New water works, a new water czar, and the same challenges ending 2011

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 in New Mexico, as in most parts of the Southwest, was grim during 2011. If 2010 was “meh” by way of rainfall and snow, then 2011 was a big, fat uh-oh. The region entered its second straight La Niña pattern, which means (typically) less rainfall, less snow, and a certainly drier winter. Is that what we’re getting, as I write this in late December? Well, it’s a mixed picture honestly. The Colorado high country is drier this year, with less snowpack, and it’s certainly now the snowbonanza that 2009-10 was. New Mexico and Arizona, along with SE Colorado, and well…. All of Texas have taken it on the chin as far as rainfall. But there has been a decent set of snowfalls in New Mexico, at least, in the early part of winter 2011. Will it extend to 2012? The good folks at CLIMAS, the regional climate assessment service out of the University of Arizona, are not promising much for late winter.

Water in NM (supply/drought):

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/localnews/Middle-Rio-Grande-Farmers-worry-about-water-access-as-irrigatio

In other news, the state of New Mexico got its first new state engineer in the last ten years with the new Republican Governor. Her appointee is a relative unknown, Scott Verhines, and he certainly has his work cut out for him. While the OSE has made genuine, and faster, progress on adjudication efforts across the state, there are a few white elephant stream stretches that will likely outlive his presence as state engineer (I’m looking at you, Lower Rio Grande).

New NM OSE State Engineer, Scott Verhines,

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/localnews/-Serious-challenges--ahead-for--new-state-engineer

You can, if you like, see the state’s past state engineers at:

http://www.ose.state.nm.us/state_engineer_past_state_engineers.html

Water transfers, in New Mexico, show no signs of abating and no signs of fading as a regional and local object of environmental politics. Wild Earth Guardians, for example, is contesting some notable water rights transfers, and this merits following if you have an interest. So not only are local ditches contesting transfers away from their stream flows, and ditch flows, now you have NGOs increasingly intervening in the water transfer issue. Is this the only way to keep a healthy set of river flows? Is it the only way to keep endangered species on the radar for the state? Stay tuned…(below)

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/localnews/WildEarth-Guardians-object-to-water-rights-transfer

Finally, on water news, I want to highlight some local coverage in New Mexico regarding the so-called Aamodt adjudication, basically the Pojoaque River Valley basin, and the so-called “celebration” that this funded settlement created. Celebration by whom? That’s a better question, since I witnessed some of the settlement hearing open meetings this past summer – depending on who you are, there’s either something or very little to celebrate – so I can only guess that the involved attorneys, the BuRec folks, the BIA, the city of Santa Fe, and the county of Santa Fe are the ones who are pleased with the settlement (in that, the process might…just might, be over). Does this settle things? Better question.

Aamodt settlement (latest)

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/localnews/Water-deal-sparks-celebration

Finally, and yes, the link is from Aljazeera, I want to put in a plug for Bill deBuys’ latest book (A Great Aridness) which addresses the real, tangible, or emerging signs of (warming) climate change in the Greater Southwest. I finally had a chance to read it over the early part of my winter break, and it’s a great book, and also a great service to people living in the region. While Bill is a well-known resident in El Valle, New Mexico, this latest book is not just about New Mexico. He does, however, make recurring references to the Rio Grande, and the large wildfires of the past decade in the state. Read more about it in this opinion column published by Bill (below) – I’ll post more links just below it, so that you can purchase and read it at your leisure. The other volume is V.B. Price’s The Orphaned Land, a quirky yet large compendium of staccato-style writings on environmental justice, history, water, pollution, and radiation issues in the state of New Mexico. It’s a great, easy, read that you can consume all at once (python-style) or in the brief snippets that are of most interest. Check out both of these – you won’t be sorry.

