Well, with the fate of constitution democracy in the courts where we know the mills grind slowly (as opposed to the grinders who break things quickly); and with the money frozen for farmers doing well by doing good in water conservation; and neither white smoke nor black smoke arising from the chimneys of the enclaves trying to envision the next decade or so for the Colorado River – I’ll take a break from my wonkish efforts to think outside the box, to remember a friend and mentor, and friend of the River, who thought outside the box often in the last half of the 20th century. The cantankerous Colorado River water community recently lost a valued member, L. Richard Bratton, a water attorney in the Upper Gunnison River Basin from 1958 till his death January 28. Dick Bratton’s scope of influence went beyond the Upper Gunnison mountain valleys, however; he was a creative thinker who never met anyone he could … Read More
Romancing the River: To Halve and Have Naught, Part 2
A voice from the dark called out, ‘The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster.’ – Denise Levertov We have developed the resource; Now we have to learn how to share it. – Greg Hobbs The Trumpster Rebellion – is it organized enough to call it a ‘Revolution’? – is making itself felt in the Colorado River Basin at this point by the hold being put on all federal funding from the two big infrastructure-related acts of the Biden administration. This included funding for the Upper Basin’s System Conservation Pilot Program, to pay farmers to leave some of their decreed water to flow down (it was hoped) to Powell Reservoirs; I believe it also included some of the money being used in the Lower Basin to pay farmers to leave a three million acre-feet of decreed water in Mead Reservoir for Water Years 2024-26. This is nothing ‘personal’ against Colorado River management; … Read More
Romancing the River: To Halve and Have Naught
Belated season’s greetings, dear readers! The season being the long dark days as our turning planet slowly tilts our part of the planet again toward the star we circle – moving us into a new year-cycle that will probably again be ‘one of the ten warmest years in recorded climate history’ – if not ‘the warmest’ again. But we are officially no longer going to be concerned about that, right? The voters have spoken, with the usual one-percent victory taken by the winner to be a landslide mandate. And what the voters decided, by that one-percent margin, is that we, as a nation, the Untied States of America, shall officially cease to believe that we are changing the climate; we’ve given ourselves license to linger in the denial and anger stages – denial that it is happening, and anger at anyone who wants to blame us for that which we can now officially refuse to believe is happening. And we … Read More
Romancing the River: Bluffing a Call, Calling the Bluff
Breaking news! The Lower Colorado River Basin is threatening the Upper Basin with a ‘Compact Call’ if it does not agree to share some major cuts in river use! Well, actually the news broke a week ago – and now there’s more news: just as I was wrapping this analysis of the ‘Call’ up yesterday, the Bureau put out for our consideration five options for river management up to and beyond the 2026 termination of the ‘Interim Guidelines.’ So we’ll interrupt our out-of-the-box exploration for management options for living with a desert river in an intelligent universe, and try to figure out what’s going on back in the surreal world of the ‘Compact box’ – looking at the ‘Call’ situation here, then get into the five management options in a couple weeks after the dust has settled. The Lower Colorado River Basin has attempted to break the stalemate between the two Compact-designated Colorado River Basins, by telling the Upper Basin … Read More
Romancing the River: Forging on in the Era of Fear and Loathing
Voz del pasado The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about ‘new politics’ and ‘honesty in government,’ is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers…. – from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson Hunter Thompson put the term ‘fear and loathing’ into our cultural dialogue in the early 1970s: first in 1971 with ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ then with ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail’ in 1973, a long rambling essay into America’s political character based on his coverage for Rolling Stone of the 1972 election of Richard Nixon over George McGovern. ‘Fear and loathing’ is a pretty … Read More
Romancing the River: The Existential Election – Again
I would be remiss in whatever responsibility I feel to the Colorado River if I did not remind you of the implications of the coming election for the river and our future with it. I don’t say ‘the future of the river’: the river will always be here in some form or another, but we may not always be here interacting with it – certainly not 40 million of us taking it for granted. And this election, like the last one – and probably the next one, if there is a next one – are and will be playing a determinative role in which way our future with the river goes. At some point, the American people have got to seriously confront the fact that phenomena like Hurricane Helene, heat domes, town-consuming wildfires and an enduring drought are climate-driven consequences of the way we do civilized life, and they will only get worse if we don’t do something to change … Read More
Romancing the River: The Headwaters Challenge 2
In the last two posts here (one of which you got twice, my apology), I’ve been trying to ‘revision’ the Colorado River as the classic desert river that it is. All rivers are composed of runoff – water from precipitation that did not soak into the ground, collecting in streams that ‘run off’ to the next lower watershed. Humid-region rivers receive new water from unused precipitation all the way along their course to the sea, but a river in the arid lands obtains nearly all of its water as runoff from a highland area high enough to force water vapor to condense into precipitation. The resulting runoff from that precipitation then flows down into the arid lands where it receives very little additional moisture and thus starts to diminish through natural processes on its way to the sea – evaporation under the desert sun, riparian vegetation use, absorption into low desert water tables. When the deserts are large enough, and … Read More
Romancing the River: The Headwaters Challenge
An Apology: Our service that sends these posts hs malfunctioned; this one sat in limbo for the past two weeks. I hope we have things back to where we can again get it to you every 3-4 weeks. – George In the last post here, with the Colorado River’s Upper and Lower Basins in stalemate over how to distribute the suffering after the 2026 expiration of the Interim Guidelines, I suggested we use the time to do what we’ve all been saying we need to do, but find it hard to do: ‘think outside the box.’ The ‘box’ in this case being the Colorado River Compact. We can go back to Monday-morning-quarterbacking the rivermeisters as they try to figure out how to drag the Compact, its misbegotten two-basin division and its Marley’s-chain Law of the River into the 21st century. But for the moment – let’s just indulge in imagining river scenarios that might actually reflect Colorado River realities in … Read More
Romancing the River: The Desert River
In the last post, I suggested that the Colorado River Compact with its ‘temporary equitable division’ into two basins could now be considered irrelevant (or worse, obstructive) because we have finally effectively accomplished, over the past century, the goal that brought the seven-state Compact commission together in 1922, but which they were unable to achieve then: a seven-way division of the use of the river’s waters. They wanted a legally constituted seven-way division that would override the appropriation doctrine at the interstate level, to avoid a seven-state horserace for water in which California was already lapping the field, but in 1922 they lacked, for that goal, both a sufficient knowledge of the river’s flows and reasonable expectations for their own growth. Finally they settled on the two-basin division that was, from the start, problematic (Arizona refused to even ratify it), but which sufficed to persuade Congress that the states were enough in agreement so that Congress could go ahead with … Read More
Romancing the River: Back to Basics?
Note in passing: this is the 50th post on this ‘weblog’ (a meaningful number to a ten-digit species). I am grateful to those who continue to open and even read these posts. I am obviously writing as much for my own edification and clarification as for yours, in the spirit of British writer E.M. Forster, who said, ‘I don’t know what I think until I see what I write.’ Working it out on paper, as we used to say, except now it is electrons on a screen only a little more organized than a starry night. Most of these posts have been about the Colorado River – a river I can say I ‘love’ in all the complexity that concept of engagement encompasses. I love its natural forms and contours, which leave me thinking that we need a ‘sur-’ category for nature – ‘surnature’ like ‘surreal’ is to ‘real’ – for natural phenomena that seem to be ‘beyond nature,’ at … Read More