Sure, the river begins in the Colorado Rockies. But in law and practice, the waterway making headlines is clearly the California River. And the first provision of any deal to save the river should rename it accordingly.

This condition wouldn’t be about Golden State pride. Instead, a name change would more accurately reflect the imperial role California plays not only in the river controversy, but in the movement of water, people and power in the American West.

Right now, the Grand Canyon-sized divide over how to reduce the amount of water drawn from the rapidly diminishing river is being portrayed as a dispute between states, and as a contest between the power of politics and the power of law.

On one side, six states that rely on California-née-Colorado water—Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—have come together to demand cuts in water use that would fall heaviest on California, which receives the largest share of the river’s water.

In response, California water officials have produced a plan that emphasizes how our state’s rights to the water are more senior than those of our Southwest neighbors. Their newly released plan would cut less from California’s take, and more from Arizona and Nevada. In the Wild West of Water, this argument—We stole it first! We stole it fair and square!—is a strong legal position.

But such descriptions of the fight fail to capture the true dynamics of the West. In matters of economy and demography, the six states are California colonies. Which makes this dispute less a fight between Californians and Arizonans, Nevadans, or Coloradans and more a civil war within California, with Californians on both sides of the fight.

To understand this river rift properly, start by seeing California for what it really is: the seat of a regional empire. The state of California, anchored by its major metropolises, is by far the richest and most dynamic area in this half of North America. With nearly 40 million people, California has more residents and a bigger economy than all the other western states of the U.S. put together.

In recent generations, California, like other great empires through history, has grown so much that it has exported people, money, and culture to nearby territories. California’s investment has helped make the intermountain West the nation’s fastest-growing region.

Many of the greater West are native Californians, or immigrants who came through the Golden State. Nevada is the most Californian state, with nearly as many California natives (20 percent) as Nevada natives (25 percent), and more than 90 percent of its population living within 50 miles of the California border. But Californians have also provided sizable percentages of new residents to Utah, Colorado, and especially Arizona, where one out of every 10 residents was born here.

Moving to the colonies is so common that the Orange County Register business columnist Jonathan Lansner often builds spreadsheets for his readers examining which of these colonies are doing best. (His latest advice? “Move to Colorado.”)

Are these transplanted Californians, and other residents of the California colonies, grateful for our largesse? Of course not. Colonists don’t freely thank their emperors, which is why every so often, the LA Times or New York Times interviews some real estate agent in Phoenix or Las Vegas or Denver, who whines about how the California ex-pats are driving up housing prices.

Oh, you denizens of western deserts and mountains, please forgive us Californians for making you wealthier!

With water, our successful colonization policies create headaches for us. We seized the water of the Western wilderness to build the world’s fourth-largest economy. But that wilderness is now full of former Californians and their communities, which now mercilessly seek a bigger share of the water.

“Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive,” Edward Gibbon observed in his classic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Alas, the patently clear observation that Californians should keep the water because we do more things with it is not politically palatable in our colonies. Nor should we expect the president, from the tiny corporate tax haven of Delaware, to choose the grand needs of our great empire over the demands of those desert swing states, Arizona and Nevada.

Instead, we have little choice but to behave like wise empires, and do for our colonies what they won’t do for themselves. “The price of greatness,” the imperialist Winston Churchill observed, “is responsibility.”

The Golden State needs a better, future-focused answer to the colonies’ claims, especially with climate change drying up the Colorado and other rivers.

California must develop and finance a water plan not just for itself but for the West. This will mean more water recycling, more capture of stormwater, more desalination, and more water for ourselves and our colonies—so that our empire is no longer so dependent on that workhorse of a river.

All we’d ask in return is that everyone start calling our river by its proper name.

The post The Colorado? Call It the California River appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In her 1997 poem, “Colorado Water,” she wrote:

The palm said, “My clover is cool around my bole, over my hidden roots.
My fronds clatter, crash
like waves in the far off sea.”

I follow the tradition of thousands of years, of date palm growers diverting the waters of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates and Indus, to irrigate their gardens. Water that entered the Colorado River basin as melted snow in Wyoming and Utah, Colorado and Arizona, and even New Mexico, contributes to the flow onto my property.

But this is a historic moment, too. This summer, for the first time ever, water on the Colorado River was rationed. With the West drier and the current drought dire, the river’s flow, which supplies water across the American West, as well as to Mexico, cannot meet the needs of all the humans who depend upon it.