Overall drought picture (from deBuys, age of thirst):
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011127125429770306.html

W deBuys’ A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. Oxford University Press,  available at

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Aridness-Climate-American-Southwest/dp/0199778922/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325123319&sr=1-1 or better yet, your local bookstore…

V.B. Price’s The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project. UNM Press.

http://www.amazon.com/Orphaned-Land-Mexicos-Environment-Manhattan/dp/0826350496/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325123364&sr=1-1 or better yet, your local bookstore

I’ll have more to say in the upcoming weeks, I promise, on these books in a more substantive post. Until 2012, amigos...

Putting the monitoring back into "AWRM"?

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 downstream less affected by the consequences. The Bounds case involved one of the few actual priority calls in the state of New Mexico, and people of all stripes scrambled to find a solution or implement some version of a fair system to address it. AWRM has involved a system of "signed agreements," done with OSE regional staff out of the Deming office, to have stream flows and ditches monitored with water meters. These have been of a couple of varieties: one has been the ditch kind, a rather restricting concrete flow device with a scale slapped to the side. The other is a larger metering device meant to monitor larger tributary flows around the state (see the photo), such as the one picture here at the outlet of Bear Canyon before it hits the ditches and stream banks of the Rio Mimbres. You can also read more about this metering and measurement program here, courtesy of the OSE.

There have been on-going claims of alleged bullying by the OSE's personnel to "sign" these metering agreements (without the "or else" usually involved in such tactics) and this has not exactly created a favorable environment in many parts of the state where AWRM is in place (see the prior post on the Gallinas near Las Vegas, for example). Now, that said, it's nearly impossible to begrudge a parastatal agency charged with water administration. After all, the OSE is supposed to adjudicate (done for the Mimbres), monitor (nearly there for the Mimbres according to this .pdf map), and then manage through priority administration (not really, for the Mimbres), right? You do have to wonder what "99% complete" actually means for AWRM on the Mimbres, considering that most folks on the lower Mimbres are not monitored or metered, nor have they signed off on the plan. I am not arguing that management isn't necessary or important in a state that will see on-going lack of rain for the foreseeable future. Perhaps we should not even be using the rather antiquated word "drought" anymore, if this will be the new normal in the Greater Southwest.

Once again, if I harp on anything, it is the scale and nature of water governance and management in this state and frankly all others in the western U.S. Instead of building more, or relying on, massive infrastructure, why not emphasize and enrich the institutions that already exist on the ground that clearly have more adaptive capacity on more watersheds in New Mexico? Yes, I'm talking about community ditches and acequias. Yes, I favor a strong role for agricultural producers (the ones that remain at least).

One of the recurring themes in travel, reading, and attendance at conferences is that the era of "big water development is over." Really? Have these people been paying attention? New pipelines, regional water systems, trans-basin diversion projects are all in the works. Just because we aren't building Hoover Dam II doesn't mean that hydraulic infrastructure of a serious sort is gone. The Iron Triangle (feds, senators, state engineers) is alive and well. On a side-note, as we drove down to the Mimbres, we made a pit-stop at the mother of all dams in New Mexico, Elephant Butte. The dam and its irrigation district is once again in the news, because of New Mexico's concerns about a new operating agreement that seemingly favors Texas in its new balance sheet of delivered water. That's debatable. This is the same area that has the LRG adjudication to deal with, a now one of the sides of the iron triangle is suing the EBID over the new arrangement. And as anyone on the Rio Grande knows, the LRG adjudication may trigger new difficulties upstream towards Albuquerque (MRGCD) and Santa Fe, as Staci Matlock has recently suggested. It's not even close to being over, folks. Given the long and complicated re-engineering of the entire basin of the Rio Grande (see Reining in the Rio Grande, a new book) to serve human needs, perhaps we need to add a leg to the triangle. The iron square? What was missing in the iron triangle? Water law, and how it facilitated and complicated these situations. How's that for a teaser?

Until next time...

Return of the blog, part 68

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 multiple forms of legal understandings are both present and visible (and perhaps accepted) in any given area. Here's a resource list for folks interested in the nexus between legal studies and anthropology. New Mexico certainly has several unspoken layers of legal pluralism, even if the law of the land is supposed to be prior appropriation.
So it should be a fun, informative, and rollicking two months here in New Mexico as we both sink our teeth into another mass of literature, interviews, and archival documents. As I read more, and write just a bit on these issues, I'm convinced I'm missing 90% of the story on water governance. And that's what makes for fascinating research. Until next time...

