Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest
244
Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest
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Overview
In contrast to this fantasy of abundance, Sevigny explores acts of restoration. From a dismantled dam in Arizona to an accidental wetland in Mexico, she examines how ecologists, engineers, politicians, and citizens have attempted to secure water for desert ecosystems. In a place scarred by conflict, she shows how recognizing the rights of rivers is a path toward water security. Ultimately, Sevigny writes a new map for the future of the American Southwest, a vision of a society that accepts the desert’s limits in exchange for an intimate relationship with the natural world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609383947 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 244 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mythical River
Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest
By Melissa L. Sevigny
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-394-7
CHAPTER 1
A River's Heartbeat
IN MY MIND there is no country more beautiful than the Basin and Range Province. A young, muscled landscape, it strains restlessly against its geologic skin. Mountain ranges push upward from bright, broad plains. Tectonic plates began to pull the earth apart here 150 million years ago, dropping valleys and raising metamorphic and igneous blocks of stone spiked with copper ore: mesmerizing veins of malachite, azurite, chalcopyrite, chrysocolla, porphyry.
A latecomer to the theater, I arrive for the standing ovation: the Hualapai Mountains of western Arizona crisp against the sky, green with pines and junipers, and the pale desert scrub curled around their toes like a rug. On the west side rivulets gather their strength in the Big Sandy to splash seamlessly into the Santa Maria River and Date Creek. This confluence gives birth to the Bill Williams, a forty-mile reach that heads single-mindedly west into the Colorado.
A flood once tore down the sandstone canyon at the astonishing rate of 200,000 cubic feet of water per second (like watching two Olympic-size swimming pools flash by every second), rivaling the largest floods on the Colorado. Yet stretches of the streambed remain dry much of the time, when the river plunges into the rustling alluvium to flow invisibly beneath the surface. Wayward, irascible, and unpredictable — these are the traits of a desert river.
Willow and cottonwood trees have come to rely on the erratic behavior of desert streams. Every decade or so a flood scours the canyon in a thunder of mud and debris, stripping the riverbanks clean and flinging out carpets of rich, black silt. The springtime pulse of cold water triggers cottonwood trees to send aloft bundles of fluffy white seeds, exactly at the moment when the riverbanks have plenty of vacancies. Willows produce cottony catkins about a month later, when the moist soil has retreated closer to the stream. The seeds whirl into position in a slow ballet without jostling each other or falling out of step.
Until 1968, the planet's seasonal tilt decided how the dance on the Bill Williams would go. That year the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Alamo Dam, justifying its construction with the unassailable argument of flood control. No towns existed along the forty-mile stretch to the Colorado. The largest population at risk from a flood was the construction crew. Uncontrolled, the Bill Williams threatened not houses or farms but the clockwork schedule of water deliveries to the urban centers of California and Arizona, hundreds of miles away.
* * *
THIS IS THE RIVER I drink, though the convoluted path it takes through desert terrain and politics to reach my childhood home in Tucson isn't easy to explain. At first dammed, exploited, and disregarded, this nearly forgotten tributary of the Colorado has become a test case in redemption. Perhaps no river has resisted its place in western history more than the tiny Bill Williams.
To understand my obsession with water — which led me at last to the banks of the Bill Williams — I have to go back a few years, before I'd ever heard of the Buenaventura, to the summer after my freshman year in college. The woman who taught me about rivers got off a plane in Arizona with my phone number stuffed in her bra strap. I'd just spent two weeks traveling in Costa Rica and Guatemala in the company of a river scientist from South Africa named Jackie King. She was a slight woman with faded auburn hair and intense blue eyes. At our first meeting, standing on a grassy riverbank with fat iguanas lounging everywhere, she gripped my hand and mentioned the article I'd written for the Arizona Daily Star about her upcoming visit to Tucson. "This is what we need," she said. "Poetry and science together."
We flew to my hometown together for a final few days of workshops and lectures. King hated airports, especially American airports, with their pallets of shrink-wrapped luggage and gauntlets of security checks. Travel-weary, she didn't want to lose me in the unfamiliar Tucson airport. I promised to turn on my cell phone as soon as we landed, and stuffing the slip of paper bearing my number in her bra must have seemed the expedient thing to do.
Born in England, King moved to South Africa as a headstrong teenager — to see the animals, she told me — got married, bore a son and daughter, and only then began a career as a freshwater ecologist. Concerned about the impact of a proposed dam near Cape Town, she wrote the South African government to ask how much water would continue to flow down the river. A government official wrote back, inquiring how much water she thought should flow downstream.
