Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West

Navigating the Rapids of the Future

251 < William deBuys William deBuys is a celebrated author and a former professor of documentary studies. He serves as a private conservation consultant whose clients have included the Conservation Fund, the Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Biological Survey. He is the author of several books and articles and the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. His book River of Traps was honored as the New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1990. Other awards have included the Robert Langsenkamp Award, the Pflueger Award, and the Watershed Steward Award. His first book, Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range, which won a Southwest Book Award, combines the cultural and natural history of northern New Mexico. His second book, River of Traps, one of three finalists for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize, combines memoir, biography, and photography. DeBuys’s third book, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, is an environmental and social history of the land where the Colorado River comes to an end. He is also the author of Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell and The Walk. His most recent book, A Great Aridness, addresses global warming and climate change in the North American Southwest and is one of the most important books of our time as it apprises the reader of William deBuys, photo by Jack Loeffler William deBuys 252 < the absolute uncertainty of the future of our species and many others as we inhabit a planet that has been unalterably changed by human presence. In the following pages, he reveals his take on our cultural approach to the array of hazards that we face in the imminent future. Navigating the Rapids of the Future (The following is excerpted from an interview conducted by Jack Loeffler on July 6, 2011.) JL: Basically, Bill, the project we’re working on now is called “Thinking Like a Watershed.” Conceptually, it has its origins in that map rendered by John Wesley Powell in the nineteenth century that you gave me a copy of years ago. It’s become part of my consciousness , actually. Two watersheds that we address are the Río Grande and the Colorado River. I know you’ve been doing a whole lot of research regarding global warming in the American Southwest. Could you give me an easy overview about your sense at this point about the potential probabilities or possibilities with regard to global warming and climate change for the two butterfly wings of the Colorado–Río Grande watersheds? WD: That’s a big question, Jack. I think one of the main things that climate change is going to be telling us is to do the things that we should have been doing anyway, like living within a sustainable water budget. Right now on the Colorado River, according to one of the main individuals who directs the use of the Central Arizona Project, the Lower Basin of the Colorado (south of Lee’s Ferry) is operating at an annual deficit of between 1.2 and 1.3 million acre-feet. That’s an enormous amount of water. The allocation for the Lower Basin is only 7.5 million acre-feet, so it’s a big percentage of that. Basically the reason that’s happening is < < Navigating the Rapids of the Future 253 < that none of the states in the Lower Basin (California, Arizona, and Nevada) budgets its water consumption for evaporation, transmission losses, their share of the apportionment that goes to Mexico for our treaty obligation, things like that. They have been expecting, and have been getting away with taking, surplus Colorado River water coming from the bounty of the weather or resulting from the failure of the Upper Basin to use all of its allocation. Well, in recent years the Upper Basin has not been sending down much in the way of leftovers—it has been using more and more of its allocation—and, aside from a big-water year in the northern Rockies in 2011, the weather has not been very bountiful . Inflows to Lakes Mead and Powell, the big reservoirs on the Colorado, have been slowing, and the levels of the reservoirs have been dropping and dropping and dropping. Although 2011 provided a kind of temporary stay of execution, we’ve come very close to having to take some serious measures to deal with these annual deficits. In fact, in the last couple of years we’ve had pretty good winters with pretty good snowfall in the Colorado Basin, but the runoff has not been proportionately as good. What’s going on? It’s probably climate change. We’ve got warmer temperatures, and that means more evaporation, so that for the same bang of precipitation you get a lot less buck of storable water. We’re beginning to experience the pressures of climate change in the environment on our water resources. And the climate change models forecast reductions in surface stream flow of 10 percent to 30 percent relative to a 1900 to 1970 baseline. So we are already in a deficit position and our income is dropping 10 percent to 30 percent. If this were a bank, we would declare it insolvent. The regulators would need to come in and take it over. That’s what we might