Ep. 951: Will The Colorado River Run Dry?

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Melanie Thornton about the water crisis on the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 3:30Steven Rinella?

  All right, everybody, we're joined today by our first ever hydrologist. I'm pretty sure that's true. You're definitely the first hydrologist to ever sit on that couch, but I think you're the first hydrologist to ever come near this show. Dr. Melanie Thornton, and she is the Senior Director of Western Water at TRCP. But what we're going to talk about is, um, if you're anything like, not you, I'm saying to the listeners, if the listeners are anything like me, they have spent their entire life reading headlines, if not the whole articles, about the plight of the Colorado River. Okay? That it's that

• 4:11Steven Rinella?

  the Colorado River is going dry, that the calamity is coming, or that like the Rio Grande, are you a Rio Grande or Rio Grand?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Rio Grande.

• 4:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay. That the Rio Grande doesn't even flow in some places. Like, it's sometimes you hear the Rio Grande is dirt. It's mud. It doesn't even flow out to the ocean. Right?

• 4:37Steven Rinella?

  I've been hearing this for so long, and I feel like now I'm hearing it more. And I'm just, I want to talk to you to understand what is up with these rivers? What is causing this? What is using all the water? What happens when the water runs out? Before we started the interview, you and I were discussing, um, we did some rough math. 10% of Americans draw their drinking water from a river that's some, from a watershed that's, that some people prophesize will like go away, or is going away. Okay? This is all just set up.

• 5:21Steven Rinella?

  I'd have to understand this better. So that's why you're here. You're here to explain this to us all. Like, why have we been hearing about this for so many decades? But I think my first actual question to you is, can you lay out sort of the scope of what we're talking about when you see things about the Colorado River watershed? Like, what is this? What states? How big is this? How does, how is this 10% of Americans' water?

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Sure. I think the Colorado River Basin is, it's a big river. And when I think, when most people, or if you're picturing, picturing the Colorado River for the first time, you think of it as just one river. But really, it's an interconnected system. It's big. There's lots of rivers, creeks, streams, tributaries, lakes, that, that eventually feed into the Colorado River. So the Colorado River starts in the Rocky Mountains in, in, in Colorado. It flows roughly 1,400 miles all the way through the desert southwest to historically, the Gulf of California. And when we're, when we're looking, when we're thinking about how big it is, you know, I'm a scientist, I'll talk a little bit about

• 6:27Speaker 03

  the numbers. It's roughly 246,000 square miles. What does that mean? I did some quick map before we got here, too. That's roughly, you take the size of Rhode Island, it's roughly 150 of them.

• 6:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a big basin.

• 6:41Steven Rinella?

  Rhode Island always gets like, Rhode Island's the handiest state.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  It's the smallest one.

• 6:46Steven Rinella?

  When, when it comes to making something seem big, you can always turn to Rhode Island.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Um, and so it's a river that flows through seven states. It starts in Colorado. You've got Wyoming, you've got Utah, New Mexico, and then it goes down through the desert southwest, through Arizona, Nevada, and California. It links 30 federally recognized tribes, and it doesn't just support drinking water for 40 million people throughout the basin. It provides water for our farms and our ranches. It provides water for our tribal communities. And of course, it provides water for fish and wildlife habitat.

• 7:20Steven Rinella?

  So what, what is happening? Or let me ask this. If you go back in time, because like I said, I feel like I've read this story for a, I'm a half century years old. I feel like I've read this story since I learned how to read, or some dire prediction on this. Can, can you go back in time to, when was the first time that someone, or some entity, something, put together like, if, if human populations do this, the river will do this? Right? And, and we will someday feel the effect of it. When was this, when did this become apparent to somebody?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  I mean, I think if we're traveling back in time, and I think it's helpful to sort of understand that the rules and the frameworks and the laws that govern the system were built around a time when people just thought the river was going to produce a lot more water than it does today.

• 8:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  And so the Colorado River, if, and we're, let's travel back 100 years. Okay. Let's look, we're, we're talking about the 1920s. The American West was expanding, right? You were starting to have cities get developed, agriculture was expanding, and the states, the seven states in the Colorado River were like, wait a minute, wait a minute, how are we going to figure out how to share this river? We need to figure out a game plan. And so in, in 1922 is a, is a key year in the Colorado River, because that's when representatives from the seven states, they all gathered at Bishop's Lodge outside of Santa Fe, and they negotiated to try to figure out, how are we going to share this river among our seven states? And eventually, what came out of that was the Colorado River Compact. And

• 9:01Speaker 03

  then you, you let's speed back up into time now, you know, Congress has weighed in, Congress has passed laws related to the Colorado River. Dams and reservoirs have been built, the courts weighed in, tribal communities are, you know, are negotiating their water rights with the federal government. And so all of that layered on together is what folks call the law of the river. I don't know if you, if you've heard about that term or seen that term.

