March
14, 2001
To the
Last Drop
Why the Colorado
River Doesn't
Meet the Sea
Fifty years ago Aldo Leopold hailed
the Colorado River delta as North America's greatest oasis: Two
million acres of wetlands, cienegas, lagoons, tidal pools, jaguars
and mesquite scrublands. Today it's a wasteland.
The mighty Colorado River no
longer reaches the Sea of Cortez. Its entire annual flow has
diverted and spit out into hay fields, water fountains in front
of Vegas hotels and thousands of golf courses. The Colorado has
been sucked up to the last drop.
It's once lush delta is now
a salt flat, as barren as Carthage after Scipio Africanus took
his revenge on Hannibal's homeland. This estuary used to be one
of the wonders of the world: a vast wetland, teeming with more
than 400 species of plants and animals. In fact, like the Nile,
another desert river, nearly 80 percent of the riparian habitat
for the entire Colorado River was once clustered near the mouth
of the river. The shallow lagoons in the delta region are home
to the Vacquita dolphin, at four feet in length the world's smallest,
which is now on the brink of extinction, with only 100 animals
known to exist. Dozens of other endemic species are in the same
shape.
And not just animals are in
trouble. The delta was once the cultural mecca of the Copacha
Indians, who made a good living fishing the estuary. But these
days the fishing boats are beached and the Indians and Mexican
residents are in grinding poverty, forced to work multiple jobs
in distant tortilla factories, maquiladoras and wheat fields.
Perhaps, the only legal framework
as mind-numbing as the Law of Sea is the Law of the Colorado
River. This thicket of deals, trade-offs, set-asides, subsidies
and politically sanctioned thievery is nearly impenetrable to
even the most seasoned and cyncial observer. But from the Mexican
side of the border, the law is devastatingly simple: The US retains
95 percent of the Colorado River's water and Mexico gets what's
left over. Most years this is about 1.5 million acre feet, roughly
the same amount that Sonoran desert farmers were using to irrigate
their bean and onion fields in 1922.
Just before the Colorado crosses the
US/Mexico border 75 percent of its flow is diverted into the
All-American canal. From there the water is flushed into wasteful
irrigation systems and it eventually trickles down into the Salton
Sea, once an important stop on the Pacific flyway for migratory
birds now a toxic soup of fertilizer and pesticide runoff. Instead
of a bird paradise, the Salton Sea has become a killing ground,
the avian equivalent of cancer alley.
The water that eventually makes
it to Mexico-much of it run-off from Arizona and California alfalfa
and cotton fields-- is nearly as salt-laden and toxic as that
in the Salton Sea. The situation is so extreme that the Bureau
of Reclamation was compelled to build a $211 "reverse-osmosis"
desalination plant at Yuma, Arizona. But that plant, built in
1992, has only operated for a year.
It comes down to consumption.
People in the American southwest have yet to come to turns with
the fact that they live in a desert. Per capita water use by
the residents of California, Nevada and Arizona ranges up to
as much as 200 gallons a day, more than 120 percent above the
daily average for the rest of the nation. In Israel, for example,
daily water consumption is less than 75 gallons.
But as stark as these numbers
are the thirst of California agribusiness is downright vampirish
by comparison. Nearly, 80 percent of the Colorado's flow goes
to corporate farming. Much of it to low-valued crops, such as
alfalfa, cotton and even potatoes, that require lots of water.
And because of their political clout they get the water cheap.
Residents of Los Angeles, for example, pay as much as $600 per
acre-foot for water from the Colorado. Big agribusiness is getting
the same water for only $13 per acre foot.
For nearly 150 years, the attitude
of the water users of the American West has been guided by one
dictate: "use it or lose it." The notion of allowing
any water to remain in the river, for fish, for birds, for rafters,
or for Mexico, has long been anathema to the water lords.
"Scientists say we need at least one-percent to keep the
Colorado River delta on life-support," says David Orr, of
the Moab, Utah-based Glen Canyon Action Network. "That's
why we started the One-percent for the Delta Campaign. We're
asking all of the water users in the Colorado basin to donate
one-percent of their allocation to help restore the delta. One
percent's not a lot to ask, is it?"
The question is rhetorical,
because Orr knows better than anyone that the history of western
water politics is based on this paradigm: use it or lose it.
That's why the Colorado and its tributaries are dammed and diverted
from Wyoming to the Mexican border. For the water lords' perspective,
it's better to waste the water than to leave it in the river.
That's how we got Glen Canyon
Dam, one of the world's greatest desecrations of nature. This
concrete plug flooded nearly 300 miles of the Colorado, destroying
one of the most glorious canyons on earth. But the impounded
water-the equivilent of two years of the river's entire flow--just
sits there. Lake Powell is what's known as a storage reservoir.
It's there to merely keep the water from reaching the Sea of
Cortez where it would be "lost."
But here's where we arrive
at just how perverse the system has become. Because Lake Powell
sits in the middle of a redrock desert, it loses a lot of water
every year to evaporation. How much? More than a million acre
feet. Moreover, another 350,000 acre feet are absorbed into the
sandstone walls of the canyon. All told that represents ten percent
of the Colorado's yearly flow. To put it in perspective: the
evaporation loss in a single day is equal to the amount of water
used by 17,000 homes in Phoenix over an entire year.
This grim fact has led to a
radical but sensible idea: tear down Glen Canyon dam, restore
the canyon and let the water return to the delta, where it can
replenish that once teeming oasis. To promote this outlandishly
appropriate plan, Orr and his colleagues have taken to the road
in a water-tanker truck, stopping at dams along the course of
the Colorado, taking a bucket of water from each stop and into
pouring the holds of the tanker, ultimately delivering it to
the Colorado Delta. They've named their truck "Vaquita Rescue",
after the rare porpoise.
This is the face of the new environmental
movement: ethnically diverse, smart, theatrical, militant, and
armed with a passion for social and ecological justice as well
as a sense of humor--true descendents of their mentors David
Brower and Edward Abbey.
Riding along with the truck
on several of its stops in the Four Corners region was Thomas
Morris, the head of the Navajo Medicine Men's Association. Morris
sees the damming of the Colorado as an assault on the cultural
and spiritual roots of native people throughout the Southwest.
Many of the sites most sacred to Morris and the Navajo tribe
are now buried under hundreds of feet of water, destined for
Phoenix subdivisions and golf courses.
"Preserving our cultural
traditions is more important but harder to do as time goes by,"
says Morris. "Indian people have worked hard to gain protection
for our spiritual beliefs and practices, for the places where
we make prayers, sing songs, and hold ceremonies. We have seen
some progress, but there is still a long way to go. Imagine how
it might feel if the great cathedrals were bulldozed for strip
malls. The Bible tells how Jesus threw the moneychangers out
of the temple. We can relate to that when we see our sacred places
flooded and turned into tourist attractions."
Taking down Glen Canyon dam and restoring
flows to the mouth of the Colorado would be a big first step
toward righting old wrongs on both sides of
the border. CP
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