Red Snow Warning: The End of Welfare Water and the Drying of the West

Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert
-- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot 'n'
dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly
arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of
miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's
majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.

Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry
of the San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell
me that the pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder
hues, so thick and frequent are the dust storms that roll in these
days. A cross-section of a typical Colorado snowbank last winter
revealed alternating dirt and snow layers that looked like a weird
wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripes alternating
against the sky's blue field.

The Forecast: Dust Followed by Mud

Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West
in new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we
jokingly refer to as "adobe rain" -- when rain falls through dust,
spattering windows or laundry hung out to dry with brown stains. After
a dust "event" this past spring, I wandered through the lot of a car
dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the only color seemingly
available was light tan. All those previously shiny, brightly painted
cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickers under
opaque windows.

All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery:
Colorado's red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the
arid West is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger -- and
of more than simply a continuing version of the epic drought we've been
experiencing these past several years.

The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of
high plains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep
canyons. Unlike eastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad
rivers, streams, lakes, and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to
draw on, we depend on snowpack for about 90% of our fresh water. The
Colorado River, running from its headwaters in the snow-loaded
mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is the principal water source
for those states, and downstream for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and
southern California as well.

While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado
became the most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in
America. Its development spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the
Bureau of Reclamation, as well as a hundred state agencies, water
districts, and private contractors to keep it plumbed and distributed.
Taken altogether, this complex infrastructure of dams, pipelines, and
reservoirs proved to be the most expensive and ambitious public works
project in the nation's history, but it enabled the Southwest states
and southern California to boom and bloom.

The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what
the Colorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather
scenarios, and the weather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative
these days. If Portland soon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle
as warm as Sacramento, as some forecasters now predict, expect Las
Vegas and Phoenix to be more like Death Valley.

If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at
most three, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los
Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that
depend on it alive. That margin for survival gets thinner with each
passing year and with each rise in the average temperature. Imagine a
day in the not so distant future when the water finally runs out in one
of those cities -- a kind of slow-motion Katrina in reverse, a city not
flooded but parched, baked, blistered, and abandoned. If the Colorado
River system failed to deliver, the impact on the nation's agriculture
and economy would be comparable to an asteroid strike.

Too Much Too Soon, Then Too Little Too Late

Hot and dry is bad enough; chaotic weather only adds to our
problems. As we practice it today, agriculture depends on cheap energy,
a stable climate, and abundant water. Those last two are intimately
mixed. Water has to be not just abundant, but predictable and reliable
in its flow. And the words "predictable," "reliable," and "water" go
together ever less comfortably in our neck of the woods.

Here's
the problem. Despite the existence of the Colorado River's famous
monster-dams like Hoover in Nevada and Glen Canyon in Utah and the
mega-reservoirs -- Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- that gather behind
them, we really count on the vast snowfields that store fresh water in
our mountains to melt and trickle down to us slowly enough that our
water lasts from the first spring runoff until the end of the fall
growing season. Dust-covered snowpack, however, absorbs more heat,
melts sooner, and often runs down into streams and rivers before our
farmers can use it. In addition, as the temperature rises, spring
storms that once brought storable snow are now more likely to come to
us as rain, which only makes the situation worse.

This shift in the way our water reaches us is crucial in the West.
Not only is snowpack shrinking as much as 25% in the Cascades of the
Northwest and 15% in the snowfields of the Rocky Mountains, but it's
arriving in the lowlands as much as a month earlier than usual. Farmers
can't just tell their crops to adjust to the new pattern. Even
California's rich food basket, the Central Valley, fed by one of the
most complex and effective irrigation infrastructures in the country,
is ultimately dependent on Sierra snowpack and predictable runoff.

We need a new term for what's happening -- perhaps "perturbulence"
would describe the new helter-skelter weather pattern. In my Utah
backyard, for example, this past May was unusually hot and
unusually cold. At one point, we went from freezing to 80 degrees and
back again in three short days. Not so long ago, seasonal changes came
on here as if controlled by a dimmer switch, the shift from one season
to the next being gradual. Now it's more like a toggle switch being
abruptly shut on and off.

