It’s starting to feel like fall in the Great Basin. Shorter days, cooler nights. Leaves changing.
With everything going on in the world right now, I’m ready for the holidays, a time for things to slow down, a time for reflection, a time to reconnect and a time to engage/listen. If you’re in Reno, I highly suggest checking out the new public poetry display installed near the Truckee River, starting downtown and extending past Idlewild park. More information on that below.
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-Daniel
Variability in the water cycle, this winter and beyond
The Los Angeles Times reports that federal forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predict a wet, warm winter — with an El Niño pattern at the center of trends in the U.S. As the article notes, it is all but certain that 2023 “will end up as the planet’s hottest year on record.” 2024 could top that.
The Colorado River is in search of a long-term management plan. This week, federal water officials released a document outlining the results of “scoping,” a public comment period ahead of efforts to update rules for managing the river (the current guidelines expire in 2026). Those comments, which included about 300 unique letters from tribes, federal agencies, states and the public, are a start, not an end of what is going to be a long negotiation process. KUNC reports on the point where many agree — the need to adapt to a drier future — and the point where many disagree — exactly how to bridge the gap between the river’s supply and human demand to divert water.
A top Interior official involved in Colorado River negotiations to leave.
Rivers flowed this year in places where prolonged drought left them parched over the past few years. But new research from a team UC Riverside shows that there can be a lag-time of up to 3.5 years before streams and rivers fully recover from drought. That’s in part because its not only rainfall and snow that is feeding into rivers. Water stored underground provides important base flows, and groundwater aquifers often take longer to recover from a drought, depending on their geography and geology.
Where water demand exceeds supply
For the Nevada Independent, I wrote a piece about efforts to buy back groundwater rights in places where irrigators are tapping into aquifers at unsustainable rates:
Here’s the main takeaway: “Following a handful of other states, Nevada officials are now looking to fund entities that want to facilitate the buyback and retirement of state-issued water rights. Where there is simply not enough water to go around, policymakers want to take water allotments off the balance sheets.”
It was an interesting story to report out, and it left me thinking about several public policy questions. How do you enforce water buybacks? What is the responsibility of the public, government and taxpayers to correct the problem of overuse? How do you ensure that sustainable uses replace agricultural lands that go out of production? And the biggest question of all: What’s a fair price to charge for buying back water rights?
The idea of paying farmers to fallow — or to cutback — is not new in the West, where agriculture uses the majority (about 80%) of the water. But exactly how that is done in a fair and equitable way is important. Not all programs focus on permanent water buy backs. Some have looked at temporary conservation and cuts to meet shortages. A new study focused on the Colorado River Basin looks at how producers are looking at voluntary and compensated conservation. Water Education Colorado has more.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation giving state regulators explicit authority to investigate the use of water users with high-priority “senior” rights, the L.A. Times reported. But the measure stopped short of making major systemic changes.
An excellent piece by ProPublica and High Country News looked at newly-unearthed documents showing the ways in which Western states blocked Colorado River tribes from accessing water. Seventy years later, many tribes are still fighting for their water.
Speaking of solutions…
Fixing remade rivers one eager beaver at a time: My colleague Amy Alonzo at the Nevada Independent looked at how wildlife managers in Nevada are looking to beavers — and the unique habitats they create — to create healthier riparian ecosystems.
PFAS, or “forever chemicals” are found in synthetic grass, posing a challenge for what otherwise seen as a drought fix. From CalMatters: “Less than a decade ago then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law prohibiting cities and counties from banning synthetic grass. At the time, the state was in the middle of a crippling drought and fake lawns were thought to be helpful in saving water. But this year Democrats in the Legislature went in a different direction, proposing bills that would discourage synthetic turf.”
Last thing: A poem for the Truckee River
Last week, I checked out the new roughly mile-long public art installation running alongside the sidewalks and curbs built near the Truckee River in downtown River. It’s a 6,000 word poem by artist Todd Gilens, inspired by spending time at Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station near Truckee. “I wanted something that really reflected my understanding of streams in the landscape, which is that they start way further away than we even realize,” he told Double Scoop, a Nevada arts outlet, for a recent story. “And they they don’t really ever end. They evaporate into the sky, they seep down into the groundwater, there’s really no boundary to a stream.” Another neat detail about this project: The handwriting on the sidewalk mirrors the handwriting of a former water master for the Truckee (more on that in a Nevada Humanities blog post). I’m looking forward to engaging with this project more in the coming weeks.