Adjudication Round-table (March 18, 2011 report)

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 in the first place; there are simple reasons for a state to do so, apart from state mandates and statutes. As one technician at OSE shared with me back in 2009, "How can we manage water when we don't even know how much water there is available to manage?" Yet bringing suit to force people to document or substantiate their water use in a watershed is a shifting target. We discussed how the changes in mapping and data technology now allows the OSE to make much quicker work for adjudication field-mapping. The old maps, for example, for the past adjudications were commonly on linen and Mylar. As soon as crop and water use were recorded, those data (for that growing season) were largely obsolete, since farmers change crops, and thus change water use year to year. This is why, frankly, the so-called "STS" or science and technology studies literature, is relevant and interesting. If technology does indeed change us, and that technology changes over time, well then.... The other related prong to this conversation is frankly the development imperative that still rules water governance and adjudication concerns: the reason for adjudication is not only to quantify and assign rights, but also to figure out "what is left" for apportioning out and planning for future water development. It tickled this geographer to hear someone (a non-geographer) actually use (David) Harvey's phrase of "accumulation by dispossession" - and what this means is complex: It can mean that by establishing some use first, even before rights are assigned or verified, one can accumulate rights even as a junior water rights user. Or, it can mean the simple and outright purchase of water rights away from rural (in theory) water users, as urban areas grow and demand more municipal water. Or... well, again, you get the point.

As a group, we discussed how the recent federally-funded water settlements (Aamodt for Pojoaque; Abeyta for Taos) will be implemented. Since they are now settled, they now avoid state courts. The files will be considered 'closed' and a decree issued if parties to the settlement can agree that there are no longer serious issues in each watershed. That remains to be seen, and is frankly the basis for some on-going research this coming summer. Do settlements actually "settle" adjudications?

The discussion was also recorded by Jack Loeffler, who created a multi-CD set of audio recordings on the Colorado River which are absolutely fabulous (Watersheds as Commons) and are highly recommended if you are a water wonk or education of any kind. We'll see what comes of these recordings, and how we can (and cannot) use them or make them available. Given my inelegant oral eruptions, I can only imagine how some might take the statements we shared with each other in odd ways. But the conversation was valuable, and given our very different backgrounds, goals, and interests, totally worthwhile. I thank Sylvia Rodriguez for bringing us all together. The last hour of our dialogue was really to focus some attention for a special issue of the Journal of the Southwest on water adjudications in the Southwest, centered on New Mexico and Arizona. But more on the latter will be forthcoming later this year (September). Finally, after a long day, we decided to stay in touch and share resources - perhaps this group, along with others, will convene again.

If only I'd had this kind of resource and conversation five years ago as I was entertaining this project on adjudication and acequias.

For the record, the attendees were:Herb Becker, long-time lawyer for the DoJ (and active in Indian water suits)
Darcy Bushnell, the UNM Utton Center, Director of the Stell Ombudsman Program
Leslie Kryder, Technical Assistance Provider at Rural Community Assistance Corporation
Jack Loeffler, Lore of the Land (and session recorder)
Sam Markwell  (UNM graduate student, Am Studies)
Eric Perramond (Colorado College)
Sylvia Rodriguez, Prof Emeritus of Anthropology, UNM & our host (also the Ortiz Center at UNM)
Melanie Stansbury (ABD, Sociology, Cornell University)
Elise Trott (UNM graduate student, Anthro)

Post-settlement adjudications?