To add to the confusion, our summer monsoon season arrived six weeks
early this year. A surprisingly wet spring seemed like good news amid
the bigger picture of drought, but it turned out to mean that farmers
had a hard time getting into their muddy fields to plant. Then when
spring showers were so quickly followed by summer storms, some crops
were actually suppressed, according to local gardeners and farmers.

The West at Your Doorstep?

Our soggy spring and summer, however, masked an epic drought that
has touched almost every corner of the nation west of the Mississippi
at one time or another over the past decade. Southern Texas right now
is blazingly bone-dry. Seattle had a turn with record-breaking
temperatures earlier this summer. In New Mexico, the drought has been
less dramatic -- more like a steady drumbeat year after year.

A trip to the edge of Lake Powell in the canyon country of southern
Utah in June revealed the bigger picture. A ten-story-high "bathtub
ring" -- the band of white mineral deposits left behind on the
reservoir's walls as the waterline dropped -- stretches the almost
200-mile length of the reservoir.

Recreational boat users, hoping against hope that the reservoir will
refill, have regularly been issuing predictions about a return to
"normal" levels, but it just hasn't happened. Side canyons, once
submerged under 100 feet of water, have now been under the sun long
enough to have turned into lush, mature habitats filled with willows
and brush, birds and pack rats. A view from a cliff high above the once
bustling, now ghostlike Hite Marina on the receding eastern side of
Lake Powell shows the futility of chasing the retreating shoreline with
cement: the water's edge and a much-extended boat-launching ramp now
have 100 acres of dried mud, grass, and fresh shrubs between them.

After decades of frantic urban development and suburban sprawl
across the states that draw water from the Colorado, demand has simply
outstripped supply and it's only getting worse as the heat builds. Not
surprisingly, a debate is building over what to do if there isn't
enough water to fill both Lakes Powell and Mead, the principal
reservoirs along the Colorado. Should the seven states that depend on
the river live with two half-full reservoirs or a single full one, and
if only one, which one? River managers have now realized that both
massive "lakes" were always giant evaporation ponds in the middle of a
desert and only more so as average temperatures climb. There is no
sense in having twice as much water surface as necessary, which means
twice as much evaporation, too.

Given the stakes, the debate over what to do if there isn't enough
water is playing out like the preview to the all-out water war to come
when the reality actually hits. Westerners are well aware that, as
always, there will be winners and losers. The constituency for Lake
Mead will no doubt prevail because of its proximity to Las Vegas and
Phoenix, two cities that grew bloated on cheap but, as it has turned
out, temporary water from the dammed Colorado. Already desperate to
make up for their lost liquid, they will surely muster all their power
and influence to keep the water flowing.

Las Vegas is now aiming to tap into an aquifer under the Snake
Valley that straddles eastern Nevada and western Utah. Recently, a
rancher friend who ekes out a precarious living there mentioned the
obvious to me: the dusty surface of that arid high desert is barely
held in place by a thin covering of brush, sage, and grass. Drop the
water table even a few more inches and it all dies. The dust storms
that would be generated by a future parched landscape like that might
make it all the way to the Midwest or even farther. After decades in
which Easterners ritualistically visited the American West, the West
may be traveling east.

Those we pay to look ahead are now jockeying like mad for position
in a future water-short West. A new era of ever more pipelines, wells,
and dams is being dreamed up by the private contractors and bureaucrats
swelling up like so many ticks on the construction and maintenance
budgets of the West's heavily subsidized water-delivery infrastructure.
It is unlikely, however, that their dreams will be fully realized. The
low-hanging fruit -- the river canyons that could easily be dammed --
were picked decades ago and, unlike in the good ol' days when water
simply ran towards money, citizens of our western states are now far
more aware of the ecological costs of big dams and ever more awake to
the unfolding consequences of dependence on unreliable water sources.

