Water Rights Have Become Water Wrongs

Across most of the arid West, snowpack is low, rainfall is scarce, and residents are staring down the barrel of another year of major drought. Water levels are dropping, native fishes have become endangered, and a battle royale is heating up between western states to decide whose water uses will go unfulfilled.

Right now, water is allocated based on Wild-West-era laws that allowed the first settler who filed a claim to get priority rights to use that water. You could claim as much water as you could use – or squander – with the proviso that any unused water at the end of the season could be hijacked by a downstream water user who wanted more, and that portion of the original water right would be lost forever. Almost always, the first user was a rancher or farmer, because they arrived before the growth and incorporation of towns and cities. This led to today’s absurd reality that the least-important water use (from a societal standpoint) — feed to subsidize cattle in arid environments where they otherwise couldn’t survive — takes precedence over every other use including keeping enough water in rivers and streams for fish to survive.

The Colorado River, which flows through the Grand Canyon, is a prime example of this absurdity. Colorado River flows into Lake Powell are projected to be only 22 percent of normal this year, and could hit record lows. This giant reservoir was built as a “water storage savings account” to allow water to be accumulated during wet years and released during dry years so Upper Colorado River Basin states could meet their obligations under the multi-state Colorado River Compact. But spreading out and slowing down the river maximized water loss to evaporation. And the savings account is already overdrawn, with reservoir levels approaching deadpool levels at which hydropower at the dams can no longer be generated. This scenario occurs ever-more-frequently as climate change produces longer and more frequent droughts. Clearly, there is not enough water in the Colorado River to keep both Lake Powell and Lake Mead at levels that allow for hydropower generation and that prevent dam failure.

An obvious near-term solution is to remove Glen Canyon Dam, liberate the spectacular canyon country drowned by Lake Powell, and let the water flow free through the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead. But that only addresses the symptom, and not the cause of the problem: too much human use of too little water in the Colorado River system.

The same scenario is repeating itself across the West.

Just to the north, the Salt Lake watershed is similarly being strangled by excessive human use, and as the Great Salt Lake dries up, it exposes a century’s worth of arsenic and other chemicals that have been deposited into the lake. Winds whip up toxic clouds of lakebed dust, which billow into Salt Lake City and its expanses of suburbs, poisoning the locals – humans, plants, and animals alike. As a result of these water woes, the Salt Lake Tribune wrote an editorial concluding, “[A]lfalfa has become a greater liability to the overall Utah economy and environment than it is worth.”

The main culprit of the water deficit in the western rivers and streams is the livestock industry, and its heavy reliance on irrigated feed crops to support cattle production in desert environments completely unsuitable for this water-hogging animal.

As High Country News reported, “Cattle-feed crops consume 90% of all the agricultural irrigation water in the Upper Basin” – withdrawn upstream from Lake Powell “– three times more than is consumed by municipal, commercial and industrial uses combined.” Irrigation accounts for 71% of human water use of rivers flowing into the Great Salt Lake, and cattle-feed crops make up 80% of this total according to a recent study. In Montana’s Big Hole River, a new report shows that Arctic grayling – a rare native fish – is being pushed out of its habitats by rising water temperatures, driven in large part by irrigation to support hay production in the valley. The dewatering of Lake Abert in Oregon by irrigation withdrawals has made the lake much saltier, decimating populations of brine shrimp and insects that waterfowl and shorebirds rely on during their migrations. I have personally witnessed entire rivers and streams (like the Cimarron in Colorado) diverted into an irrigation canals for hay and alfalfa fields, leaving nothing but dry cobbles downstream for the trout.

It begs the question: Why is the agriculture industry shoehorning cattle into arid environments in the first place, when cattle are raised more easily, more profitably, and in far greater numbers in the eastern half of the continent? What a waste of a scarce and precious resource to provide feed for livestock in a region that cannot support them year-round in such large numbers.

When the livestock industry causes major problems – overgrazing, erosion and soil loss, decimation of native wildlife, in this case dewatering of river systems – it has one play in its playbook: distract public attention by blaming someone else.

Fundamental reform is needed. We should federalize water use from rivers, and designate categories of use: municipal, industrial, agricultural, and in-stream flow. Then we should make policy decisions about which category of use gets priority. In-stream flow should come first – because protecting healthy river systems and recovering endangered fishes should be the baseline expectation – then Tribal uses (first among human uses, they were here first), and municipal use (because drinking water will always be more important than irrigation to growing alfalfa and hay for cattle, and for export).

Then, within each category, states can allocate water-use priority on a first-in-time, first-in-right basis.

It makes sense logically, because why shouldn’t the federal government allocate water to the most important uses first, starting with the health of the rivers themselves? It makes sense from a legal perspective, because rivers often cross state boundaries, implicating interstate commerce. Federal legislation would be required.

It’s clear that across the West, water rights have become water wrongs. Water rights holders intentionally waste river water because of use-it-or-lose-it provisions in state statute. In the Colorado Basin, Upper Basin users have more water rights than they can use, while Lower Basin states go wanting. Irrigating hay and alfalfa for cattle – sometimes for export – trumps every other use, including municipal water used by local residents. Native fishes from the Colorado pikeminnow to the razorback sucker to the Lahontan cutthroat trout lose habitat and wind up under Endangered Species Act designations. Water policy shouldn’t be all about greed and maintaining a degraded status quo. It’s time for reform.

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