There is enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to pave a highway sixteen feet wide from San Francisco to New York City.
This concrete, more than six and a half million tons of it, is required to suppress the persistent flow of the Colorado River so that Phoenix and Las Vegas and Los Angeles can rise from the desert despite dust and dry air.
Consider, for a moment, the audacity of halting the Colorado River. Put aside concerns of environmental impact, seismic safety, and operational costs. Remember that the Colorado River has spent the past six million years carving 6,000 feet down into the Colorado Plateau, through Precambrian gneiss, Devonian fish graveyards, and the limestone traces of ancient shallow seas.
Nearly one hundred years ago, even knowing the river’s history, even having seen it churn with sediment every spring, we decided that we could plug the Colorado River and harness its flow to make the desert bloom. And somehow, before computers and geographic information systems and nuclear power, we did.
When archaeologists from some other planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude that our temples were dams. Imponderably massive, constructed with exquisite care, our dams will outlast anything else we have built...
- Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
I’m fascinated by dams.
They represent ingenious engineering and incredible investment. A dam is a flashpoint that sets alight the persistent rifts in American democratic cooperation - how we live on a planet riled by emissions, how we equitably reckon with scarcity, how we negotiate private ownership and public good. Embedded in dam operations are choices about who gets water, when, and why.
There are more than 84,000 dams in the United States. California alone has at least 1,400 large dams that control flood risk, provide hydropower, and ensure water supply. These three purposes are often at odds - achieving any one objective usually requires the sacrifice of another. The impacts of these dam operational trade-offs are far-reaching, affecting ecosystems, rural communities, urban metropolises, agricultural producers, and the atmosphere.
Most dams in the United States were constructed during the middle of the twentieth century based on historical precipitation records from the first half of the twentieth century. Those records are no longer relevant - climate change has made the past a poor predictor of the future. This challenge, referred to in technical circles as nonstationarity, means that the agreements and arrangements that water managers have long honored will no longer be possible. Instead, we’ll have to contend with:
More frequent extreme weather events (both droughts and storms)
More precipitation arriving as rain instead of snow
Earlier spring snowmelt
Increased flooding risks
Sea level rise and aquifer salination
Water quality degradation
It’s time to get creative in how we store, move, allocate, and consume water.
The rules and strategies we’ve used before won’t continue to be useful. Though this prognosis is easily read as dire, I see a silver lining. In re-imagining water management to contend with climate change, we have the opportunity to:
Ensure that “disadvantaged” communities - communities that are poor, rural, black, brown, queer, immigrant, unhoused, or otherwise relegated to the margins of society - have access to consistent, clean drinking water
Honor the environment as an essential contributor to human survival by leaving enough water in natural systems for flora and fauna to flourish
Accommodate variability and uncertainty with responsive management strategies
Revitalize institutional protection of the common good by embedding democratic ideals deeply within operational frameworks
Construct systems of treatment and reuse that bolster, not reduce, volumes of water available for human and natural uses
To seize these opportunities, we must first appreciate how the systems we have right now work, as well as where these systems came from in the first place. I’ll be exploring the history of water development and the current state of water management research and practice in this blog. But that’s only half the battle of meeting the challenges of climate change. The other half is much harder and perhaps more noble: we all must learn to share.