Document redEX5REOxy8qgV4Qm4LMEbjv

To: Tracy Mehan[tmehan@awwa.org] From: Tracy Mehan Sent: Tue 4/4/2017 3:05:51 PM Subject: A Hopeful Perspective on the Colorado River / HOPEFUL PERSPECTIVE ON THE COLORAP'> R< /ER JAWWA.pdf Dear Colleague, Attached please find my review of Water Is for Fighting Over-and Other Myths About Water in the West by John Fleck. It offers an different, upbeat perspective on water management in the Colorado River basin. It appears in the April issue of Journal AWWA. I hope you find it of interest. Tracy Mehan G. Tracy Mehan, III Executive Director, Government Affairs American Water Works Association 202-326-6125 (direct) 703-850-9401 (cell) Attachment This communication is the property of the American Water Works Association and may contain confidential or privileged information. Unauthorized use of this communication is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the communication and any attachments. American Water Works Association Dedicated to the World's Most Important Resource 17cv1906 Sierra Club v. EPA - 6/22 Production ED 001523 00008050-00001 A Hopeful Perspective on the Colorado River: Exploding Myths About Western Water A review of Water Is for Fighting Over--and Other Myths About Water in the West by John Fleck. Published in 2016 by Island Press (ISBN-13: 978-1 610-91679-0, 246 pp., $30.00). Among political sci entists you will hear it said that no longer is governance just about government. With regard to water supply, this is particularly true in connection with the daunting challenges of both water quantity and quality offered by large-scale watershed or basin management. In a democratic society with constitutional checks and balances, not even the federal government--surely a major player--can simply wave a magic wand and just "make it so" in terms of a desired policy or outcome. Consider the numerous levels of government and mul tiplicity of societal interests, both domestic and interna tional, with an interest in managing the waters, say, of the Chesapeake Bay, Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, and, most notably, the Colorado River watersheds. Stakehold ers include federal, state, tribal, and municipal govern ments; foreign nations and their provinces or states; agri cultural organizations and irrigation districts; navigation interests; drinking water and wastewater utilities; conser vation and environmental organizations; and media organizations and the citizens whose opinions are, for better or worse, formed by them. With government and civil society joined at the hip, friction and conflict are inevitable, causing many to quote a statement (incorrectly) attributed to Mark Twain: "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over." John Fleck, a former journalist with the Albuquerque Journal, challenges this lazy assumption given the progress made in the Colorado River basin. He is upbeat on its prospects for overcoming future challenges of economic and population growth, vari able climate, and drought. In Water Is for Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West, he categorically rejects the "genre of apocalyptic proph ecy," a journalistic narrative that he once embraced but has now abandoned in the face of facts, those troublesome things. Although Fleck "grew up with the expectation of catas trophe, " the droughts of the first decades of the 21st cen tury forced him "to grapple with a contradiction"--i.e., "people's faucets were still running. Their farms were not drying up. No city was left abandoned." Indeed, he found instead "a remarkable adaptability." "When people have less water, I realized, they use less water," declares Fleck. Yuma County, Ariz., used to consume 967,000 acre-ft of water in the mid-1970s, about the same quantity diverted to Los Angeles to the west. Half of the county's farmland was planted in alfalfa or cotton, lower-value, or water-intensive crops. By the early 2010s, that acre age was nearly cut in half and the amount of water con sumed dropped by nearly a third. However, total agri cultural sales rose from $900 million to $1.2 billion in the same period. His own town of Albuquerque "cut its per capita water use nearly in half, and the great aquifer beneath the city actually began rising as a result of a shift in supply and reduced demand." Farmers idled fields of alfalfa and cotton, "crops that bring in low returns of each gallon of water," and shifted to higher-valued pecan orchards. Las Vegas, Nev., "a model of progressive water man agement," saw its population grow by 34% from 2002 to 2013, while its use of Colorado River water dropped by 26%, reducing per capita water consumption by 40%. Fleck, now a writer-in-residence and adjunct profes sor at the University of New Mexico, does not gloss over past conflicts, especially those between Arizona and California (do not skip the section in his book on the "Arizona Navy"), or decades of litigation and the endless posturing of politicians playing to the home town crowd. He provides excruciating detail on the operation of the "Law of the River," an incredible con figuration of federal and state law, an interstate com pact, international treaties and agreements, local irriga tion rules, and court decisions spanning decades governing the basin. But in Fleck's long view, these are epiphenomena, a distraction from the basin community's general movement toward more water efficiency, con servation, fledgling water markets, and more inclusive ness of tribal, Mexican, and environmental interests in the overall management of the Colorado River. Still, Fleck is not a believer in the inevitably of prog ress. He isa believer in the efficacy of human agency, "the network" of public and private officials who have 84 MEDIA PULSE | APRIL 2017 109:4 | JOURNAL AWWA 2017 American Water Works Association 17cv1906 Sierra Club v. EPA - 6/22 Production ED 001523 00008051-00001 worked collaboratively to reconcile the inevitable ten sions between the Upper and Lower Basins, as well as the region's economic and environmental interests. He embraces the teachings and research of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics and a proponent of community-based management of com mon resources, a concept that offers a solution to the "tragedy of the commons" and an alternative to the strictly binary choices between government regulation or outright privatization. Fleck believes that "place-specific solutions" and numerous informal meetings