Los Angeles probably should not exist at its current level of demand and development, and certainly wouldn't exist, given its size, if it had only to depend on local aquifers and water sources to quench its enormous thirst. Instead, it dangles at the ends of long systems of water transport: gravity-fed pipelines, fossil fuel-powered pumping stations, and reservoirs and tunnels and aqueducts that twist their way across evaporative deserts from sources hundreds of miles away, from the north and east.
At the same time, the city's enormous hardscape of roofs and roads rushes what small intermittent amounts of freshwater precipitation it does receive, mostly in the winter months, into its flood control system of channeled rivers and buried streams, down through its basins and rapidly out to sea, leaving little to percolate into and recharge its aquifers. In other words, Los Angeles works hard to dry out its landscape, then spends the rest of the year sucking water out of distant regions to balance its account.
It can manage these supplies at this scale because its Metropolitan Water District, a collection of twenty-six collaborating water agencies spread along the length and breadth of coastal Southern California from Oxnard down to San Diego, is the five hundred pound gorilla in the room, and it can demand its “fair share” based in large part on its participation in the Colorado River Compact.
So that's Los Angeles, not exactly a model of intelligent systems design but able to allocate the water it has access to, allowing supply to stay within shouting distance of the demands of a growing population by concentrating, to a degree, on conservation and ensuring deliveries from distant sources. By some measures, it's not doing badly in that regard, but, like everyone else, it's being impacted by a warming climate and the constraints of prior agreements and legacy infrastructure. Rapidly shifting contemporary conditions – such as, for example, the growing threat of wildfires – do not allow much room for considered adaptation at a leisurely pace.
So I write – ignorantly as it may be – from the standpoint of a person now living at the other end of that chain of water delivery systems, our own North Fork Valley whose river is a tributary of the Gunnison River which is, in turn, a tributary of the mighty Colorado River, the centerpiece of a catchment basin that drains down out of the Rocky Mountains, carving its way across the desert Southwest, through the Grand Canyon, and exiting (when it's able) into the Gulf of California. In theory, our placement somewhere near the top of that watershed should ensure our spot in line and a seat at the table when the water is being shared out, but climate change is playing fast and loose with the rules we mere mortals cooked up into an agreement that was based (in 1922) on an inadequate and incorrect assessment of the size of the available supply. We do get our “share” but it is a share of a shrinking amount.
It takes some time, when you move to this state, to understand the many factors that affect the definition of a “share” of water in Colorado, especially if you move from anywhere east of the Mississippi River. Where rainfall is plentiful, the issue is how to get it where you want it to go (or keep it from going where you don't want it to go) – not worrying about whether there will be enough to go around. The idea that the state could claim ownership of every drop that falls from the sky and treat rainwater harvesting as a kind of crime – or at least a matter ripe for legal restriction and regulation – just seems preposterous.
Until, however, you arrive at the thought that the water – whether it falls from the sky or flows off of a mountaintop, down a valley and out of the state – is for the most part just passing through. Diverting, capturing and storing it, in a situation that more often than not would elsewhere pass for a drought, opens the door to commoditizing it and making it a target for market speculation.
And speculation in so basic a resource is precisely what Colorado sought to avoid by adjudicating water rights based on a “First in time, first in right” principle that basically means the rights travel over time with the deed to the property and are prioritized and enforced by contract. The two can be separated (like selling off mineral rights), but it's an unlikely scenario in rural areas. If you don't have access to a relatively predictable supply of water, you don't have a farm. Or a ranch. Or a mine. If, however, you live in a city, you don't pay that much attention to such matters. You turn on a tap and out comes the water – from somewhere. At the end of the month, you pay the utilities bill, and that's the end of the story. Let somebody else worry about where it comes from, or how clean it is.
