Naturalist warned about water woes early

In the two decades after his historic Grand Canyon trek, Powell had led survey teams across the West, what he dubbed the “lands of the arid region.” But Powell ended up on the losing end of the struggle that ensued when Manifest Destiny bumped up against the harsh region’s scarcity.

Our records of stream gauges and weather stations from that period are sparse, but tree ring analysis suggests there was nothing terribly unusual about 1889. Flow on the Rio Grande that year was perhaps 87 percent of the long-term average, give or take a bit — on the dry side, but certainly not drought conditions. And yet the water was simply not reaching the Mesilla Valley in New Mexico and the farms of the El Paso and Juárez regions to the south.

John Wesley Powell

Farmers to the north, Powell told the congressmen, were taking the water, spreading it out across their own farms in Colorado and the central and northern reaches of New Mexico before it could reach the lower Rio Grande. “The cutting off of that water above for irrigating vast areas comparatively has cut off the water they were using in the Mesilla Valley above El Paso and the El Paso Valley,” Powell testified.

Sunday was the 179th anniversary of Powell’s birth. Our current drought and water management struggles in New Mexico and across the western United States make this a good time to revisit what Major Powell was trying to explain to the House Committee on Irrigation back in the spring of 1890.

There is much about 21st century water management that would likely surprise Powell were the bearded naturalist and pioneer of government science to revisit the Mesilla Valley today.

Powell imagined great dams to protect valleys from flooding and store water during times of plenty to use in times of drought, and would likely be pleased with the way we carried out his dreams. He would doubtless be amazed at the massive natural gas-powered groundwater pumps that now step in when river water lags during a drought. And a reading of his 19th century thinking on Western water management suggests he did not contemplate cities the size of Albuquerque, El Paso and Juárez springing up amid the farms of the Rio Grande Valley.

Even then, he clearly understood the water battles of his day between upstream and downstream users, but more important, he saw the seeds of conflict we were planting when we carved up the landscape the way we did.

Powell’s idea, roundly ignored in his day and clearly impossible to implement now, was to build governance in what was to become the western United States around watershed boundaries rather than the arbitrary survey-straight state lines that had been drawn as Manifest Destiny spread across the continent.

Under the best of conditions, with the best of intentions, sharing scarce water among members of a community is a hard problem. But when we slice up the landscape with artificial boundaries, especially the borders between states and nations, the problem can at times seem intractable.

Thus we end up with the almost comical series of memorandums exchanged last week among representatives of Colorado, New Mexico and Texas regarding the proper way to calculate which state is entitled to how much water from the Rio Grande.

I say “almost comical” because the accounting argument over whose water it was that was evaporating from Elephant Butte Reservoir in the summer of 2011 seems surreal until you realize that there are now at least three separate lawsuits now making their way through state and federal court attempting to sort out the complexities of how to share the Rio Grande’s water.

Most important of those is a suit filed by Texas in January asking the U.S. Supreme Court to step in as referee.

Powell’s 19th century vision of the West’s watersheds would have had us all, from the San Luis Valley down past El Paso, as part of a single state. On his map, Powell colored the resulting “state” green.

Powell’s loss of what Wallace Stegner called the “fight against the dragons of error” involved more than simply the question of whether to draw state boundaries around watersheds rather than along the straight lines laid down by surveyors. Beyond the laying out of borders, Powell was arguing for a deeper caution in developing the lands of the arid region. Development needed to proceed cautiously, he argued, lest we overbuild the region’s farms and cities for the scarce water supply its rivers have to offer.

We’re still paying the price for what resulted.

UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John Fleck at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal