blocks the Colorado River at Black Canyon just south of Las Vegas, NV and forms Lake Mead that stretches along the border between Nevada and Arizona, and Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell in Arizona and Utah. For decades, these structures were celebrated as among the largest engineering feats on the planet, along with other Bureau facilities like its Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington and the Central Valley Project in California that includes Shasta Dam and associated canals and laterals that move water 300 miles south from the San Francisco Bay-Delta to the southern San Joaquin Valley and are visible from outer space. Today, water delivered from these and almost 500 other Bureau of Reclamation dams and associated infrastructure projects is used to produce 25% of the nuts and fruits consumed in the United States, grow 60% of our vegetables, and help meet the domestic water supply needs of about 15% of the population.
Water, or more specifically its control and management through huge investment in what is perhaps most easily envisioned and understood as a massive west-wide plumbing system, lies at the heart of virtually everything encountered in the American West today. Quite a claim, no doubt, but unlike most superlatives tossed about today like confetti on a windy day, it has the distinction of actually being true.
Henry Jackson, William. High Line Canal, Platte Water Co., Platte Canyon. 1884. Colorado Encyclopedia. https://bit.ly/31PV7kk
The cities of the American West simply wouldn’t exist without the infrastructure built in the first half of the 20th century to move water over tremendous distances from its sources to where it’s used. The region’s signature ranches and hay meadows and, at lower elevations, its farms and orchards, simply wouldn’t be productive without supplemental irrigation water delivered by these water projects. Whole economies and countless political careers owe their existence to water development projects. In ways almost too numerous to imagine, the control and management of water permeates the region’s social and economic fabric. The region simply wouldn’t have developed as it did were it not for this investment, of which projects built by the Bureau of Reclamation offer perhaps the most enduring emblem.
But if capital, concrete, and steel have been the warp of the West’s fabric, its weft is the system of laws, court cases, judicial decrees, contracts, and interstate and international agreements that establish who controls and owns rights to water and the manner in which it is allocated to every kind of conceivable kind of use. Water in the West represents property, or more specifically, property interests in water are created when it is applied in a continuous controlled fashion to any number of uses specified in law. These include everything from the irrigation of crops and green urban lawns, to the provision of water that make possible modern conveniences like hot showers, clean clothing, and flush toilets, to the production of electricity, and to the maintenance of fish and wildlife habitat.
Every river system in the West is festooned with its own set of legal arrangements, but nowhere are they more prominently on display than in the Colorado River Basin. Referred to in shorthand as the “Law of the River,” this formidable mountain of legalese rests firmly on the foundation of the Colorado River Compact, an agreement negotiated in 1922 by representatives of the seven states whose boundaries encompass portions of the quarter-million square-mile river basin and a federal delegation led by then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover (prior to his election to the U.S. presidency).
For a century, this Compact – an enforceable contract between the states of the Colorado River Basin that confers upon each both rights and obligations – has been the lodestar for the way in which the River’s flow gets divvied up each year between the states of the “upper basin” and the states of the “lower basin.” These two sub-basins in reality are legal fictions of geography arrived at by the original Compact negotiators because they lacked an objective way to equitably allocate each state a share of the river’s flow in any given year. Subsequently, the development of additional information largely to resolve inevitable disputes that arose in the wake of the Compact’s signing led to state-by-state allocations of water from the River, which helped, in turn, to pave the way for political agreements enabling the financing and construction of the huge dam, reservoir, and canal projects responsible for the Colorado River Basin we know today but which would be virtually unrecognizable to the likes of Major Powell.
Photographer Unknown. Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. Estimated date of creation, circa 1984 (the last time Lake Mead reached capacity). Inkstain. https://bit.ly/2EPQuhi
By the 1980s, most of the River’s legal framework and major engineering infrastructure was in place. The once wild Colorado River that offered Major Powell and his companions enough heart-stopping adventure on their pioneering descent in 1869 to last three or four lifetimes had been tamed. To be sure, long stretches of the River over the 1,450 miles from its headwaters high in the central Rocky Mountains to its outlet at the Sea of Cortez still offer, to this day, an unparalleled wilderness experience to weekend warriors like myself. But by the time Lake Powell completed its first fill in 1980, enough of the River’s unruly nature had been harnessed for it to become a reliable source of water for domestic, industrial, and agricultural uses throughout a huge swath of the American West. The River’s natural variability, season to season and year to year, had been smoothed out. Its huge snowmelt-driven springtime peak flows had been lopped off and stored in massive reservoirs for those drier years when water wasn’t as plentiful. And its occasional drought-driven low flows were augmented by carefully timed releases of water from these same reservoirs to meet downstream water supply needs.
