I’ve spent a lot of hours recently thinking about water and time.
Something I heard from a biologist once on a reporting trip north of Elko was that sagebrush can live for a century. This fact always stuck with me, a beautiful reminder of resilience in a harsh climate. It is mind-numbing to think about all the change that has taken place around this immovable plant — to stop and try conceptualizing all the change a sagebrush plant has seen in a lifetime, as old as the Colorado River Compact, as old as Hoover Dam’s profound impact on growth in the West, its altering of nature.
So far, in my research, I’ve been struck most by just how quickly everything happened, and yet how much remains uncertain. Dams and diversions. Canals and flood control. Overuse and overallocation. A system of water use that is only a few generations old.
And the future?
Time is strange, and time weighs on water.
It is embedded in how water is allocated. In the West, with a few exceptions, water is allocated based on a sequential system of priority: Those who claimed water first get water first in times of scarcity. “First in time, first in right.” Accordingly, much of my work in piecing together how water is used today is an exercise in historical digging.
I can’t think of any other type of law, at its very foundation and framework, that is so inherently tied to the past. Those with claims to use water know this all too well. In Nevada, state regulators are slowly going through the process of adjudicating claims to water in groundwater basins, claims that pre-date the creation of state water law.
These adjudications rely heavily on county tax records and memoranda, patents and newspaper clippings, and contracts so old the elegant cursive is a chore to decipher.
Handwriting like this:
Many court cases and water disputes turn on such historical documents and memos, unlikely as it might seem. Water, even in the present is uniquely rooted in the past.
It’s not only the law. Time runs through our relationship with water, how it becomes so personal. We interact with water over time, in our lifetimes and across generations with stories that are shared with us. It is a marker of where and how we live, at a time.
And time is a determining variable in how water cycles through our environment, if an often unappreciated one. Drought in all of its many forms seem to accumulate over time, building off of one another and amplifying in intensity. Beneath the Earth, water that is stored in aquifers moves on a temporal journey, accumulating over years, if not decades. When water is pumped out, it can take years (or decades) for land to recover.
And yet, a little water can go a long way. A big storm, a big water year can feel like a rapid relief for communities in the West and the environment. This winter certainly did, as atmospheric river after atmospheric river moved across the region. Vegetation responded quickly. We went from dry soils to flooding in a flash, a whiplash. And of course, so too do our opinions about policy, taking action to curb the next inevitable shortage to come. Instead, we often enter the next phase of the hydro-illogical cycle.
I’m still working through what to make of all this, and it’s hard for me to articulate, in a similar way that geologic time is hard to express. In all this, there is probably a good lesson to be said about patience and humility. Or maybe something to be learned that helps to inform our solutions: We live with past decisions about water allocation and use, wrapped in history, and understanding that seems a step in how to move forward.
In any case, now it’s time for me to go write.
A few more threads (back in the present):
In Nevada, the Division of Water Resources held the first of three workshops to hear presentations on possible management schemes for the Humboldt River, where USGS modeling has shown how groundwater use contributes to capturing flows of the river.
A new research paper found that warming temperatures have reduced the Colorado River’s flow, over the past two decades, by enough water that it could fill Lake Mead.
An excellent Salt Lake Tribune piece on the Great Salt Lake and a superfund site.”
What’s in Tulare Lake since it reemerged? The L.A. Times has an illuminating story.
Saudi-owned farms using Arizona groundwater, an update.
In New Mexico, water experts ask legislators to fund groundwater research.