Making more water available never led to prudent use. Instead, cheap
and easy water led to such foolishness as putting a golf course with
expanses of irrigated green in every desert community, not to speak of
rice and cotton farming in the Arizona desert.

Rip Your Strip

All of this is now changing. Fast. The airways across the Southwest
are loaded these days with public service announcements urging us to
conserve our water. "Rip your strip" may be a phrase unknown in much of
the country, but everyone here knows exactly what it means: tear out
the lawn between your front yard and the street and put in
drought-resistant native plants instead.

Everyone is increasingly expected to do his or her part. In my
little town of Torrey, Utah, we voluntarily ration our domestic water
on weekends when the tourists are in town, taking long showers and
spraying the dust and mud off their tires. Xeriscaping -- landscaping
with drought-resistant native plants instead of thirsty grasses and
ornamental shrubs -- is now fashionable as well as necessary, even
required, in some western towns, a clear sign that at long last we get
it. Yes, we live in a desert.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this sort of thing, useful as it is,
will be nearly enough. Our challenge is only marginally to take shorter
showers. After all, 80% of Utah's water goes into agriculture, mostly
to grow alfalfa to feed beef cows raised by ranchers heavily subsidized
by federal grants and tax write-offs. They graze their cows almost for
free on public lands and have successfully resisted even modest
increases in fees to cover the costs of maintaining the allotments they
use.

Utah legislators passed a law last session that gives agriculture
precedence when there's not enough water to go around. Consider that a
clear signal that the agricultural interests in the state don't have
any intention of changing their water-profligate ways without a fight.

Sure, everyone agrees that we have to change, but we in the West are
fond of focusing blame on personal bad habits that waste water -- and
they couldn't be more real -- rather than corporate habits that waste
so much more. The fact is that we Westerners have never paid anything
like what our water truly costs and we lack disincentives to waste
water and incentives to conserve it. Behind all that fuss you hear from
us about the damn government and how independent-minded we Westerners
are, is a long history of massive dam and pipeline projects financed by
the American taxpayer, featuring artificially low prices and not a few
crony-run boondoggles. Call it welfare water.

The Ruins in Our Future

A visit this summer to the most famous ruins in the West, the cliff
dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park and hollowed out palaces at Chaco
Culture National Historic Park, proved a striking, if grim, reminder
that we weren't the first to pass this way -- or to face possibly
civilization-challenging aridity problems. The pre-Colombian Anasazi
culture flourished between 900 and 1150 A.D., culminating in a city in
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, that until the nineteenth century contained
the largest buildings in the Americas, now uncovered from centuries of
drifting sands. Mesa Verde with its "skyscraper" cliffside dwellings,
also flourished in the twelfth century and was similarly abandoned and
forgotten for hundreds of years.

The mysteries of these deserted cities -- their purpose and the
reasons they were abandoned -- may never be fully plumbed. This much is
undeniable though, as one walks through cobbled plazas and toppled
towers, and past sun-blasted walls: cities, dazzling in their day,
arose suddenly in the desert, prospered, and then collapsed. Tree-ring
data confirm that an epic drought, one lasting at least 50 years,
coincided with their demise. Broken and battle-scarred bones unearthed
in the charred ruins indicate that warfare followed drought. What the
Anasazi experienced -- scarcity, the need to leave homes, and a
struggle for whatever remained -- is getting easier to imagine in a
water-short West. Only this time at stake will be Las Vegas and
Phoenix.

Archaeologists at Chaco recently uncovered a sophisticated cistern
system under the city. Anasazi builders, they now believe, learned how
to harvest the runoff from the summer rains that poured down and
spilled over the sandstone cliffs behind the ruins. Think of these as
the Lake Meads and Powells of their time, capturing the torrential
monsoon rains just as those reservoirs do the Colorado River's flash
floods.