She didn't know, and so she never replied. The question troubled her. When American scientists first turned their attention to protecting rivers, they imagined that saving a certain amount of water — say, 30 percent — would sustain the surrounding habitat. The only issue was calculating how much. More water meant better habitat — specifically, habitat for fish, which took center stage in the discussions because people liked fish more than they liked freshwater mussels or caddis flies. To manage a dam for fish and keep a certain minimum flow in the river seemed easy enough for engineers to calculate into computer models.
In the 1970s engineers and biologists alike began to question this cut-and-dried method. South Africans, latecomers to the research, brought a fresh perspective unhindered by the Americans' deeply ingrained love of engineered solutions. They wanted to develop a new method. No country had yet adequately crafted a management approach that recognized ecological needs. America's model, developed with the interests of anglers in mind, wouldn't work in South Africa, where millions of people relied on rivers for their livelihoods.
In July 1993, King and her colleague Rebecca Tharme convened a workshop with seventeen South African scientists to discuss what they called a holistic approach, a way to address the needs of the entire ecosystem. They began by sketching hydrographs of rivers they knew well, simple charts that show the amount of water that flows through a given point in the riverbed. A hydrograph looks like the lines on a heart monitor, with months or years marching along the horizontal axis. In the Colorado River Basin, wide hills mark the early spring when snowmelt surges down mountain slopes, followed by a low, flat line where water disappears in summer's heat. August and September bring the sharp spikes of monsoon floods.
King asked her colleagues to redraw their graphs to preserve as much of the river's natural pattern as possible, but with half the water removed. In this way they developed the basic principles of what we now call environmental flows.
Over millennia, plants and animals adapt to a river's unique rhythm. They release their seeds and spawn their eggs according to seasonal patterns. High flows scour the river channel, reshaping pools and riffles. Floods wash over the floodplains, carrying flapping fish helter-skelter and dropping them in rich spawning grounds. Dry spells raze dominant plants to the ground, making room for others to sprout. The unraveling strands of sunlight penetrating the river's depth, its chemistry and cobbles, fallen branches slick with algae, and slack water at the river's edge — these make up the river's supple body. Flow is the heartbeat, circulation, and pulse.
King and her colleagues realized that they needed to attune water management to a river's heartbeat, preserving the most essential floods and low flows while still allowing dams to operate for water supply and electricity. They set to work, river by river. The research might have remained unimportant outside of academic journals had they not begun at that particular place and time. The collapse of apartheid made South Africa a crucible for change, and its journey toward a more equitable and ethical government would begin with water.
* * *
BEFORE THE CONSTRUCTION of Alamo Dam, riparian forests had sprung up around the Bill Williams in dense thickets, waiting for the next big flood to raze them down to size. After the dam, few floods continued to flash down the channel, and those often occurred in the wrong season at much smaller sizes. Willows and cottonwoods no longer received the signal that choreographed their reproduction. Sandbars eroded without fresh sediment arriving to build them up again.
The river's newly predictable flow favored saltcedar trees, transplants from Eurasia that produce seeds year-round. A 2007 survey showed saltcedar dominating 38 percent of the channel. Other species that thrived in the new conditions appeared, including beavers, while some plant and animals accustomed to the Bill Williams's unpredictability began to dwindle.
Historically the Bill Williams had been a capricious river. In 1837 a red-bearded fur trapper named William Sherley Williams wandered downstream to the river's mouth hunting beavers. Six-foot-one, lean and sinewy, Old Bill epitomized the era's mountain men. He had trapped with Jedediah Smith during the famous first rendezvous in Green River country and made his way across most of the unexplored Southwest. A former itinerant preacher turned mystic, Old Bill abandoned his parents and siblings in Missouri for a life with the Osage at the age of sixteen, and then abandoned his Osage wife and children for a footloose life of adventure.
The river later named for Old Bill offered little in the way of beaver pelts. Beavers like to build their lodges on steady, perennial streams. A hardy few colonized the Bill Williams, but the river's erratic nature — floods one day, drought the next — discouraged them. Old Bill abandoned the stream in search of richer trapping grounds. By then the fur trade had begun to collapse from its own efficiency. The era of mountain men faded away. Old Bill spent the rest of his life as a guide, interpreter, and horse thief, only once returning to Missouri to visit his children and meet his little granddaughter.
For the next two decades the Bill Williams lay mostly ignored. In 1858 a prospector named Robert Ryland tapped into the crumbling sedimentary walls of the canyon and found a coppery glimmer. Arizona wasn't a state yet. The 1860 census recorded just over 6,400 people in the region, excluding indigenous people, who weren't included in official censuses for another three decades. Copper changed everything. Prospectors flocked to the banks of the Bill Williams, and a slapdash community sprang up around the Planet mine.
