‘Dancing with Deadpool’ – Doesn’t that sound like something a romantic like me would concoct? I was intending for this post to be a follow-up on the last post, laying out my rationale for believing that we have all been ‘romancing the Colorado River’ for a century and a half, with three distinct epochs.

But then ‘Dancing with Deadpool’ came along. ‘Dancing with Deadpool’ is actually the title of a report recently released by a Colorado River Research Group, a group of natural and social scientists presenting under the auspices of the Getches-Wilkinson Law Center at the University of Colorado. They are ‘all academics with long, well-established involvement in Colorado River scholarship,’ and you’ve heard about the work of a number of them in these posts before – Brad Udall, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Ann Castle, Doug Kenney, among others. In ‘Dancing with Deadpool’ they were invited ‘to present their thoughts on the future of the Colorado River as individuals rather than as representatives of their institutions.’

Back for a moment to my thesis that, as a Bureau of Reclamation engineer said in 1918, ‘a vein of romance runs through every form of human endeavor,’ but mediated with desert poet Mary Austin’s caution to those who drink the waters of the romanced river, and who then ‘can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance’: I will say of most of the contributors to ‘Dancing with Deadpool,’ that they are trying to reconcile the naked facts too long ignored with the ongoing Romance of Controlling and Conquering the River that they are too polite to suggest just ending, as it were.

Their thoughts have received a bigger play in the news than they might have, had there been any real news from the closed rooms where the seven state negotiators, with 30 First People nations and Mexico looking over their shoulders, are trying to work out a new post-2026 management plan for the river. Since we’ve been in the 2026 water year since October 1, a new plan can’t come any too soon at this point – especially given the projections that this winter may be as anemic as last winter in terms of runoff this coming summer.

The 60-page report can be found at Colorado River Insights: Dancing with Deadpool, and is mostly good reading; the Executive Summary of the eight essays can be found here, and most newspapers of record have done a big story on the report.

I am not going to go into separate analyses of all eight essays making up this report. What I want to do instead is to pick up and run with some points in several of the essays that seem to me to point toward a potentially romantic vision of our future in the Colorado River region that starts with some often downplayed ‘naked facts’ that can’t be ignored or denied forever….

When we talk about ‘our problems with the Colorado River,’ we need to be more clear when we are talking about a ‘river problem’ and when we are talking about ‘the river system’ that we have imposed on the river to enable our use of the river’s water. In ‘Dancing with Deadpool’ Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck, take a second look at a big river problem. A decade or more ago, they added an enlightening distinction about ‘drought’ to our vocabulary: they acknowledged that part of the 21^st century drought was a ‘dry drought,’ meaning caused by diminished precipitation; but then said that at least half of the drought was a ‘hot drought,’ caused by rising temperatures that increased evaporation and transpiration of the precipitation that managed to fall. And the rising temperatures they accrued to anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Now they they have amended their analysis based on studies of  what has been happening in the Pacific Ocean; they say in this essay that the ‘dry drought’ is also probably at least partially a consequence of our anthropogenic sins, due to the impact of rising temperatures on the Pacific Ocean from whence the western climate emerges.

About half of the CRRG scientists collaborate on a ‘Dancing’ essay about a river system problem, analyzing where we stand on Colorado River Reservoir Storage – showing that we are indeed dancing with deadpool, the stage at which a reservoir level drops below its lowest portals through the dam, meaning no flow in the river below the dam. We wish this were a river problem that we could blame on the gods of nature, but it is mostly a river system problem. The river system is most visibly a set of big physicl structures for storing water and releasing it on a need basis into a vast desert distribution system. This system is overlaid on the natural river (which has dealt with worse obstacles in its five million years), but overlaid on the physical system is a thick but rickety layer of compacts, laws, treaties, regulations, court decisions, et cetera that dictate the operation of the physical system. Right now, the river managers – another layer, generating an operating system fraught with tensions between politics, economics and traditions – are working kind of desperately on ever-larger bandaids patched on operating systems that were clearly on track for deadpool in the first decade of the century. Jack Schmidt et al lay out this unfolding story.

But those essays reflect the ‘first we scare’em, then we ask them to think’ strategy of most legitimate public information (public propaganda never gets to the second step). Some of the essays in ‘Dancing with Deadpool’ gave some nudges toward alternative ways of looking at both the river and the river system that might be rabbit holes out of the current stalemate.

Doug Kenney, chair of the CRRG and director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center’s Western Water Policy Program, set me to thinking about that with an essay that was actually part of the ‘first we scare’em’ section of the pamphlet, about the ‘alarming erosion’ of the Colorado River ‘Safety Nets.’

One of the safety nets he spoke about is the groundwater which we pump to ‘balance out’ the shortfalls in our surface water. This dinged a bell in my mind – a statistic from a Western Water Assessment study of ‘the state of Colorado River science’ (another CU-based group). Their study concluded that only around 10 percent of the precipitation that falls on the Colorado River Basin actually finds its way into the river. The other 90 percent either sinks into the ground or is evaporated before it gets to the river’s tributary streams. Globally, roughly one third of the freshwater potentially usable in liquid form (neither frozen solid nor already evaporated back to vapor) is underground, groundwater; less than one percent of our freshwater is on the surface in streams and rivers, lakes and wetlands. (USGS info)

A focus on surface water prior to the early 20^th century is understandable; until the advent of powerful fossil-fueled pumps, all land-based animal life including us had to access the water we needed from the surface water that makes up less than one percent of all the water on the planet. We could also dig wells into the upper groundwater zone, fitted with handpumps, and the farm culture generated the windmill driven pump for filling stocktanks as well as home use, but other than that, it was all surface water – especially when it came to irrigated agriculture.