see on the Colorado. The Río Grande is maybe not in as extreme a condition, but it’s still heavily allocated, probably overallocated, and it is probably even more vulnerable to climate change because its watershed does not reach as far north as the Colorado’s, into regions where precipitation is more likely to increase. There are big questions about how much water various entities like the Middle Río Grande Conservancy District actually use and how much William deBuys 254 < they’re actually entitled to. Astonishingly enough, even after the better part of a century, there are still big, big ambiguities about who owns what and who’s entitled to what. Indian water rights on both rivers remain big question marks. If we were a really well-organized, foresightful society, we would clean up all this business as we approach the future. But we don’t seem to be doing that. I liken climate change to a set of rapids on a river. Here we are in the boat of society and we’re going to run the equivalent of Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon. Well, you can’t control a lot of things down there in the rapids, but you can control one thing, and that is your point of entry. It’s the location, the angle of your boat, your velocity. Point, angle, velocity. You can control those things. That’s how you run a rapid. You’ve got to get the right point of entry, the right angle, the right speed, et cetera. Are we doing that? No, it doesn’t look like it. So we’re going to have a much more haphazard run through the rapids. We’re going to be bouncing off the rocks, bouncing off the walls. We’re going to be taking on a lot of froth. We’ll get turned around probably . God only knows how we’re going to come out the other end. JL: That’s a great metaphor. You can also get sucked right down to the bottom. WD: At Lava Falls Rapid, if you don’t have the right point of entry you can go over the ledge and into the big hole and get maytagged to a fare-thee-well. Our society can do that too. JL: One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot that we’re factoring into this project is the role of an economically dominated paradigm in relation to how do we steer the boat. WD: Yes. JL: Obviously economics is a major factor, but it has to be seen, at least in my mind, as just one of a system of factors rather than the prevailing , predominant factor. What are your thoughts about that? WD: The way I come to the economics issue is really through reflections on water conservation. For decades now our utilities and Navigating the Rapids of the Future 255 < our leaders have been telling us that in the dry Southwest the key to water sufficiency is conservation. I don’t believe that’s true. I believe water conservation is a hoax. Let me explain why. If you or I use less water—we take short showers, xeriscape the lawn, use low-flow toilets, all the things that really we should do that seem morally and ethically correct—we’re not adding to the resilience of our watershed, of our community, of our water utility, wherever we live. We’re just making more water available for the next housing development or strip mall down the road, because conservation, under our present economic paradigm, doesn’t go back to the river or the aquifer, to the source of the water. It just goes to more economic growth. Water conservation is a really good way to keep short-term building, real estate, and other economic activities rolling. But long-term, what it does is harden demand. The concept of demand hardening is a crucial one when we talk about water in the Southwest . In times of drought in the past, waste has been our best friend, because it’s easy to tighten up the system. You stop washing the car. You stop watering the lawn. You don’t make puddles of any kind. So in a time of drought, when there’s a wasteful system you can cut those wastes, and demand drops like a stone, and you make it through the drought. If everybody has conserved, then the uses to which you put water are increasingly, maybe all, absolutely essential uses. You can’t stop doing them. So when drought comes, if a community has really conserved but then has reallocated that conserved water to new growth, you can’t pare it back. There’s no flex in the system. Demand has hardened. You’re in a very tight corner then. The solution, according to many of our utilities, is then to do augmentation, to bring in new water through desalination or tapping new aquifers, even interbasin transfers—all these things that have enormous fiscal and usually environmental costs, and that can keep the hamster wheel of increased need, conservation, and demand hardening spinning for another generation or so. Ultimately we’ve got these two lines, of available supply and need, and they ultimately cross at a certain point. We keep thinking we can put off that point of crossing into the indefinite future. But one day, the day of reckoning will come. And with climate change, what William deBuys 256 < will happen is that day of reckoning accelerates back toward the present out of the future, because supply is going to be dropping. What do we do? The only real solution is not conservation. It’s a changed economic paradigm. We