Planet still holds undeserved distinction as the first Arizonan mine worked by Americans. In reality, the rich eastern investors who owned the operation mostly hired Mexican, Chinese, and Native workers for the grimy, dangerous work. Driving shafts into the hillsides, workers risked heavy masses of ore tumbling loose and crushing them amid choking clouds of rust.
The mines prospered. Four years after Ryland's discovery the owners of the Planet mine packed 100 tons of copper ore onto mules and trekked 20 miles to the Colorado River, where they loaded it onto a boat for shipment to San Francisco. Mining wouldn't become truly profitable in Arizona until railway lines crossed the state two decades later. Nevertheless, the ore yielded a profit upward of $100 a ton — fortune enough to lure more treasure-seekers west.
By 1866 fifty mines had sprung up on both sides of the river with an annual production of 1,500 tons of ore. To cut freight charges, the owners erected a $100,000 smelter that year. Planet swelled to 500 residents, earning the right to a post office in 1902. Two observers commissioned by the government to report on the mineral resources expressed their confidence that the Bill Williams "will very soon be one of the most important copper mining districts on this coast ... the hills for miles around being colored red by the iron, or green and blue in patches where waters containing carbonate of lime in solution have percolated through the copper."
But the Bill Williams surprised its optimistic exploiters once again. The mine played out in 1917, and within a few years the entire roughshod community of Planet disappeared. Today only roofless ruins remain, and iron grates close off the mysterious open mouths of exhausted mine shafts — a lonely monument to the boom-and-bust cycles that the Southwest has never quite managed to shake off, ever hopeful that the next strike will last forever.
* * *
LESS THAN 20 INCHES of rain falls annually over two-thirds of South Africa, the magic cutoff that makes agriculture nearly impossible without irrigation. Twenty percent of the country receives less than 8 inches, comparable to much of the Sonoran Desert. South Africa has roughly the same land area as Arizona, California, Nevada, and Colorado combined, 471,000 square miles, and almost the same population at 50.5 million people.
South Africa's legal structure for governing water developed along similar lines to the Southwest. A dam-building craze that began at the start of the twentieth century developed most of the country's rivers. Water rights were attached to land ownership, a system poorly suited to dry regions and inherently iniquitous in a country where only the minority white population owned land. The 1970s brought a rise in environmental consciousness, and ecologists like Jackie King began developing new science in local river basins to balance human needs with ecosystem health.
There the similarities end. South African ecologists developed the science of environmental flows at a moment in history when they had "a rare window of opportunity," as King put it. Handed a blank slate after apartheid, President Nelson Mandela began implementing reforms in health, education, employment, and many other areas of government. A critical early step, he discarded South Africa's water laws and appointed a Water Law Review Panel to come up with a new system. "Everyone in the country was consulted, as they ought to be," King said. "They insisted on consideration of ecosystem use. Lawyers said you couldn't write it into a law in a way that people would understand. And we said, we think we can."
The lawyers on the panel faced a critical question: should they treat the environment as a user of water, competing with cities, farms, and power plants, or should they treat it as a resource base that supported all other users? A lone aquatic scientist, Carolyn Palmer, served on the Water Law Review Panel in the influential position of vice-chair. She mobilized her colleagues to present evidence that the environment should be considered "an indivisible national asset," governed by interrelationships that could not be split apart into discrete resources.
The lawyers agreed with the premise but remained skeptical. To make the environment a priority for legal protection, they would have to believe that scientists could accurately determine what a river needed to stay healthy — how much water, what quality, and when.
In 1996 a panel member attended a workshop at the Sabie River and listened to King explain her new Building Block Methodology, an approach that involved assembling a diverse team of scientists, determining the environmental needs of the river in question, gathering data about the riparian community, and then developing a set of recommendations. The lawyer was impressed. The workshop convinced him that scientists could quantify a river's needs.
The Water Law Review Panel drafted a set of principles that began, "All water, whenever it occurs in the water cycle, is a resource common to all. ... There shall be no ownership of water but only a right (for environmental and basic human needs) or an authorisation [sic] for its use." These principles underpin the National Water Act that Nelson Mandela signed into law in 1998.
The act created a "reserve" of water set aside for basic human needs — drinking, cooking, and washing — later defined as 25 liters (7 gallons) of water per person per day, available within 200 meters (656 feet) of the household. A second reserve was created for aquatic ecosystems. All other uses, including agriculture and electrical power, had to get in line for whatever water remained. In just a few years the concept of environmental rights had progressed from idea to science to law. South Africans began assessing the impacts of proposed dams and defining the terms of the Ecological Reserve, which would be unique to each watershed, even before the law went into effect.
As King described the radical shift in the nation's thinking about water: "The old government said, we must supply it, otherwise we are failing in our duty. The new government said, we live in a dry place. Get used to it."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mythical River by Melissa L. Sevigny. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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