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 details of what's involved in other posts, in news outlets, or even in the Congressional records and/or some of the publically-available information from the State Office of the Engineer (of NM). I'm not going to belabor the details here. It does strike me, however, that in both cases there are several "high prices" to the settlement. Personally (and professionally?), I find the Abeyta settlement for the Taos Valley to be more... well, democratic and feasible. Abeyta is not without its problems as the previous link makes clear, and regional water planners will have to be careful not to violate the terms of these settlements. And municipalities and counties have to watch out that their public welfare measures (on water) don't violate the historic easement and access rights for maintaining acequias. But Abeyta won't involve another giant set of pipelines and water infrastructure, at least not in the short-term, unlike the Aamodt settlement. Plus, residents will want to keep an eye out for the "roll out" phase of the new regional water system in the Pojoaque Valley. The state and (SF) county officials have said that non-Indian residents won't be forced to join the system and that they can keep older wells without any risk.

The lack of a firm plan in the Pojoaque Basin, and a clear proposal, leads to a lot of rumor-mongering however. So hopefully we'll get a fully fleshed-out blueprint, and one that comes with a genuine full accounting of (future) costs, soon. These lawsuits were settled out of formal adjudication court, in a settlement setting, but that doesn't mean that the details are finalized, that it's "over," or that there's nothing left to be vigilant about in the two valleys. And residents know this well, already. If adjudication was supposed to proceed using a coarse watershed approach, New Mexicans will have to pay attention that the "better mouse-trap" of a regional water system in the Pojoaque doesn't betray the intentions of water's own behavior in the region. You can order a copy of the "feasibility study" from Santa Fe county here.

Until next time...

Aamodt, Abeyta, Pojoaque Regional Water System

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 the "active adjudications" map (the one posted is from 2003).

Oh, there's only one catch, a new $81 million regional water system, to divert water from the Rio Grande, for the Pojoaque Valley and largely its non-Pueblo population. The reactions are mixed, and long-term observers remain skeptical of how 'optional' the hook-up to the water line will actually be if and when the system is actually built. Will the bill provide relief for Pueblo and non-Pueblo residents? Will it help, in any way, the environmental in-stream flow, of the Pojoaque River itself? I leave you with a typical photo of the Pojoaque taken in October of 2009. Until next time, and this time, I promise to post sooner!

Hasta pronto!

The glowing calm of the nuclear aquatic

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 will discuss as we roll in a CC shuttle through the San Luis Valley is the always-present "land grants" issue in southern CO and northern NM. This is a reference to the historic alienation of about 90-95% of the historic Spanish and Mexican land grants that vaporized in a filter of greed, poor law, and questionable land (titling) ethics in the territorial period of New Mexico. Most of that land is now either entirely privately held, not by communities, or in federal and state hands.

The rest of the week (9/13 - 9/17) will be spent understanding how the Cold War era and the presence of federal research labs has irradiated the Southwest. We'll meet with nuclear, local activists, federal employees at Los Alamos, water resouce managers, and concerned NGO operators from the Pueblo perspective. In terms of water, however, the singular focus (as a case study of sorts) is the Buckman Diversion Dam. Familiar to anyone in northern New Mexico, this is the latest effort to purportedly wean the city of Santa Fe away from declining groundwater resources and towards surface water use of the Rio Grande/Chama. How this links to the 'nuclear' theme is that the intake point at the old site of Buckman, along the Rio Grande, is right across from many of the most contaminated canyon tributaries that drain the Pajarito Plateau. For almost twenty years, Los Alamos dumped nuclear and hazardous wastes into the nearby canyons, and the diversion dam itself has had to be designed with this in mind. This was before remediation and mitigation were watch-words for the industry, and compliance was weak at best. Now, it's at least a major component of LANL environmental management programs.

The point of this is to highlight the ecology of "risk" in New Mexico, in terms of water and radiation, but also to get students to grapple with multiple perspectives on the subject. What is the official story-line? Are locals engaging in conspiracy theory, or are there real concerns here to take into account? How can we filter through public relations rhetoric, the contemporary version of "propaganda" that was so common during the Cold War? How does Los Alamos continue to shape the changing ecology and mutating social relations of the Pajarito Plateau and northern New Mexico? How did residents benefit economically, even if environments were affected?
These are difficult, troubling, and admittedly leading questions - but it's the substance of our week.
And it's also the substance that enters our bodies. More later, on this issue of the glow, the calm, the irradiated, and that which enters us directly.