When date growers want to order water for their palms, we can call or email the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) and order water—“30 inches on Monday, off Wednesday,” and their computer alerts the computer at the Imperial Dam on the river, which regulates how much of the total flow is routed over to our canal and Valley. As we are below sea level in the Salton Sink, the need for pumping is minimal.

My usual 30 inches are not much compared to neighbors who order 90 inches or 120 inches, so the “Zanjero” (the CVWD employee who opens the water valve gate up on Ave. 60 that regulates our stem of the canal) may not adjust the flow exactly to 30 inches, and I may get a little more or less.

The insects cry in different voices, “When the water comes
we climb the clover to the pinnacles of safety.”

The ducks speak in an ensemble
of piccolo, oboe and kazoo, “Now
there is water around the tree for our feet, a banquet of bugs on the clover;
our beaks snap and gather the harvest, crisp and squishy, legs and wings,
tidbits of flyer and crawler,
the last buzz in our bills,
the last tickle in our swallowing.

But if I get a little less and come up short of water, the final end palms in my rows may not get water that month. As the crisis deepens, who decides which “end rows” get short changed, and how that shrinking total flow is allocated?

Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to fund irrigation projects throughout the West. The original intent was for U.S. taxpayers to provide the infrastructure (dams and canals) to help family farms, with the subsidized water going to farms of 160 acres or less.

In 1922, the Federal Government and the affected Western States negotiated a compact that divided the allocation of the Colorado River’s waters. Seniority of water rights goes back to that agreement. Since then, this law of the river has spawned an army of lawyers and lobbyists defending different interests, and treaties that involve Mexico, Native Nations, states, and various other entities.

The Coachella Valley Water District and the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), at the southern end of the Salton Sea, cover a 100 mile plus area stretching from Palm Springs to the Mexican border. Both were formed over 100 years ago. But over the years, large landowners and corporate farms joined with IID to challenge the 160-acre limitation, going back to the Boulder Canyon Act of 1928, arguing the notion of “perfected rights.” In 1980, in Bryant v. Yellen, the U.S. Supreme Court waived any limitations on water deliveries to these growers.

The allocation of the river’s limited and life-giving bounty has become a political as well as ecological crisis as urban and rural interests clash.

During my several days of irrigating every month, tens of thousands of cars will be washed and tens of millions of toilets will be flushed in Southern California with water from the river.

I pay under $50 an acre foot (325,851 gallons) for my water. San Diego has agreed to pay IID $679 per acre foot. An acre foot is estimated to serve 2.5 households (four persons each) for a year. Since they have more votes than the sparsely populated Imperial Valley, and more representatives in Sacramento and Washington, and their own lobbyists and lawyers, and are willing to pay, urban users in San Diego and Orange and Los Angeles are going to put tremendous pressure on agriculture to cut back.

There are delights for all on a desert morning
when the water is sidetracked from the Colorado.
Even the insects know
they have hidden their eggs well, and their tribes will increase,
though they perish in the duck’s morning meal.

A key principle in water allocation is “best use” or “beneficial use” which assumes “best use for humans.” The ducks and bugs and clover cover crops, the whole web of life that the river stimulates in the date gardens in this valley, are not part of the equation. If the IID can provide water at $50 an acre foot, and San Diego is willing to pay many times that, corporate farmers and the IID are eying selling more and more of their high seniority “rights” to the water. The Imperial Valley reverts to desert.

But wait—water itself isn’t what we pay for. The original intent of taxpayer-funded dams and canals was to provide water to farmers to feed the cities. Farmers and urban dwellers are paying for the water delivery systems, and the maintenance of same.

CVWD delivers my water through canals by gravity flow, with no water treatment and almost no expense of pumping. Urban dwellers are paying for the pipes and pumps and filter systems that enable them to flush their toilettes with purified water suitable for drinking. As the decreasing supply of the river’s waters are reallocated, and the original intent of the 1902 Reclamation Act is overridden, urban and rural populations must both promote conservation and Best Use/Beneficial Use of this life-giving asset.

The Coachella Valley, with its high seniority water rights and highly productive and beneficial use in agriculture, may have more protection for its water that other agricultural areas. But the river cannot do all that humans demand. And agriculture, and the whole web of life it supports, will surely suffer.

The post When the Colorado River Runs Dry appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post <em>Arizona Republic</em> Reporter Shaun McKinnon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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Arizona Municipal Water Users Association executive director Kathleen Ferris said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimates a potential shortage of 3.2 million acre-feet of water in the next 50 years, as demand for Colorado River water outstrips capacity. “We have to get back to reality,” she said. “What can that river really sustain, and how can we ensure that new growth is met by sustainable water supplies?”

