Unsettled Waters: A blog on water rights in the American West

As a colleague and I prepare to launch block 6 (Feb 20 th start date) with our Southwest Studies 272 ( Nature, Region, and Society of the Southwest ) methods course, I am finalizing the details of our field excursion into New Mexico. Our theme will be on the “cultures of water in the Southwest.” And while sticking to New Mexico may not show all the dimensions to the theme, it certainly will cover most contemporary concerns related to water: cultural perceptions of water, water use, water rights, and also the rights of ecosystems and species. So what we have planned is visits, discussions with local and regional experts on the various cultures represented in the state. We have assigned Sylvia Rodriguez's book on Acequias , a volume largely focused on the Taos Valley experience (see the map) , as a way to illustrate the complexity surrounding water use, ritual, and place in northern New Mexico. We'll be with her, in the flesh, on March 6, as a way for the students to 'me...

Last post of 2011! It’s been too long, yet again. So this will be the last post for this calendar year of 2011. There are so many issues and events of interest to cover, since last August, I’m not sure where to start. So here I’ll simply start with some regional issues, first with Texas (?!), then moving on to the usual New Mexico water issues, challenges, and battles. There was also big news out of Santa Fe, namely with the appointment of a new state engineer. Finally I drop a plug or two for some books that have recently appeared that should be of interest to all residents of the Southwest if you care (at all) about water in our region. NPR had an interesting story on water issues in Texas specifically that I thought was worth sharing – see below. I’m not sure if they are “things you didn’t know” about water in the Lone Star state, but some are intriguing. Water in Texas: http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2011/11/15/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-water-in-texas/ The water year i...

For this month's post, I'm choosing to focus on the state of New Mexico's " active water resource management" program , which I'm unofficially re-naming the active water resource monitoring program. Why? Read on... I'm just back from the Rio Mimbres, in southwestern New Mexico, a beautiful and verdant valley even in this horrible drought year (the driest on record for most parts of the state, serious business). In past posts, I'd made mention of the Mimbres as both fully adjudicated and already in the AWRM program that the Office of the State Engineer (OSE) runs. About eight years old as a piece of state statute, less old in terms of actual existence, AWRM has triggered controversy, grumbling, and one lawsuit that questioned its legality. On the Mimbres, the trigger was the Bounds case, and it has created real difficulties for folks on the so-called "upper Mimbres" (basically north of Rt 152 that runs E-W across the valley) with folks dow...

This is a long-overdue quick post to get my blogging engine running again. I'm now back in New Mexico, on the outskirts of the captial, with a spectacular view from our casita of the Jemez Mountains and its current state of smoke and fire. In the first week of July, the scene was straight out of a Lord of the Rings set of Mordor ( photo ). I'm here to not only try to write several pieces on the larger water governance, adjudication, and acequias project but also to work with one of our Southwest Studies majors and a rising senior at Colorado College , Andrew Wallace. He has chosen to look at the Aamodt adjudication, now in settlement talks with all stakeholders, and how legal pluralism is or is not visible in the original case and the run-up to the settlement itself. Legal pluralism is a concept that originates from the critical legal studies literature, as well as from anthropologists like Laura Nader who made extensive use of it in her work, that speaks to whether multipl...

Well, more than two months have gone by (again), and I'm in the position of playing a bit of catch-up for the purposes of this blog. Hopefully I can begin to re-commit to these writing activities now that stand-up teaching (always a curious phrase) is over for me at CC. I wanted to report on a fascinating, and inter-disciplinary, conversation hosted by Sylvia Rodriguez (Prof Emeritus, UNM Anthropology) this past March 18, 2011 at the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. The point of the conversation was the water adjudication process in New Mexico , putatively, but we wandered far and wide on topics ranging from ecosystem rights to water, to Powell' original "watershed" democracy proposal in the 19th century, to how other states have coped (or haven't) with the demands of a general stream adjudication. After some formal and informal introductions, our discussion started to hone in on the real issues of "why adjudication" started...

This month's "acequias and adjudication" update will be old news for most of you who follow these issues closely, so apologies in advance. The point of this small post is to push through the seemingly finalized and maybe mundane details of an adjudication "settlement" and ask "what comes next?" The Aamodt ( Pojoaque Basin , NM) and the Abeyta (Taos Valley, NM) adjudications have been legally resolved through settlements funded, finally, by the U.S. Congress and the President's signature. This is good news for residents who worried about the long-term implications of these two pending lawsuits that embroiled locals, state officials, attorneys, the respective tribes, and finally, the federal agencies. Both of these lawsuits, shockingly, were older than I am, born in the late 1960s when water infrastructure and future projects pushed the state to finally file suit to document the water rights in the two water basins. You can easily find the detai...

