Postscript: NM Water Dialogue

Yesterday's Water Dialogue meetings at the Pueblo Indian Cultural Center were maybe the best public forum I've attended this whole past year. In my previous post, I had voiced some doubt as to the purpose and openness of the meeting, and now I'm eating crow - a lot of crow.

After a keynote address by Helen Ingram, which warmed my heart, that explicitly addressed "place" and "politics" in water governance, the rest of the day was occupied with three separate panel sessions. Speakers were either quite brief, after explaining who they were, or quite long-winded if they had a lot of content to share. I don't begrudge either approach. Ingram's initial volley addressed most of the minor and major lows and highs that were part of the day's activities and discussion points.

On the panels, speakers included personnel from the Interstate Stream Commission (OSE), the UNM Law School, the Navajo Nation, Elephant Butte Irrigation District, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD), ranchers, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority (or ABCWUA, winner of the day's acronym soup prize), and a climatologist and an angler to round events out. Tellingly, those three panels all had the words "conflict" or "competing interest" in their working titles. So panelists were challenged with addressing current and conflicting priorities (1), water transfer conflicts (2), or future changes (3). While I will not recap all of the speakers, there were some notable highlights relevant to the topic of this blog.

In the first morning panel, all of the speakers correctly identified near and long-term challenges to water governance and management in New Mexico. Chief among these were "environmental flows," guaranteed minimum water levels to help non-humans, and the difficulties posed by the U.S. Endangered Species Act. I will admit that this concern has been less of a priority for me these past few months as the blog has addressed really the socio-economic, human, and legal-plural dimensions of adjudication. But I bristle at the continued binary logic (black-white; nature-culture; good-evil) that speakers, even legitimate geniuses, continue to use in everyday dialog. Water flows across and through landscapes, period. There is no such thing as a "human flow" or an "environmental flow" of water. It's water, period. Does "nature" (whatever it is, capital N or small n) have "rights" to water? Sure, but as Ingram would have surely critiqued, "in what context?" For example, in Islamic law and tradition, there was a "right of thirst" for both humans and livestock (non-humans in the language of the binary fans). This vein of mindless ecolospeak does little to help or clarify, and it certainly doesn't get us very far in addressing overall concerns regarding water. I think a far more useful perspective on this, rarely used when it comes to water (explicitly), is the literature on the human appropriation of nature. And like the net primary productivity (NPP) share used by humans, so too do we allocate a good share of water for ourselves. This water typically goes through landscapes (or "environments" if you like), through agroecosystems, rejoins natural flows of water (either surface or ground), and moves downstream (or underground) to the next appropriator, whether fish or human. But if you (yes, YOU) think you speak for nature, or have some exclusive claim to speak for fish, vegetation, or "the environment," get over yourself. We all do. Moving on...

But it fell to Janet Jarratt, the current Chair of the Board for the MRGCD, to call out "adjudication" as the number one issue that, for her, was both a near-term and long-term issue to address and finalize in the state of New Mexico. And then she rightly pointed out the lack of land-water connection when it came to planning, zoning, and managing both resources. Sadly, like colleges and universities that have splintered into dozens of disciplinary fields, the reality of municipalities is that specialists rarely plan or coordinate together - and that's both in the carrot (incentives) and the stick (command and control; regulations) of land-use planning. There was some spirited discussion in the first session (and later ones) regarding the allocation percentages and "consumption figures" to agriculture in the state. Sure, agriculture uses between 80-90% of water allocations in the Western states. But public understanding of water use (by agriculture) is confounded. What is "use" in this case? I would again like to point readers to the studies out of NMSU on hydrology along irrigation ditches (acequias) and how little actually is "lost water" to the atmosphere from ET (evapotranspiration). Bottom line: Even if the figures are off signficantly, at least 80% of all applied water to a field works its way back to the near-surface aquifer to the nearby stream. So, following simple principles of thermodynamics, and what we know of the hydrologic cycle, the water is not used or lost in perpetuity. It moves downstream to the next user or, on a short-term basis, is stored in the agricultural soils and surface aquifers to be released gradually over weeks and months. The latter is the only true form of water bank we can actually document biophysically.

In the second panel session, it was disappointing that members of the Cochiti Pueblo and NMAA (respectively) could not attend so the highlight (for our purposes) was the summary review by Gary Eslinger from the Elephan Butte Irrigation District in southern New Mexico. I've posted some material about the on-going Lower Rio Grande (LRG) adjudication and the complications in working out the state-federal negotiation on an offer of judgment, along with the difficulties of historial "takings" on this portion of the Rio Grande. But this was largely about how EBID had set up a special water users association (SWUA) to include the city of Las Cruces within the boundaries of the irrigation district. As a way to buffer instant water loss to the city, EBID offered to include parts of the buffer boundary between Las Cruces and the district, as long as the city was willing to be "a farmer" within the bounds of the EBID itself. It was a simple concept, sure to have been tedious and challenging in the negotiation of it, and it seemed to be working for the district and for future city plans.

Finally, the third panel session revolved around so-called future changes. To most people on the panel, this meant "climate change" or both climate and the ESA, though one presenter focused on "conservation" of water. One panelist, Reed Benson (UNM Law), discussed how the Klamath Basin negotiations from the 1990s collapsed because most parties were more interested in the status quo than actual, meaningful change. Species listings, under ESA, in the upper and the lower parts of the Klamath had triggered this process, and in the end, the Coho Salmon (among other species) were no better off. Dave Gutzler (climatologist, UNM) addressed the potential challenges of global climate change for New Mexico, drawing material from a 2008 publication in Science (Milly et al. 2008), and the IPCC AR4 (2007). He focused on the bottom line story, in terms of the consequences to water flows, the Rio Grande hydrograph (etc..), and certainly didn't do much to boost enthusiasm or optimism. It's the same problem I have faced in teaching this material at Colorado College, where even jaded undergraduate seniors can be overwhelmed by the seeming scale of the problem. While I am not a strict "climate skeptic" of the insane variety (a la "it's all a great conspiracy perpetuated by climate scientists, the illuminati, the Pope, etc.."), I do remain skeptical of how we can accurately model these data from past trends. But more about that in a later post. Jean Witherspoon, ex officio from ABCWUA, focused her PPoint on conservation measures that work on a residential/industrial scale. Yes, this means low-flow toilets, laser leveling, Xeriscaping initiatives, and the like. But as one commentator noted, by focusing on improvements at the per capita scale (150 gpd/person), we lost track of the important figure: total consumption by day, month and year as a net use figure (not by person). It's the total amount of water use that planners have to worry about, not the "per capita use" mantra, and that total figure is the arena of governance.

The Water Dialogue is a great public event, and I have only two concerns (still) with it: a) It was $30 (advance) or $40 at the door -- this excludes, or certainly dissuades, poorer residents from participating; that's IF they knew about it. b) Where are the acequias and Pueblos in these discussions? I can understand getting tired of the Dialogue, but disenfranchisment can happen in many ways, and lack of public awareness makes it easier for people to get the shaf--- I mean, short end of the stick. And just food for thought as it was a great event; it was well-organized, very well attended, and well moderated. - epp