Nature Conservancy Colorado River program director Taylor Hawes said that the river is also facing significant environmental challenges. The Colorado River is home to 42 native fish species, 30 of which are found nowhere else in the world. Four have gone extinct, and 16 are imperiled. Striking a balance between a healthy river system and the demands of farms and people is not an easy task.

Hawes said that it’s difficult to get people—who are dealing with 25 or 100 issues in their everyday lives—to make water a priority. The people of Denver and Las Vegas, for instance, recognize that the Colorado River has a problem, but they won’t recognize that it’s their problem. They don’t know where their water comes from.

Here in Havasu, said McKinnon, you’re right on the river, but the desert city has a limited supply of water. What’s it like to see golf courses in Phoenix and resorts in Las Vegas using the resource in a way that seems so wasteful?

Lake Havasu City’s water resources coordinator, Doyle Wilson, said that living on the river offers a much better perspective. But in general, people in rural environments—particularly if they get their water from a well or have it hauled in—are more aware of how much water they use than people in cities.

Hawes said that throughout the Southwest, “we’ve done too good a job in our water utilities”; people don’t know it’s a limited resource. Arizona, however, has changed the tone of the discussion by highlighting that the state is a desert—and needs to use less water.

Changing water use isn’t just about individuals’ decisions; significant legislative change requires the seven states that make up the Colorado River Basin to agree on big issues. “Nothing major gets done on the Colorado River without the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation being involved and without cooperation of the states,” said Ferris—which is why it takes a very long time. (Hawes referred to this glacial speed as “water time.”)

Because it can take decades to change water use laws, short-term efforts will have to be voluntary, said Ferris. One recent example of such an effort is an agreement by Lower Colorado Basin states to leave water in Lake Mead in order to prevent water shortages in Arizona.

Current laws, said Hawes, reflect the values of 150 years ago. They will be changed—but only when society gets behind them. In the meantime, we need to make space within the law for change.

Wilson said that a “spirit of cooperation has to take hold” throughout the Southwest. “Otherwise we will be mired in litigation for decades, and that doesn’t get anybody anywhere,” he said. In the meantime, he and other local water managers have taken the position that the best way to conserve water is to be as self-sufficient as possible: “We have to take care of ourselves.”

Some policies make self-sufficiency difficult. Wilson said that one policy he’d like to see changed prevents Lake Havasu City from making deals with Indian tribes for water lease agreements. Another rule designates all water below lake level under federal jurisdiction, which prevents the city from treating wastewater and storing it in the ground.

McKinnon asked the panelists how they find balance in their work between human water use and the river’s ecology.

Hawes said that it’s easy to know how much water a household needs and to make calculations based on that figure. But it’s a challenge to find a formula that dictates what the river needs. The Nature Conservancy is trying to replicate patterns found in nature as much as possible, like the big spring floods on the river that are followed by a hot, dry fall season.

We have to understand we’re never going to restore the river to what it was, said Wilson—but we still need to watch it carefully.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked whether homeowners and farmers pay different amounts for Colorado River water.

Yes, said Ferris—and it depends on where people and businesses are, too. In California’s Imperial Irrigation District, farmers pay $20 per acre-foot of Colorado River water. A single acre-foot, said Ferris, will serve 2.5 households for an entire year.

For farmers in Colorado’s Western Slope, an acre-foot costs $125, said Hawes.

And in Lake Havasu City, said Doyle, the city pays $0.25 per acre-foot—mainly because they treat the water themselves.

Why, asked another audience member, don’t people in the Southwest see water as a common resource, one to be best used by the most people possible?

Ferris said that local economies were built on having secure water rights. Over the years, legislation gets piled up on those rights, and laws become interwoven and difficult to change.

Most people came to the West from the East, which was wet, said Hawes. The miners and farmers were the first to migrate—and the government needed to convince them that they could make a living here. Guarantees of a consistent water supply did the work of convincing them.

The post Whose Colorado River Is It? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If river flow continues to decline, it will be an economic as well as an ecological disaster affecting everyone from the maids at Caesars to the endangered humpback chub.

In advance of the Zócalo/ASU event “Can the Colorado River Survive?”, we asked people who study, manage, and document the river to tell us how we can make sure the answer to that question is “yes.”

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