First of all, apologies for the long interval and delay in this latest post. I had hoped to keep posting at a pace of about one comment per month, and administrative duties have taken their toll on this blog. But there's big news out from this past week, for all New Mexicans, even if the Aamodt-Abeyta settlements (for the Pojoaque Valley and Taos Valley, respectively) are supposed to be constrained to those water basins. The effects simply won't be. Funding for the settlement was approved on November 30th by the U.S. House of Representatives after already clearing the Senate, and it has money attached. The timing is tight, and frankly, lucky for those people who would fashion themselves as 'proponents' of the settlement. The legal team at the Office of the State Engineer must be relieved, if not overjoyed, that these old adjudications are seemingly put to rest. It puts to rest two of the longest running court processes in United States history, and will re-configure t...

Hello again - as I begin the submersion into a week 2 field excursion with my "political ecology of the Southwest" course here at Colorado College, I wanted to share a few thoughts about this particular course. We adopted a theme of "nuclear borderlands," an obvious play on Joseph Masco's (2006) excellent book by the same title, and one of our focus points is the relationship between the nuclear era and water quality in northern New Mexico . And it's difficult to talk about this region without discussing the role of "the lab" in every day life. I'm referring to Los Alamos National Laboratories here, and the small (federal company) town of Los Alamos, perched on the Pajarito Plateau. We are beginning our week with a guided tour of the political ecology of northern New Mexico, hitting on the major historical-geographic discussion points that have to be understood in context, highlighting the cultural diversity of the region. Among the topics we...

So, we are finally back from the Pyrenees . As part of our time in southern France/northern Spain, I poked around villages and countryside to see how irrigation infrastructure and social institutions are surviving. The news is mixed, even for a region that has decent water supplies, and there's real differentiation between FR and ESP in this case. On the French side, the infrastructure of canals looks OK, but the social institutions are facing new pressures as new immigrants to the region show up, without much understanding of the norms for access to water rights (sound familiar?). On the Spanish side, it's infrastructure that needs help, while the social side seems to be in better shape by way of basic functioning and understanding of rules and customs. The other interesting aspect is the accepted mix of function (canal) with recreation (hiking trail) that epitomizes the region. The banks of irrigation canals frequently serve the purpose of trail, as on the GR10 trail that...

I'm not a huge Brooks fan, but this quote (and his column today) are quite appropriate both for the Gulf oil fiasco and for water governance in general (and certainly for local acequia vs centralized water management issues!): "The balance between federal oversight and local control is off-kilter. We have vested too much authority in national officials who are really smart, but who are really distant. We should be leaving more power with local officials, who may not be as expert, but who have the advantage of being there on the ground." And frankly, the same applies to "state experts" as well - even when earnest, there's only so much (or so little) folks in Santa Fe can actually do when it comes to water resource management (or lack thereof). Read the whole column by Brooks, focused on the bungled fed-BP clean-up coordination efforts, here .

So with a full week now under my belt, after returning from Japan, I'm ready to start tackling some comparative posts. This one is an abstract for what I perceived in general about the way the Japanese have coped with, and modified, natural rivers and streams. First, the places we visited were highly modified urban environments (mostly), and that should be the most important caveat. However, I do want to highlight the amazing and sometimes over-the-top use of concrete in Japan. From urban watersheds (like the Kamo River in Kyoto) to more rural ones on the south island of Kyushu, concrete river-banks and riparian armoring are common. Second, this generalization also counts for coastal locations, where concrete tetrapods litter much of the Japanese coastline. Finally, one of the highlights for a water geek was to see the aqueduct section of the large Lake Biwa-Kyoto Canal , that starts at (you guessed it) Lake Biwa northeast of the city, and moves water through tunnels, an a...

Hello again friends. As I recover from a where-the-hell-am-I jetlag from the long trip home from Japan, which was 15 hours ahead of Colorado time, I share this link as a BUMP for this weekend's "celebrando las acequias" event in Embudo, New Mexico. Colleague and debonaire activist Estevan Arellano has organized this event, with some great speakers, and is being sponsored by the HUD-funded collaborators from Woodbury University (CA). Wish I could be there to celebrate with you all, compadres y comadres. It looks to be a great time. Saludos, abrazos!