For the next couple of decades or so, until about 2000, this massive agglomeration of law, concrete, and steel worked largely as designed. Water demands throughout the Southwest, both those of city residents and also farms and ranches, were met fairly reliably, and the region’s historic conflicts over water were kept to a dull roar. To be sure, for the first time since the closure of Hoover Dam in 1935, those with a vested interest in the River began to wrestle with the environmental consequences of damming and diverting its flow on such a massive scale as new information became available regarding changes to its flora, fauna and sediment transport functions. In response, operations of the River’s mainstem dams were adjusted slightly to address endangered species and other ecological objectives, especially in the Grand Canyon. For the most part, though, the system, as designed and built, worked as planned.
Cascading Failure in a Permanent Drought
Phoenix Urban Area growth 1985 - 2015. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://bit.ly/2DtaGVO
This certainty was short-lived, however. Right around 2000, the southwestern United States’ already arid climate downshifted into what would become at least a 20-year dry cycle, whose grip is still felt throughout the Basin. Regarded initially by most as an especially long drought, this dry period now is being cast as the “new normal,” so persistent and sustained it’s been. As a consequence of decreased precipitation and snowpack in the River’s headwaters regions in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, natural annual flow in the river is now roughly 20% less on average than it was over the entire 20th century.
Low natural flow, combined with the Lower Basin’s high water use, increased evaporation, and drying soils -- all induced and exacerbated by higher overall temperatures -- have caused storage volumes and water surface elevations in Lakes Mead and Powell to decline sharply. Lake Mead is especially low, having dropped to a surface elevation of about 1,085 feet above mean sea level (MSL), or only about 40% of the reservoir’s total storage capacity. This surface water elevation is significant since it is uncomfortably close to elevation 1,075 feet MSL, which, when reached, requires the Secretary of the Interior to begin making significant reductions to water deliveries from Lake Mead to users in the Lower Basin, principally Arizona farms and cities located in the Sonoran Desert with few if any alternative sources of supply. Lake Powell is in slightly better condition, though its volume, too, has dropped dramatically. Water in storage behind Glen Canyon Dam is only about 50% of Lake Powell’s total storage capacity, having dropped about 100 feet from a “full pool” last reached in 1999. Were Lake Powell’s levels to fall another 75 feet or so, to elevation 3,525 feet MSL, it no longer physically would be possible to release water to turn the dam’s hydroelectric turbines used to supply electrical power to millions of people throughout the western US to power homes and offices and generally keep the wheels of industry turning. In the absence of this once-reliable source of power, utilities would be forced to turn to other more expensive and likely less reliable sources.
Shaw, Samuel. Sold. 2020
The risk of dropping below the 3,525-foot surface elevation at Lake Powell is consequential for another reason, too, since the same tunnels that deliver water through the dam to turn its massive electrical turbines also are the principal means by which water is released from the reservoir to meet the Upper Basin’s water delivery obligations to the Lower Basin prescribed by the Colorado River Compact. Under the terms of the Compact, if these deliveries don’t occur, for whatever reason, then the Upper Basin would be deemed to be out of compliance with the Compact. The Lower Basin likely could then “call” water from the Upper Basin, thereby restricting at least some water uses in the Upper Basin until delivery obligations to the Lower Basin are fully satisfied.
Nothing like this possible Lower Basin “call” has ever materialized in the Compact’s 99-year history, so it’s impossible to predict precisely how responsibility for fulfilling such a “call” would be allocated and how water users in the various states affected might respond. Would they willingly forego their use of water to meet downstream demands? Would they litigate the legitimacy of the “call?” Would they resort to some other measure?
Currently, strategies to manage such a complex and uncertain future are in development, all formalized to a certain extent through a set of recently executed agreements collectively referred to as “drought contingency plans” (DCPs). The Lower Basin DCP is complete, reflecting agreements between the States of Arizona, California, Nevada, and almost all the major users of Colorado River water in each of these states on a systematic means for voluntarily reducing uses and sharing any remaining water shortages when Lake Mead’s levels fall below 1,075 feet. This is a departure from a status quo that has prevailed essentially since the 1960s which would have dictated that Arizona water users disproportionately and exclusively bear shortages imposed on the Lower Basin in the event the 1,075 feet level in Mead were reached.
The Upper Basin’s DCP is more accurately understood as a plan agreed to by representatives from each of the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah) to further develop their own individual state-based plans. In general, this commitment encompasses two goals: first, avoid a Lower Basin “call” altogether by equitably reducing enough current water use in their respective states to ensure that Lake Powell remains sufficiently full to meet water delivery requirements to the Lower Basin (surface elevation of 3,525 feet), and, second, in the event of a Lower Basin “call,” to allocate responsibility for compliance between the four Upper Basin states and water users within these states.
