Sept. 10
Good morning, water groupies:
Hope you all had a lovely weekend. We had cloud cover in Rowe with just enough moisture to mean once again I didn’t have to tax my well by watering. My little native trees are learning to adjust to my lax watering habits (my version of conservation.) Lucky for them, its been a pretty wet year.
Most of you have probably seen the dismal USGS note on the future of polar bears. If you haven’t, check it out here.
I can hear the canary in the coal mine gasping.
Jerd Smith of the Rocky Mountain News had this little bombshell in a story published Saturday: “Studies indicate Colorado will need 53 percent more water in pipelines and reservoirs by 2030.” Smith doesn’t say who did the studies, but if true it highlights yet more competition for limited water in the West.
At about this time, word is Las Vegas, Nev. has less then five years of water supplies left unless they can drain Lake Meade further and suck up a lot more water from the state’s rural outback.
Phoenix and surrounding suburb is still growing at break neck speed.
I’ll be curious to see whose needs (who has the most money and political power) comes out on top with the Colorado River when the flows start to dry up.
So in skipping around books as usual, I read the first couple of chapters in Sam Bingham’s decade old book “The Last Ranch: A Colorado Community and the Coming Desert.” It is a brilliant book and I highly recommend it. It has a lot to say about our own ongoing and coming problems with water and unhealthy land.
It is Bingham’s ability to weave together vingette’s from around the world that makes it compelling. If you do nothing else, peak at his introduction and first chapter where he describes the evolution of Holistic Resource Management guru Allan Savory. In that description, Bingham also lays out an argument for why our human approaches to problem solving so often seem to glide astray. Too much reliance on our technology and limited science without fully understanding all the ways nature works?
It also turns out Bingham and his wife moved to Navajo country in 1971, the same year as my family. My mother, it turns out, often used curriculum Bingham developed for the Rock Point experimental school. Even then Bingham was an astute listener. In his book he tells of asking an elderly Navajo lady to tell him about native grasses. She laughs and says there is so much less of it then there used to be. Because of overgrazing?, he asks.
No, she says, because the grass lost interest.
You’ll have to read it to understand what she meant. But apply her theory, based on long years living off the land, and it begs the question for us in modern times:
Will water lose interest?
Later