have to figure out a way to transition to a steady-state economy rather than a continuousgrowth economy. This is true in water, it’s true in energy use, it’s true with regard to greenhouse gases, and it’s true in so many areas. The sooner we get on with the business of making this transition, the less painful it’s going to be. It’s like that image of the rapids that we used a little while ago. If we don’t prepare, if we don’t select our point of entry, then we give ourselves up to dumb luck and chaos, and they’re not always very friendly to us as we go through the rapids of the future. JL: That’s really well put. I think about this all the time with regard to corporate economics that dominates much of our paradigm. It’s not so much them versus us but, rather, all of us participating in this economically dominated paradigm based on, as Ed Abbey said, growth for the sake of growth, which is the ideology of a cancer cell. WD: Exactly. JL: Somehow we have to come to terms with that. In the meantime, I take a long hard look at the ways of governance that we have created in this country and how that contributes a huge amount of energy to the current economically dominated paradigm. Modern governance goes hand in hand with forwarding growth for the sake of growth. WD: Exactly. You can’t get reelected if the GDP is falling. So you run the economic system as best you can to goose that GDP figure up. That’s how our politics work. JL: What we’re forwarding in this project is governance from within the commons rather than from the top down. This is not to say to take out the federal government but to really increase the sense of responsibility from a population base within the commons and reorganize the system of laws that were erroneously Navigating the Rapids of the Future 257 < wrought in the first place. It’s really interesting looking at the 1922 Colorado River Compact and what that implied as necessary to maintain over the future. Of course it was also based on an erroneous concept of how much water was coming down the river. Could I ask you to talk about your sense of the commons itself and how we might be able to restore a sense of human balance? WD: I think about that a great deal. We are citizens of so many commons all the time, in a sense. The atmosphere, which we’re polluting with greenhouse gases, is a commons. Our watersheds are a commons. Qualities like silence are a commons. These days in America you can hardly go any public place without hearing a doggone TV yammering away. Commons is what we share with each other, and somehow linked to this idea of transitioning to a steady-state economy we’ve got to transition to a set of values that is rooted in what we share together, rooted in a sense of community , rooted in our bonds to each other, rather than in our individual existences to the degree that we are so preoccupied today. Where that leads is to an emphasis on quality of life rather than on quantity of consumption. Bill McKibben has done some very interesting work and has tracked a number of interesting trends and polling systems and so forth, and he is fond of citing the fact that it seems that as Americans accumulated more possessions, they report themselves as being less happy. More toys don’t mean more fun. I think as we take this consumer society to its accumulating, trash-producing reductio ad absurdem, we’re finding that it’s not a very satisfactory way to live. Somewhere down the line, if we’re going to be successful, if we’re going to get into the future more or less intact, we’ve got to reorient our values to the primacy of the commons, to a sense of loyalty to place, to a sense of dedication of quality of life rather than just to the continuous consumption of more and more material things. JL: Right on. Something that I think about a lot is that in a sense, the commons in which we participate the most is the commons of human consciousness, what Western culture has wrought on human consciousness. The whole consumer notion with regard to William deBuys 258 < how we comport ourselves has splayed throughout human consciousness . To me the huge challenge is how to convey to the mainstream commons of human consciousness what really needs to happen. That’s why I really love talking to peoples of indigenous persuasions, because they still retain systems of values that provide far more balance with habitat. WD: Most people through most of human history have lived in something like a steady-state economy. This continuous-growth way of life that we define as normal today is really an artifact of the modern era in western Europe, then exported to North America, and really to the rest of the world today. But that’s not where human beings evolved. That’s not where we lived for all those millennia beforehand. We can do this, and that’s the wisdom that we get from Native peoples, because they’re still connected to that other reality, that longer heritage of human experience. They can draw on traditional knowledge about how that steadystate world existed and what kinds of values were necessary to underpin it. JL: And that’s why their perspectives remain absolutely vital in today’s world. Thanks, Bill. ...