These Upper Basin state-based plans currently are in development, so nothing’s a given and nothing’s set in stone. But one way in which Colorado, which enjoys the largest entitlement to water from the River of any of the Upper Basin states, could meet its share of a Lower Basin “call” would be to reduce or curtail uses of water by those water users whose rights to use available supplies are predated by the 1922 Colorado River Compact. This approach certainly would be consistent with how water shortages in dry years already are administered in Colorado, which since statehood in 1876 has subscribed to the “prior appropriation doctrine” (also known as the “Colorado Doctrine”). This fundamental legal doctrine establishes that the first person to establish a legally recognized beneficial use of a discrete amount of water has a superior claim to water during conditions of scarcity relative to those whose rights were established at a later date in time.
As it turns out, virtually all of those users who divert water from the Colorado River Basin in Colorado to other river basins (e.g., the South Platte Basin where the Denver metro area is located, or the Arkansas Basin where Colorado Springs and Pueblo are located) do so legally underwater rights established after the Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922. Thus, in Colorado, one result of a Lower Basin “call” could be the curtailment of hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of diversions of Colorado River water under junior water rights to Front Range communities and farms, including the Denver metropolitan area, with all the economic uncertainty and dislocation one might imagine could accompany such an event. There is, consequently, a rather large incentive for some rather powerful stakeholders in Colorado (and indeed in the rest of the Upper Basin, as well) to undertake measures designed to avoid a Lower Basin “call” altogether. Such measures, by definition, involve reducing water use in the Upper Basin in a controlled and coordinated fashion by offering incentives to water users to do so voluntarily. In short, there’s a great deal of effort currently going into creating Upper Basin “carrots” so that Lower Basin “sticks” might be avoided. This is what’s in play at present in Colorado and the other Upper Basin states.
Shaw, Samuel. North Thornton Subdivision, Early Terraforming. 2020
What’s the likelihood of any of what so earnestly is being discussed and planned for actually happening? Some computer simulations of future river flow and reservoir operations assume precipitation and runoff patterns over the next 30 years will resemble those of the past 20 years, including some of the driest years experienced in the Colorado River Basin in the past 1,200 years. Under these assumptions, models predict there’s a better than even chance of Lake Mead’s level dropping below the critical 1,075-foot elevation by 2030, and almost a 20 percent chance of Lake Powell’s level dropping below the 3,525-foot elevation. Were either event to occur, it would be cause for much concern, even if contingency plans based on “carrots” are in place.
Plans, you see, are only as good as their implementation. But no one involved in the day-to-day realities of Colorado River water management (let alone the 40 million city people and owners 5.5 million acres of irrigated cropland dependent upon Colorado River water) has had any direct experience with trying to operate such a large interconnected water supply infrastructure system differently – very differently -- from how it was designed to perform. It doesn’t take much to imagine, therefore, that difficulties confronting their actual implementation simply may overwhelm our collective capacity to execute even the best of plans.
Credible estimates just published by USGS scientists forecast that average annual Colorado River flows will drop by as much as 30 percent by 2050 below their already depleted volumes. Said another way, for every 1 degree Fahrenheit of additional warming, the Colorado River’s average annual flow will be reduced by 9.3 percent from average measured flows over the last 30 years. According to the fourth (most recent) version of the National Climate Assessment, published at the end of 2018, heat-trapping gases already in the atmosphere will increase average temperatures nationwide by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit, and possibly by much more. Temperature increases in the southwest may be even higher on average than the rest of the country. To put a finer point on it, temperatures in the Colorado River Basin can – and most likely will – get considerably warmer over the next few decades, thereby reducing average annual River flows that sustain 40 million people and millions of acres of irrigated crops by as much as 30 percent in comparison to long-term historical averages.
Shaw, Samuel. Top Golf/Planned Community, Thornton. 2020
As with all predictions about any future event, some uncertainty surrounds this dire forecast. But the very possibility the forecast may be correct, or even partly correct, forces us to confront some uncomfortable questions. Can already diminished reservoir levels at Lakes Mead and Powell really be propped up further above their critical elevational thresholds in the face of as much as 30 percent less water in the Colorado River Basin? If not, and the Upper Basin can’t meet its Compact delivery obligations to the Lower Basin, who will be on the hook to make up the deficit, by how much, and over what time period? How will this obligation be divvied up equitably? Will this obligation be shared, or will some senior claims to water get to take a pass while those with more junior water rights are forced to shoulder a disproportionately large share of the responsibility? Are we soon to reach a point at which the overall system of water allocation in Colorado and other Upper Basin states bumps up against a set of conditions impossible to reconcile with those upon which the current allocation system is based?
These and similar questions will confront us all in an increasingly public way in coming months and years. It’s possible, perhaps even probable, that new agreements arising from the ashes of a system whose outdated assumptions relegate it to the burn pile could result in a water supply future for the southwestern U.S. that is radically different from that which has been used to meet the region’s needs for over 100 years. And while much can happen in the next few years that might alter a rather grim future I foresee for those dependent in part or entirely on water from the Colorado River, there’s a reasonable chance the picture could only deteriorate further.
