Clean Water In the News

By Sarah Bates
Western Progress for Headwaters News

The Rocky Mountain West is thirsty. And its limited water resources work very, very hard.

Snow blankets the spine of the continent, melts into headwater streams that flow to mainstem rivers, and snakes through dry desert canyons on its way to the ocean.

On its journey, the water is dammed and diverted, piped over great distances, and put to work to meet diverse and growing human needs. Western sage Wallace Stegner observed, "Water is the true wealth in a dry land; without it, land is worthless or nearly so."

Historically, many of the choices made about managing this precious resource have not adequately reflected its value. Legal rules developed during the Gold Rush provide important protection for established water users but do not take into account changing public values for water or the health of the rivers and aquifers from which water is drawn. Priorities for development often leave until too late consideration of the reliability of water supplies to serve new residents—let alone a meaningful analysis of the impacts of obtaining water from various sources.

At the heart of the matter, as Marc Reisner artfully observed in his book Cadillac Desert, westerners have lived in a state of denial about the region's aridity, establishing a society whose "very existence is premised on epic liberties taken with water." Today, it appears, the bill for this extravagance is coming due, and westerners face important choices about how to live in an arid landscape.

It is increasingly common to see today's challenges presented as a looming crisis in western water—a coming drought of near-biblical proportions. But this is also a time of opportunity, a chance to adopt a variety of policy reforms to encourage water conservation and re-use, carefully crafted water transfers, and restoration of aquatic ecosystems.

In short, this could be the dawn of a new era of western water management, a time of adapting our lifestyle to fit the realities of our homeland rather than forcing the landscape to bend beyond its capacity to meet our needs.

According to Nevada State Archivist Guy Rocha, Mark Twain did not actually say that "Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over," although that quote is persistently attributed to him.

"If Twain didn't say it," Roch remarks, "he should have." No less a truisim (and equally difficult to attribute) is the oft-repeated saying that "Water flows uphill to money." Indeed, water—and the mighty battles and empire building inspired by its scarcity in the West—has sparked its own literature, legal and technical disciplines, and cultural traditions. No one, it seems, is dispassionate about water.

Today's water disputes are deeply rooted in historical circumstances and practices. As explained in the recently released Western Progress policy report A New Western Water Agenda, the rules governing water use trace back to the mining camps of the 19th Century.

They have evolved over time, to the point that scholar Charles Wilkinson wrote a tongue-in-cheek obituary for "Prior Appropriation" in the early 1990s. (Since then, he has acknowledged that "Prior" is alive if not wholly well.) Modern water law includes a strong federal regulatory component, some level of protection for instream flows, and consideration of public values for water and related resources.

Despite these changes, western water policy remains fundamentally anchored in the idea that water will be available wherever and whenever it is needed.

The ambitious spirit of the Reclamation Era lives on in the multi-pronged efforts of Las Vegas to obtain water to satisfy the fastest growing metropolitan area in the United States. At the right price, the thinking goes, there is always more water to be had. And, with very few exceptions, that has so far been true.

Increasingly, however, reaching for "new" water means stepping on someone else's interests—boaters and anglers who don't want to see river flows depleted, farming communities disturbed by dried-up land as irrigators sell their water rights to distant cities, and rural homeowners whose wells run dry when too many neighbors tap into the same source of groundwater.

The battles extend beyond state lines, as witnessed by a dispute before the U.S. Supreme Court pitting Montana against Wyoming over the modest flows of the Tongue and Powder rivers.

Most significantly, perhaps, the players have changed in the western water wars. Early water disputes were settled by irrigators armed with shovels or shotguns facing off across a ditch. Later these conflicts were resolved in administrative procedures or court proceedings, but the parties remained the same—those who held legally recognized water rights, sorting through their competing interests in what essentially functioned as a risk-sharing enterprise. Today, such proceedings involve parties representing all manner of public resources (fish, wildlife, water quality, recreation, and both rural and urban communities), who previously would have been recognized, if at all, as "third-party" interests.

The key driving forces for change in western water policy are population growth and climate change.

The Rocky Mountain West is the fastest-growing region in the country, and six of the 10 fastest-growing states are located in the persistently water-short Colorado River Basin. Most of the region's water withdrawals are for agricultural irrigation, but an increasing share is devoted to watering bluegrass lawns and filling the swimming pools of Sunbelt migrants. And, although western cities have embraced conservation programs and water-wise landscaping in a big way, several western states have per capita water use rates far above the national average.

In brief, the region's limited water supplies are already in short supply and are sought out by more and more people moving to the Rockies. What could possibly make the situation tougher? The answer: Warming temperatures and diminished water supplies.

A stream of scientific studies in recent years concludes that global climate changes are already impacting western water resources.

A 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected as much as 11.5 degrees F warming in the 21st Century, far greater than changes observed over the past century. (IPCC, Climate Change 2007—Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability)

The IPCC predicts that this temperature rise will result in more extreme weather conditions (heat waves, hurricanes, floods), increased evaporation from reservoirs, and decreased snow cover, glaciers, and ice caps.

The next phase of IPCC reporting will focus on regional impacts of climate change, including predicted conditions in particular river basins. This information—so essential for assessing adaptation strategies—is devilishly hard to pin down, given the broad parameters of climate change modeling and the variability of global weather patterns.

We do know that the key impacts of climate change in the American West will be reduced water availability, especially during the summer months when both demands and vulnerability are highest. Already, snowlines have moved to higher elevations throughout the region, and spring runoff is occurring as much as three weeks earlier than just 50 years before. Increasingly, the pattern of runoff is influenced by rain falling on snow, creating new patterns of fall and spring flooding.

The warming signs extend far beyond the desert Southwest. In 2007, for example, western Montana experienced record high temperatures, resulting in lower-flowing, warmer streams, which threatened the survival of native fish. These conditions prompted the state to impose fishing restrictions and prohibitions in the most popular and sought-after stretches. Local outfitters, guides, and tourist-related businesses all suffered economic losses as a result of these closures.

Elsewhere, marina owners have had to extend boat ramps over vast expanses of newly exposed lakebed—a trend well-documented in Lakes Powell and Mead, but also occurring in Montana's Fort Peck Lake on the Missouri River.

Even with this year's abundant snowpack, the region's thirst continues to grow. Climate scientists caution the public and policy makers not to confuse "weather" with "climate," pointing out that the larger trends of warming and drying will not be reversed by a single year or two of normal precipitation.

The eight major water agencies that recently announced formation of the Water Utilities Climate Alliance express no doubt that the time to act is now.

We don't need to wait for good ideas, either. For decades now, forward-thinking water experts have come together periodically and hammered out remarkably similar agendas for water policy reform.

Gatherings as diverse as the National Water Commission, the Western Governors' Association, the Longs Peak Working Group, and the Western Water Review Advisory Commission all called for changes in state and federal policies to respond to evolving public values, protect important rivers and ground water resources, and coordinate management among diverse public agencies. Some of these ideas are already finding their way into law and agency practices, but many are still classified as "recommendations"—well-considered, but untried.

Today's western water crisis provides an opportunity to step forward more boldly than before, looking to the good ideas already available and supplementing them with solid information about the changing conditions to come. Those of us who have been participants in these roundtables, commissions, and other study- and talk-fests now must help shape the laws and policies to carry us into a sustainable future.

In the next Perspectives column, to be published next week, I will suggest a path toward necessary reforms, as contained in the new Western Progress water report.