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

For those of you who track water adjudications, one of the more interesting ones has been in Idaho . That state has nearly completed the Snake River adjudications much to everyone else's surprise. These are handled a bit differently, obviously, from the New Mexican cases I'm more familiar with, but still - there are lessons to be learned from this approach, I think. What could NM do to speed things up? Certainly the use of geotechnologies has picked up the pace of doing the technical work - but adjudication is not just a mapping problem, it's a legal challenge, and a political morass. More on this matter later, for now, here's the full story link.

Grim news from the long-term NOAA forecast for New Mexico and much of the Southwest: it doesn't look good, folks. Another year of water sharing and shortages. We'll be, perhaps, luckier in Colorado only because our Fourteeners (mountains higher than 14000 ft) intercept more Pacific moisture that gives us our snowpack. But it's not likely that 2014 will snap the long-term drought plaguing New Mexico. More later, but for more on the details, see John Fleck's excellent write-up and some of the NOAA probability maps here:  http://www.abqjournal.com/337588/abqnewsseeker/nm-drought-outlook-bad-to-worse.html September 2014: Hindsight update: ENSO kicked in at the right moments this summer of 2014 and has reverted most of the extreme drought situation in New Mexico. The recent hurricane Odile rains have also helped significantly as well, even if too much water soaked into southern New Mexico. Another humbling reminder that forecasts can be useful, but completely wrong. Res...

It's been a busy year and I have had little time to update, much less maintain, this little water blog on most-things-New Mexico-but-not-all. In the 8 months, much has changed in terms of lawsuits, roadblocks in the large adjudication cases in the state of New Mexico (like the Lower Rio Grande, aka the large dry colon serving sand, sediment, and scarcely much water into Texas). And yet, other aspects seem hauntingly familiar of 2012: fires, and the post-fire flooding across regions of Colorado and New Mexico. Let's lead with the larger context , drought and record or near-record low levels in the Colorado River and the Rio Grande. And this is Forbes magazine, mind you, talking about how to responsibly 'price' water in the Southwest. The Lower Rio Grande adjudication is dragging one, lurching, even as the water itself (or "wet water" as engineers hilariously call it) is drying up. While some of the stream system issues are starting to look vaguely settled ...

Happy new year everyone! This mini-post is not about what you think it is. It's not some grim polar bears are affected by climate change post. Staci Matlock did, however, inform us that low lake levels across New Mexico are again affecting the January 1 human polar bear activity . Stay safe out there, it's icy. And welcome to 2013.

As we approach (just) the end of 2012, I wanted to make sure that several water-related stories circulating in parts of New Mexico stay vivid and don't fall out of circulation. As usual I've drawn heavily from La Jicarita . None of this is "news" to the people who have posted, shared, or spread these stories - it's only a way to reflect a bit on the links between them. Those links aren't always obvious. I'll start with what seems increasingly "natural" to the water wonks and local water experts in our region of the Southwest, drought . As detailed by Kay Matthews on the newly-revitalized La Jicarita webazine, Placitas, on the NE side of Albuquerque, is just one small village dealing with the at least two-year drought of 2011-12. After last winter's La Nina low snow non-events in the Southwest, the 2012 winter precipitation season is off to a very slow start. Things look grim , with people actually praying for snow, as opposed to expecting ...

Hello folks, the Texas Wesleyan Journal of Real Property Law asked me to post some information here about an upcoming water law symposium. Read on, below, for more information. I'll be back within the week to update the blog, once my block 2 teaching has wrapped up here at Colorado College. The Journal is hosting a water law symposium on Friday, Nov. 9, 2012 at Texas Wesleyan School of Law in Fort Worth, Texas . F or more information about our symposium, pleas e visit http://bit.ly/ TWUWaterLaw .  

This post has much to do with an upcoming visitor to the Colorado College. In September, our so-called block 1 at the college, we'll have William (Bill) deBuys on campus, to discuss his latest book " A Great Aridness " (2011, Oxford U Press). The point of the book, as I read it and re-read it this summer, is to survey how different parts of the larger region we call the Southwest will cope under forecasted (or actually-occurring) climate changes. Surface water, forest fires, endangered species, are all grist for the mill in A Great Aridness, as Bill travels parts of the Southwest and talks to scientists working closely on these topics. The relevance in the first two classes I'll teach this year, Political Ecology of the Southwest (block 1), and Introduction to Global Climate Change (block 2), is fairly obvious. The first block, the political ecology class, is really a thematically-rotating focused seminar on various regional issues. Apart from a core text on polit...

Unruly Waters is the new address, and name, for this blog. The old "donchuyspad" was just a little too creepy for a blog on water, adjudication, climate issues. New content incoming! Stay tuned...thanks for your patience. Here's some eye candy in the meantime... Photo : June 2012 pulse of the Santa Fe River, flowing once more (at least that week it was), all an experiment to create some version of a 'living river' in a city that has over-taxed this small watershed.

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!