and conversations between stakeholders--"cheap talk," according to Ostrom-- create movement or critical mass for broader, more for mal solutions across the basin. He cites several successful examples of this " network governance" that sets the stage for traditional governance--i.e., governmental or legal solutions. The resolution of the problem of groundwater intrusion in the West Basin of Los Angeles started with a voluntary association of "forward-thinking individuals"-- the West Basin Water Association. For anyone not conversant in the history of water policy and development in the Colorado River Basin, Fleck's slim volume covers the big-ticket items from the development of the 1922 interstate compact, to Hoover Dam, Lakes Mead and Powell, the Central Arizona Project, Salton Sea environmental issues, and, of course, Las Vegas. He describes the 80-mi-long All-American Canal, a big artificial river delivering irrigation water to the Imperial Valley as "a spiderweb of some 1,600 miles of irrigation ditches." California'sState Water Project, with 701 miles of pipelines and canals, 21 reservoirs, the ability to irri gate 750,000 acres of farmland, and serving 25 million people, Fleck calls "a staggering hydraulic achieve ment." The ancient Egyptian pyramids pale in compari son with these creations. The Byzantine complexity of the legal and hydrological system is presented, warts and all, without succumbing to a fashionable hopelessness. On the contrary, the author believes that "the network" continues to generate the needed "social capital--the shared knowledge, understandings, norms, rules, and expectations about 17cv1906 Sierra Club v. EPA MEDIA PULSE | APRIL 2017 109:4 | JOURNAL AWWA 85 2017 American Water Works Association 6/22 Production ED 001523 00008051-00002 patterns of interactions that groups of individuals bring to a recurrent activity," as defined by Ostrom, to move the basin forward to even greater efficiency, conserva tion, and environmental justice. Fleck opens and closes his book with the story of the despoliation and modest efforts to restore the Colorado River Delta, an area of more than 3,000 mi2, now sup plied by a mere trickle of water. A 1905 visitor from New York, Daniel Trembley MacDougal, found it to be a verdant jungle "sufficient to support a vast amount of native animal life." "The countless millions of young willows and poplar shoots supply food for the beaver, which bids well to hold out long in the impassable bayous and swamps against the trapper foe," wrote MacDougal. Aldo Leopold, writing in the 1920s, before the big dams were built, saw "a hundred green lagoons" teeming with life. "For the last word in procrastina tion, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his free dom to the sea. " What the trappers could not accomplish, water devel opment did. The willows, poplars, and beavers were obliterated. Its present predicament is the resultant vec tor of massive engineering and excessive consumption by upstream users driven, at least in part, by the "use it or lose it" principle inherent in western water law's Prior Appropriation Doctrine ("first in time, first in right"). Yet Fleck finds hope in the2014 "pulse" or tempo rary release of more water for the benefit of the delta and the lower reaches of the river, an experiment result ing from new science on seasonal hydrologic flows; i.e., water released at the right time of year can yield extraordinary ecological benefits even with a low base flow, as well as collaborative discussions by "the net work" and between the US and Mexican governments. A new US-Mexico agreement, " Minute 319," pledges further dialogue on letting more of the river run to the sea without being completely sucked dry. Despite all the dire apocalyptic predictions, the American West and the Colorado River community thrive in spite of the challenges of climate, drought, and growth. So Fleck views optimism as realistic if we discard or abandon our beliefs in the inevitability of conflict and crisis. He concludes his fine book quoting a 1960 head line from the Los Angeles Times. "Southland'sWater Safety Margin Placed at 10 Years." How often have we read similar headlines over the past half-century? " It is possible to apply a simple arithmetic wave of the arm and say, for example, that we could bring the system into balance if everyone used 20 percent less water than they are consuming today," writes Fleck. "We know from experience from Yuma to Las Vegas to Albuquerque, that such reductions are possible, that water-using communities are capable of surviving and even thriving with substantially less water than they use today. But no one will voluntarily take such a step without changes in the rules governing basin water use as a whole to ensure that everyone else shares the reductions as well--that any pain is truly shared." "We need new rules," argues Fleck. "Absent that, we simply end up with a tragedy of the commons. " John Fleck understands that "cheap talk" can be price less and invaluable as the Colorado River community aspires to govern its commons rather than fight about it. He agrees with Winston Churchill: "Tojaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." --G. Tracy Mehan III is executive director of government affairs at AWWA in Washington, D.C.; tmehan@awwa.org. STANDARDS OFFICIAL NOTICE This shall constitute official notice of the availability of the following new or revised AWWA standards. The effective date of these standards shall be the first day of the month following notification of the availability in Journal - American Water Works Association To obtain copies of these or any AWWA standards, contact the AWWA Customer Service Group at (800) 926-7337. These standards have been designated American National Standards by the American National Standards Institute. The date of ANSI approval is shown in parentheses. Standard for Sodium Chloride (Jan. 24,2017) Standard for Nylon-11-Based Polyamide Coatings and Linings for Steel Water Pipe and Fittings (Jan. 3,2017) *\\ 6666 West Quincy Ave. Denver, Colorado 80235 American Water Works (303) 794-7711 Association www.awwa.org Standard for Cement-Mortar Lining of Water Pipelines in Place--4 In. (100mm) and Larger (Jan. 24,2017) Standard for Wastewater Collection System Operation and Management (Mar. 2,2017) 86 MEDIA PULSE | APRIL 2017 109:4 | JOURNAL AWWA 2017 American Water Works Association 17cv1906 Sierra Club v. EPA - 6/22 Production ED 001523 00008051-00003