There are a lot of people who do worry about these problems, however, and whose job it is to worry – a lot of stakeholders, especially when you consider the problem from the standpoint of all the parties to the River Compact and all of its associated treaties, federal and state laws, Supreme Court decrees and decisions made to enforce environmental regulations. The so-called “Law of the River” was never a finished and settled piece of business. It's been altered piecemeal in response to this or that demand or problem over the entire length of its existence, right down to 2019's “Drought Contingency Plan” negotiations.
However, as the authors of a recent Center for Colorado River Studies White Paper make clear, “A gradual and incremental approach to adaptation . . . is unlikely to meet the challenges of the future.” They also note, “It is unwise to develop water-supply management plans based on unrealistic assumptions for future consumptive water use in the Upper Basin.” They offer a three-point rethinking of alternative management strategies, the first of which (“Changes in the rules of water-supply allocation and/or accounting”) is the one I'd like to address, but not in the big picture terms in which the paper necessarily frames it.
Essentially, I would like to break down the problem by defining given territories by their watershed characteristics, even though those boundaries represent land that may adjoin, contain, or be contained by larger catchment basins. County line boundaries or BLM regulation may work as governance structures for a multitude of problems (law enforcement, taxation, infrastructure, etc.), but they ignore or in some cases actively disrupt good management practices relative to specific local watershed conditions. Colorado water law helps to constrain the damage, but something more is needed – especially in a time of drought that is rapidly being augmented by climate change.
This increased warming seems to be primarily a function of increasing concentrations of CO2 and other heat-trapping gasses released into the atmosphere, the legacy condition of decades of fossil fuel combustion on a global scale. The mechanism is well understood, and measurement of CO2 is a more readily accessible gauge of the situation than other, possibly more subtle contributing causes of warming, such as disruptions to local or regional hydrological cycles (water vapor being a particularly potent greenhouse gas, uniquely sensitive to warming temperatures.)
How do we tease apart other factors such as deforestation, erosion and loss of topsoil, urban heat island effects, etc. that may illuminate a variety of heat-reduction and climate mitigation strategies? Are we just stuck with the primary task of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, slowing the rise of greenhouse gasses, sequestering carbon and hoping we can thereby, eventually, lower the temperature?
What seems to me to be required is on-the-ground observation and data collection, and policy that is not necessarily based on historical precedent or assumptions fed into a computer model, assumptions that may, as the authors of the white paper suggest, be unrealistic. This is especially key at the top of the watershed. If the problems aren't addressed there, they tend to multiply as they move downstream. The present system may look as if it safeguards those downstream supplies, but as we move water more efficiently through the landscape, the knock-on effect is aridification.
Each resident or occupant of a watershed needs to act as an agent, steward, or manager of the system and operate according to a specific set of ethics, best management practices regulating and ensuring a sufficient supply of good clean water. The policy of top-down management – by water districts, court decrees, seniority of rights, or system monitoring – isn't currently flexible enough to even deal with year-to-year fluctuations in supply. Latest “hot topic” idea being explored: “Demand Management” – paying farmers (out of unspecified funding sources) not to irrigate. We are still meeting our contractual obligations to downstream users, but with less and less headroom and margin for error. And the yearly trend is toward increasing aridity, which may not be so much a product of the rules as it is a consequence of our behavior under those rules.
To be clear, the system was designed to countenance a certain amount of waste – not flagrant waste, but slow, incremental, nearly universal degradation of what should more accurately be termed a standard of watershed health. In the West, we are always fighting the rate of evaporation relative to precipitation, and now the evaporation – from rivers, from reservoirs, from clear-cut hillsides and over-appropriated water sources – is outpacing us. We may have been able to make up the difference in times past by pumping up groundwater (or enjoying a particularly “wet” year of abundant precipitation), but those sources too are falling victim to our lack of an accurate and trustworthy set of watershed ethics. If Colorado intends to reverse the process of aridification, it needs to craft as a goal the repair and restoration of its local hydrological cycles, in ways that may not necessarily follow the rules under which it's operated in the past.