Old World-New World, belated

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 goes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic (Banyuls to Hendaye, respectively). It's just another reminder that "following the water," as New Mexicans put it poetically, is a long-time custom and part of daily life in this part of the world. There's simply too much to write about, but I'll post an other update soon on older (modernizing) mechanisms for timing irrigation and cooperation in some of the villages of the Conflent (in the Pyrenees-Orientales, FR side). Until next time, enjoy the photos, and keep watering. Colorado Springs has had decent rain for this time of year, and everythign is green. May your gardens and fields bloom and prosper.

Quickpost: Oily water governance (and lack thereof)

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.

Hydraulic Archipelago, first post

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 aqueduct and eventually through urban canals into the old imperial capital of Japan. That the water-work crosses an old Buddhist temple on the east side (Nanzen-ji) is even more remarkable - everywhere in Japan, the immediate intersection between pre-Meiji life and post-Meji were visible. The Meiji period, beginning in 1868, marked the beginning of Japan's long-term engagement with high modernization, a trend that not abated. There's even a high temple to the canal as a work of modernizing Japan, a Lake Biwa-Kyoto Canal Museum, that has a great variety of old maps and photographs displayed. If the hydraulic realm reminded me of anything, it was the strong similarity to European water-works and the strong human imprint on all things natural in the landscape.

Next time: rice paddies, water management!

Celebrando las Acequias (in absentia)

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!

Blog on pause, 5.29-6.11.10

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!

TITLE of the book project: See the poll!

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?

Hydro-Environmental Orthodoxies

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 goes...

We lead off with inkstain, John Fleck's blog, and why blaming "drought" as an EO for water issues in the Southwest may be a misnomer. If low precipitation and high variability of annual precipitation define the terms "arid" and semi-arid, then is "drought" really a good term to use in the Southwest? Food for thought - even if we have no simple answer to this.
In many ways, addressing the impact or use of "drought" is a bit like trying to prove that deforestation affects climate, rather than just local weather. Here's a not so recent story about that particular tie, and how complex it is. There's no new conventional wisdom there - but let's just say that the old Colonial-era logic of "trees gone = rain down" doesn't apply so neatly.

Invasive (or "exotic" or "exotic invasive") species are also a problem in many parts of the world, yet the late 20th century stategy of clearing out, say, Tamarisk (salt-cedar as it is regionally known in some parts of the Southwest), may have serious effects on the evapotranspiration balance in streams. The costs and benefits, hydrologically-speaking, are a bit more nebulous than previously thought.
Finally, two stories courtesy of Aquadoc on bottled water and rural water merit mention. So the EOs, respectively, are about whether bottling water is really such a "healthy" thing - challenged by P. Gleick - water may be better than Coke for human beings, but what about the externalities of plastic bottles? And rural water challenges have their EO, ably tackled in this publication about the 7 myths of rural water supply.

So there you have it - does that framework make sense? Is the concept of environmental orthodoxy a useful one for you? There are many more that could be posted here: public vs private water suppliers (with champions and detractors all along that continuum of supply source), carrying capacity, population pressure, soil erosion (vs degradation).

Back to the Neoliberal Future (again)

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? Is it really a choice between Rousseau and Thatcher for water issues? This hardly seems 'creative' and it certainly creates polarized views quickly.

As specific environments are "neoliberalized" (roughly put), it pays to think again about other countries' experiences with full-price costing to farmers, and the precautionary principle applies when this kind of reform is done too quickly, as in the case of Mexico. Yes there is a strong link between "prices" and water consumption (figure courtesy of C. Brooks!). But this roll-back of the hydraulic state agencies is occurring in the U.S. almost everywhere, in this difficult economy, regardless of policy goals on water management (read about the Arizona water resources case here). There is much to be learned from other places, especially the ones that swallowed Washington Consensus rhetoric and policy implementation whole-sale.
(updated 5.17.10 - thanks CB)
Next time: bottling or piping water?