The cistern system provided temporary water security, but eventually
it clearly proved inadequate. In the long run, Chaco couldn't be
sustained because turbulent, unreliable flows of water are hard to
tame. The descendants of those who left it behind settled the mesa-top
villages of the Hopis in Arizona and of the Pueblo tribes of New
Mexico. They learned to live on a smaller scale, with scant rain, and
after many hundreds of years, they (unlike their once living and
magnificent cities) remain. There is hope in that. It is no less
possible now to understand limits, to practice precaution, and to build
resilient communities.

Smoke Season

When it comes to the perturbed weather regime we are now entering,
it's not just our agriculture and our sprawling cities that are having
trouble adapting. The vitality of whole ecosystems is at stake. Native
vegetation suffers, too. When critical moisture arrives before
temperatures are warm enough for seeds to germinate, they don't. The
native grasses on my land didn't thrive despite our cold, wet spring.
Invasive cheat grass, however, blooms early, grows quickly, then dies
and dries. It ignites easily and burns hot.

When higher temperatures evaporate the moisture in soils, they
become drier in late summer and fall. Plants wither and are vulnerable
to insect infestations. The vast expanse of mountain I can see out my
window may seem like a classic alpine vista to the tourists who flock
here every summer. A closer look, however, reveals expanding patches of
gray and brown as beetle infestations kill off entire dried-out
mountainsides. More than 2.5 million acres of Rocky Mountain woodlands
have been destroyed by bark beetles so far. The once deep-green top of
Grand Mesa in western Colorado is becoming a gray, grim dead zone, a
ghostly forest waiting for lightning or some careless human to ignite
it.

Dead forests, of course, are fuel for the dramatic, massive
wildfires you now see so regularly on the TV news. We had quite a few
of those wildfires this summer in Utah, but -- what with southern
California burning -- they didn't make the evening news anywhere but
here. That statement can be made all over the West. Both the frequency
and size of fires are on the rise in our region. Early in the summer of
2008, while more than 2,000 separate wildfires raged across his state,
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a point that many Western governors
might soon be making. He claimed that California's fire season is now
365 days long. The infernos that licked the edges of the Los Angeles
basin this August were at once catastrophic and routine.

Smoke is dust's inevitable twin in a West beset by climate chaos,
and the lousy air quality we suffer when fires are raging is part of
the new normal. A few years ago we could check the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration website to see when winds might shift and
bring relief. This summer, like last, there were so many fires and they
were so widely distributed that it hardly mattered which way the wind
blew: smoke was in our lungs and eyes one way or the other.

All of this adds up to a kind of habitat holocaust for wild species,
from the tiniest micro-organisms in the soil to the largest mammals at
the top of the food chain like elk and bears. Nobody makes it in a dead
zone, whether it's a dust bowl or a desiccated forest.

Changes start at the bottom, as is usually true in ecosystems. When
soil dries and the microbial dynamic changes, native plants either die
or move uphill towards cooler temperatures and more moisture. The
creatures that depend on their seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter
follow the plants -- if they can. Animals normally adapt to slow
change, but an avalanche of challenges is another matter. When species
begin living at the precarious edge of their ability to tolerate the
stress of it all, you have to expect wildlife populations to shift and
dwindle. Then invasive species move in and a far different and
diminished landscape emerges.

Human populations in the West will also shift and dwindle, with
jarring consequences for all of America, if we do not learn quickly
that watersheds have limits, especially within arid and unpredictable
climates. The land also needs water. And such problems aren't just
"Western." Dust storms and smoke won't just stay here.

There are, of course, enlightened and engaged citizens who are doing
their best to address the growing challenge of a heated-up, chaotic
climate. Conservation groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
are working hard to protect critical habitat for stressed species and
urging government land management agencies to include global warming in
their plans and projections. The Glen Canyon Institute has raised the
specter of a diminished Colorado River and is challenging water
managers to get innovative and adopt policies that reward water
conservation and punish waste. Across the West, people are waking up
and learning about their own watersheds -- where their water comes from
and where it goes. This, too, is hopeful. Time, unfortunately, is not
on their side.

So, come see the beautiful West, our shining mountains, blue skies,
and fabled canyons. It's all still here right now. Take pictures.
Enjoy. But hurry...