Just a quick announcement of a "blog break" because of upcoming travel to Japan. It's an academic trip focused on "Nature & Environment in Japan" so I'll likely have some good comparative (water) materials to share when I return to writing. It's a whirlwind trip, too, starting from Tokyo, to Kyoto, to Hiroshima, and we end up in Minamata (as in Minamata Bay, yes), before returning to Tokyo for two final days. I hope to check out the irrigation systems and get some cursory understanding in person about their management institutions. More later, and thanks for your understanding.   Soredawa, mata!

OK folks - for anyone even stumbling on to this blog, I need your opinion on an appropriate book title should this set of interests on adjudication, acequias, water governance be turned into a larger volume. So the titles to the right are the "main" portion of the title, probably followed by some combination of water, democracy, governance, adjudication, etc... but in New Mexico. What do you think?

This post takes its inspiration from my good colleague and fellow geographer Tim Forsyth. His book, Critical Political Ecologies (2003, Routledge) is an under-utilized resource in most natural and social science disciplines, probably because it attempts to address and bridge both big groups. But a number of recent stories, in the press and across the blogosphere, have prompted me to use his 2003 concept of "environmental orthodoxy," to address stories about water. Basically, the concept is simple: an environmental orthodoxy (EO) represents the 'dominant conventional wisdom' on a process we think we understand. So, as one example, how about the term " desertification ." Does this mean the spread of sand dunes, or generally the decline of vegetative life-forms from larger tree-like species to scrubbier shrubs? It depends on the user and the point of the author or document, but its range of use is, let's just say, generously wide and flexible. So here go...

Feliz dia de San Isidro! Get ready for a lot of links and tenuous ties -- A series of stories and posts for those of you tracking the future of water use, consumption, and pricing schemes. Many of my fellow aquabloggers make a big deal about whether water is either a commodity or a human right; depending on how "Chicago-school" you are, your own reaction probably varies from "of course you pay for it" to "of course everyone should have access to water as a right." I won't critique positions (yet) but will offer this set of narratives and resources. Try this paper ( link ) for a perspective on this right to water language; alternatively you can find a number of posts on this issue from the Hayekian perspective at Aguanomics , a recent post is  here . The problem with this kind of rhetoric (price it or "make it a right") is that it stays at the binary level (yes/no, black/white, right/commodity). Are there really only two choices to make here?...

Please see Aquadoc's recent post about groundwater law, marketing, and water use and the problems of jurisprudence when dealing with water below the surface. Is this our equivalent of a hydrologic derivative? Read on...

This is a quick post to acknowledge Michael Cox's (2010) recent dissertation , completed at Indiana University, in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), on the Taos Valley acequias as an integrated social and ecological institution and system. Although largely positive on certain qualities or characteristics of many acequias, Cox sounds a warning note about economic factors that may lead to water leaving the acequia and it's worth the read. So even if acequias are able to weather one side of constant change (climate - global change), it's the economics and political economics that may ultimately create problems for them. It shows how the " double exposures " (Leichenko and O'Brien 2008) of global change and globalization may not work in balance when pressuring local resource management systems. This goes straight to the entire 3mb+ dissertation (.pdf) document if you want full details on this work. Congratulations Michael!

I've been remiss. A few developments have occurred in New Mexico, mostly the passing of the Lower Rio Grande adjudication court deadline for the state (NM) to offer the feds (Reclamation) a quantified water right, and that date passed (April 8th). That quantified number will occur whether or not the Reclamation folks actually had or acquired (legally) such water rights at the time that Elephant Butte Dam was constructed. As always, the good folks at Jicarita have been watching this closely. And see Sig Silber's story about the LRG and the ongoing dispute about whether EBID was founded as part of an illegal 'taking' of a private dam and canal company. Hot stuff - and there's an update, too, on LRG proceedings here . Good news for irrigators in most of New Mexico is that the winter snowpack has piled up, thanks to ENSO, and unless all that snow melts in June, farmers and ranchers should have a decent 2010 growing season. Most of the canals are cleaned around the...

Please see Aquadoc's site for the context, but here's the quick link to a paper by Pease (2010) on the difficulties of managing (and transferring) water in an unadjudicated basin in New Mexico. Yes, it's the Middle Rio Grande. There are lessons here for all Westerners, particularly if you live in an unadjudicated basin. h/t to MC . Addendum : The entire issue of the JCWRE is available on-line here . The article by Pease is only one of several on water re-allocation issues in the Western U.S.