Final Strokes
Here on the Colorado River, with our three-week-long Grand Canyon idyll rapidly coming to its end, I’m having a hard time filling back in the small hole in my soul felt below Lava. Reflecting on the future during our final days on the River, I’m finding the promise of hope in short supply. The grief I’ve been feeling, I’ve come to realize, is far less due to the manner in which society has altered this incomparable river resource over the last 100 years. Rather, it is directed toward people, toward friends and family, toward everyone whose lives have been and will be upended in one way or another by society’s callous disregard for limits.
Woods, Lebbeus. DMZ. 1988. BLDNGBLOG. https://bit.ly/359hIKM
Simply put, we all stand to lose – and lose profoundly – as a consequence of what the Greeks long ago understood as hubris, as a consequence of behavior that fails to acknowledge, humbly, that humans, like all other life forms, are subject to limits. Deprived of food for three weeks or so, human organs begin to fail and the human organism begins to die. Without adequate and reliable water supplies, crops begin to die within a week and people begin to die within about three days or so. In short, we have limits.
Though not hard and fast, these limits also aren’t theoretical, just as the physics of increased climate warming as a consequence of ever-higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere isn’t theoretical. And yet in the face of these immutable realities, society, tragically, plunges headlong into an uncertain future.
Have we met our match? Will climate change prove to be some sort of slowly unfolding form of “humanicide?” Or will humanity’s collective resiliency and creativity temporarily overcome – yet again – the limits to which we, as biological organisms, otherwise would be beholden. It’s impossible to say.
What can be said with conviction is that the path to which humanity apparently has committed itself – quite voluntarily, if blindly – is one which will involve a great deal of suffering.
This suffering certainly will tinge the lives of those of us approaching that invisible threshold between merely “middle age” and honest-to-god “old.” Our rapidly dwindling time on Earth already has been diminished by hotter temperatures, rising sea levels, more violent and frequent catastrophic storms, and wildfires and floods, more widely spread disease...and yes, the dread word of the moment, ”pandemic.” But only incrementally, only by degree.
For people born after about 1980, on the other hand, this suffering likely will be pronounced and prolonged, and because it never was preordained, tragic. Society’s inability to wean itself from the consumption of fossil fuel and the emission of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases)into the atmosphere isn’t too different in some respects from the behavior of the archetypal narcissistic sociopath who seems incomprehensibly unwilling to restrain actions creating suffering all around him or empathize with the plight of those on the receiving end. And so it is for people just embarking on life’s adventure, and for generations that will follow. It is these people, living and yet to be born who are destined to experience the full fury of a hotter future, for whom I grieve.
Why these thoughts and feelings forced their way through so profoundly in the eddy below Lava I may never know. Maybe it was the release from weeks of singular focus on this legendary rapid. Maybe it was taking a ton of ice-cold water squarely to the chest as we plowed through the rapid’s uppermost v-wave. Maybe it was the brief existential moment peering into the depths of the Ledge Hole after hearing if its menacing presence for years. Whatever the cause, I came to see our climate crisis in new and distinctly more vivid and disturbing ways after that unforgettable trip through Lava.
Postscript
During troubled times, it’s tempting for me to my historical heroes for insight and to the lessons history teaches. When the last bend in the river is reached, with only a handful of oar strokes left required to move the raft from the River’s main current to the eddy fronting the dusty boat ramp and de-rigging area, a brief pause while my fellow boatmen maneuver their rafts into the landing area invites one more reflective moment, one more thought about Major Powell and his brave crew.
After months of anxiety-fueled challenge, having descended over 1,000 miles of uncharted and unknown river wilderness in ill-equipped wooden boats poorly designed for the task to which they were being put, Powell and his companions camped at the confluence of the Little Colorado River and the Colorado River mainstem on August 13, 1869. With two and a half months of toil behind them, their boats and bodies had suffered untold abuse from flips and portages and all manner of privation. But remarkably, their spirits were relatively high as they prepared to enter what is now commonly called the Grand Canyon’s “Inner Gorge.” They patched and re-caulked their frail crafts, dried out what was left of their meager provisions, and, not knowing how many more rapids awaited them or how many days it might take before they would emerge from the vertically-walled gorge that had been the backdrop to their daily travails for the past many weeks, they paused to take stock of their situation. In one of his Journal’s most famous passages, Powell captures well the anxiousness that seems as germane today for all of us as it was for him and his men 151 years ago:
“We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah well! we may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests ghastly... With some eagerness, and some anxiety, and some misgiving, we enter the canyon below...[w]e can see but a little way into the granite gorge below, and it looks threatening.”
Good luck to us all.