But now we can access that groundwater – and obviously do; when we say the Colorado River provides domestic water for 40 million people and irrigation water for five million acres of farmland, it should be obvious that all that water is not coming from a river running on average 12 million acre-feet a year. It is, in fact, hard to tell in some places in the Lower Colorado River Basin, and in many urban areas, which resource, ground or surface water, is the ‘safety net’ for the other. We do know that we’ve been pumping enough ‘supplemental’ groundwater to cause serious subsiding of the land as emptied underground aquifers collapse irreversibly.

But nevertheless, at the heart (not in the head but the romantic heart) of the negotiations is how to build up the storage again in two big open reservoirs under an increasingly brutal desert sun. How to Make Mead and Powell Great Again! – and who should sacrifice to do it. Have they not read Udall and Overpeck?

If we were intelligently approaching the post-2026 era, we might consider setting a 20-year ‘interim’ schedule for phasing out Mead and Powell entirely as the world warms, and getting as much of the river’s surface water as possible underground where it is safer from the drying sun. Before we have emptied and collapsed all the underground storage areas. There’ll be a full post on that one of these days.

Well, that’s the kind of thinking “Dancing with Deadpool’ wakens in my admittedly iconoclastic mind. I do not suggest that as a simplistic trumpish solution. Allocation of invisible underground water is not as straightforward as the allocation of surface water; nothing will be simplified by trying to combine ground and surface water into a single system – although it is working out fairly well in Colorado where integrating groundwater and surface water use has been the practice since 1969.  Not a new idea, in other words, although California – where the Central Valley has massive subsidence from aquifer loss – continues to believe it is not that big a deal.

Why are our negotiators not working on that kind of integrative 21^st century thinking? Why haven’t they been working on it since the ‘interim’ began in 2007? The water mavens are quibbling over bits and pieces of the overdeveloped surface water, while most of the states pump huge quantities of groundwater with no regulation for their diminishing future.  The faded but still somewhat radiant colors of the Romance of Conquest still hover over the basin, where we continue to tinker with the divine compact carved in stone by God’s lightning and carried off of a sacred mountain by Herbert Hoover and Delph Carpenter.

Another thing that struck sparks with me in ‘Dancing with Deadpool’ was Eric Kuhn’s moderately dour history of efforts to divide the use of the river among the states by percentages – but then concluding that if/when it comes down to litigation among the states, ‘it will be obvious to any mediator or special master that given the uncertainties in hydrology, the most equitable approach will be a negotiated percentage split.’ You heard that first here, a month or two ago…. And it has been brought up in the ongoing negotiations – sort of – but dismissed, presumably by senior users (part of the problem for the longest time) who want their firm numbers, and let the juniors duke it out over what’s left.

Another thought-piece in ‘Dancing’ that resonated with me was a kind of timid call for the creation of a ‘basinwide entity for Colorado River governance,’  a ‘formal commission with federal, state, and tribal representatives—including Mexico—ensuring structural inclusion for all the basin’s co-sovereigns.’ Yes! No more Upper Basin and Lower Basin! One governance for the whole river, the river made whole again. Another idea that you’ve seen in these posts before. This essay again has Doug Kenney’s name on it, along with a law professor, an environmentalist and the co-director of the Basin’s Water and Tribes Initiative.

Again, this is not a simplistic trumpish solution to river and river system problems. It would probably have to be preceded by percentage allotments to the states based on their evolved use to this point – and that would involve working through some whole-river issues. How should the losses from climate warming be apportioned among the states – now and into the future? How should the obligations to the 30 First People nations be apportioned among the states and nations? (Is it fair, for example, that under the McCarran amendment, Arizona state water courts have to figure out the obligations to 22 of the 30 tribes, while California and Colorado each only have a couple?) There would also be some friction in the Upper Basin, which is already working in percentages; Colorado is probably using a little more than its 51.75 percent of the Upper Basin’s yoyoing annual flows; Wyoming is using considerably less than its 13 percent.

There would be other interesting situations that would require overcoming old ‘water-stealing’ prejudices. The State of Colorado, for example, is currently trying to scratch up 99 million dollars to purchase a large and very senior non-consumptive hydropower right – which would be Western Colorado’s water to use when the deal is consummated, right? Well, yes, but… where is most of that water going to ultimately end up? Being parceled out of Mead Reservoir, just like it is now, for use by those rascally states who are always stealing our water! As if we could somehow keep it here. And because the Lower Basin and Upper Basin states would rather eat a prune than collaborate on something they would all benefit from, the Lower Basin will get a mostly free ride on a major Colorado investment. Forty million of the $99 million will come from the federal government if the Trumpsters condescend to release the funds, which means all seven states will be paying something into that pot, but Colorado’s $60 million investment will still be a very good deal for the downstream states. We ought to be able to deal better with each other than this, and whole-river governance could be a big step in the right direction. It rings my bell.

Okay – ‘Dancing with Deadpool’ seemed to warrant immediate attention – one hopes the negotiators are reading it thoughtfully too. And next post, I’ll go back to my tectonic analysis of our ever-evolving romance with the Colorado River, a romance that changes as we change. Meanwhile, let’s hope our winter is not so mean and meagre as the soul of Trump’s America, and as the days lengthen and warm, may we recover in our own souls an expansion and warming that might spread….