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: 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
Romancing the River: Win-winning the West and our Unimaginable Future
Way too much is happening in the world today, beyond the Colorado River. An Armageddon is shaping up in the mideastern Cradle of Too Many Civilizations that makes Colorado River problems look like sandlot scuffles; we’re in a long slog toward an election in the Untied (sic) States that would not even be close in a rational nation-state but somehow, ominously, is close here; a so-called Cold War is heating up again between competing military-industrial complexes that are again dragging us to the brink of unimaginable disaster. As if the changing climate were not already enough unimaginability. Much about our future is unimaginable today. Those apocalyptic challenges make a focus on my favorite river almost feel like a guilty diversion, but there’s a lot of fundamental roiling and boiling going on along and around the Colorado River too – a lot of it dependent on intelligent adaptation to unimaginables like the supercharged climate. Will the Upper and Lower River Basins … Read More
Beyond 2026: Governance for the Colorado River in the Anthropocene
The graph above is from a study released a couple weeks ago, mid-June, on ‘The Colorado River Water Crisis: Its Origin and the Future,’ authored by two elders of Colorado River affairs: Dr. John Schmidt, river scientist at Utah State University, and Eric Kuhn, longtime manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, now retired; both are deeply immersed in the river’s issues, and committed to working through the current crisis to a more reality-based future for the river and those who use its waters. A third author is Charles Yackulic, a noted scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, but not so well known in Colorado River matters. When Jack Schmidt and Eric Kuhn speak about the river, everyone listens – especially when they speak together. This graph alone explains a lot of the pain and anxiety we’ve been experiencing, and anticipating experiencing, in the Colorado River region – the natural basin plus technological out-of-basin extensions. (Sometimes the anticipation of … Read More
Romancing the River: Quo vadimus?
Enough gallivanting around the Mississippi Basin and its rivers; back to the troubled and troublesome Colorado River, currently experiencing its worst dry spell since around 800 CE. The Colorado Rivers, I should maybe say, since for all practical (human) purposes the river is now managed in a quasi-de jure way as two river basins under the Colorado River Compact and subsequent ‘Law of the River’ actions: an Upper Colorado River and a Lower Colorado River. Previously here, I’ve been exploring the Colorado River Compact at its centennial, in what is certainly the worst year in its century. Here are some things I came up with in that exploration, that I don’t think are getting enough attention in our efforts to search our own souls and the soul of the river in the desert as we try to figure out where we are going from here: 1. The Colorado River Compact is not the ‘foundation of the Law of the River.’ … Read More
Romancing the River: The Law of the River
“Now we have to come to terms with the fact that there are limits. That’s not the American way to recognize limits.” – Jack Schmidt, Director Center for Colorado River Studies University of Utah For the past several posts, we’ve been exploring the Colorado River Compact, commemorating its centennial this year. Nearly everything I have read about the Colorado River Compact in this centennial year – and it’s getting to be voluminous – speaks of it as the ‘foundation’ of ‘The Law of the River,’ an accumulation of legal and political documents accompanying the development of the Colorado River since the 1922 Compact. I have a problem with calling the Compact the ‘foundation’ of the Law of the River – as though before the Compact was adopted, the River was lawless. That is not true. The real foundation of the Law of the River is the appropriations doctrine that all seven states (or territories) had embraced in the 19th century … Read More
Romancing the River: The Colorado River Compact at 100
Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, That was built in such a logical way It ran a hundred years to a day … – Oliver Wendell Holmes We’ve been exploring the Colorado River Compact here – which, like Oliver Wendell Holmes’ ‘wonderful one-hoss shay’ has now lived almost ‘one hundred years to the day’ – the commissioners signed off on it November 24, 1922. The century mark is a good place to pause and pull back for a larger perspective on something like a multi-state agreement and see what it has and hasn’t actually accomplished – but without losing sight of the romantic vision of conquest that drove the Compact’s formation, back in the early decades of the Anthropocene Epoch when reorganizing the prehuman world was still fun. In the last post here, we looked at the ‘major purposes’ cited in the first article of the Compact: the first listed purpose, ‘to provide for the equitable division and … Read More
Romancing the River: Onward and – well, onward with the Colorado River Compact
If any drink [of the Hassayampa], they can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance. – Mary Austin Before getting into the Colorado River again, I want to put out a plea: Please recognize the importance of the coming ‘midterm elections.’ Especially if you live in one of 15 percent of our congressional districts that has not been gerrymandered to a foregone outcome. This is a ‘tipping point’ election, not between two political parties trying to work things out, but between two political concepts with no middle room for compromise: if both houses of Congress tip toward the Republicans this election, rather than remaining barely tipped toward the Democrats, then we are going to be taking a big bumbling step toward authoritarian governance, and away from our evolving American experiment in government by, for and of the people. I think I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but please do what you … Read More
Romancing the River: Colorado River Compact, Part 2 – Divide to Conquer
“Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, That was built in such a logical way It ran a hundred years to a day … – Oliver Wendell Holmes The last episode here ended with representatives of the seven Colorado River Basin states gathering in Washington, DC, as a commission charged, in the words of Herbert Hoover, U.S. Commerce Secretary and Chair of the Commission, ‘to consider and if possible to agree upon a compact between the seven states … providing for an equitable division of the water supply of the Colorado River and its tributaries amongst the seven states.’ He went on to note that ‘this Conference is unique in its attempt to determine states’ rights over so large an area by amiable agreement.’ That was in January 1922; in 2022 we commemorate the centennial of a compact created by the Commission and ratified by six of the seven states and the U.S. Congress, enabling the controlling and harnessing … Read More