• 9:24Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm not familiar.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  And so that's sort of what governs the river. But then you fast forward to, I mean, even let's, let's take a look in, in the late 2000s. Um, hydrology and, and the, and snowpack and flows in the river was starting to change. It was starting to get, you know, we were starting to see, you know, sort of early onset of drought. You know, our, our big lakes, our Lake Mead and Lake Powell is the two major lakes on the river that store water, that states and, and folks can use during dry years. Those, those lake levels were starting to decline, and the states were like, wait a minute, we are, there's less water in the river, and we're using more. And there's, fundamentally, at the end of the day, there's a mismatch between how much water people use and how much water the river provides.

• 10:08Steven Rinella?

  So the water is like, besides there's more and more use on, on the water, the amount of water has like objectively declined.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 10:20Steven Rinella?

  There's less going into the system.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Correct. I mean, I, I mean, I'll ask you, what do you see out in the field? Thinner snowpacks? What is, what, what happens when, like, when there's warmer temperatures, that changes how water on the landscape?

• 10:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, um, here, outside of the Colorado River watershed, last year, I went and got my snowmobiles all ready to go, and, um, never started them last winter. I'm particular about where I go. Like, there's a certain type of thing I'm trying to do, and it's like more low elevation. Never ran my snowmobiles.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Why?

• 10:57Steven Rinella?

  Well, there's no snow. It was, it was, it was a non-snow year. Yeah. A dirt trap for coyotes till through February, open ground, bare ground.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think people, I mean, if you spend any time outdoors, whether you hunt or fish, or you recreate, you're, you probably notice these things. No snow, thinner snow.

• 11:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Rivers are peaking at a different times.

• 11:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So when these, when these folks got together in the 20s, and they

• 11:30Steven Rinella?

  And they came up this, this water pact. Tell me about a couple of the, the foundational principles that they're drawing on because and, and within that answer, a thing I'm curious about is

• 11:43Steven Rinella?

  you'd look and it'd be like, you mentioned Wyoming, right? So the people at the headwaters.

• 11:48Steven Rinella?

  I know just in general water law and water rules, it can't be that the, the farthest up person says, I'm just going to take it all and I'm going to build a giant dam at my state line and I'm going to take all the water and all the waters for me.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:02Steven Rinella?

  Because I'm here and it's mine. Um, even in the twenties, they must've had things sorted out where that, that wasn't permissible somehow. Right? You couldn't like, you couldn't hoard water.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Correct. So I think, and I'm not a water lawyer, I'm a scientist, but I've spent the last decade in DC around water policy. So I know, I know enough to be dangerous. In the West, water law is, is prior appropriation. If you were there first, you were senior on the system. And so at a really, you know, indigenous communities were there first.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  But if you're looking at the states from a state perspective, California has some of the, California and Southern Arizona have some of the most senior claims on the river. And I think what the compact did and what they tried to do at the time was try to figure out, how can we equitably share the river? And so they split up that basically in the negotiations, they split up the river. You have the upper basins, you've got the headwater states, the Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, um, and Colorado. And then you've got the lower basin states, Arizona, Nevada and California. And they split it up based on acre feet. And

• 13:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So not percentage.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Well, there's a nuance there, but just really at a really high level, there's seven and a half million acre feet that the upper basin got and seven and a half million acre feet, the lower basin got. And of course there's Mexico, there's they, they, they in, in the framework, we negotiated a treaty with Mexico and there's 1.5 million acre feet for

• 13:30Steven Rinella?

  An acre fee is?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  An acre fee is, you know, you think about this as two to three households of water use a year or take a football field, pile it high with water of about a foot deep. That's an acre foot.

• 13:43Steven Rinella?

  All right. So a football field covered in 12 inches of water

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 13:46Steven Rinella?

  is about what two households will use in a year?

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Roughly.

• 13:50Steven Rinella?

  God, seems like a lot, man.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  It's a lot of water.

• 13:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  And at the time, and you know, I think it's important, you know, at least me as a scientist, there's a, there's a book called Science Be Damned. It's written by Eric Coon and John Fleck. And what they did was they lifted the hood when, in terms of what data and what numbers were these negotiators using back in the twenties?

• 14:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  And there are some discrepancies between, do you use a, a longer period of data? That shows like over a longer period of time, the averages, or are you going to, or should we, you know, use a shorter period of, of wet data where it looks like the river

• 14:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  or the river is a little bit, provides more water than it does. And I think anyone who's having to make a tough decision, especially around water, it's so much easier to split a bigger pie than it is a smaller one. And so at the time, there was politics involved and ultimately the, the folks that were negotiating that decided to use a period of, of wetter data. And so they split the river. I mean, we're talking averages here.

• 14:51Steven Rinella?

  Do you think it was intentional?

• 14:52Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's easier. I don't think it was intentional, but that was the number all the seven states agreed to. Let's take 15 or 15, we'll split it in half. But now if you look at, at how much water is on the Colorado River now, where it's closer to that 12, 13 million acre foot number. And so it's, it's less.

• 15:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Got it. You know what's, what's kind of funny about, this is the thing I think about often, I think about water availability is, um,

• 15:22Steven Rinella?

  human memories are so short that when, when I was kind of in high school, early college age,

• 15:32Steven Rinella?

  even before that, we would hunt, we would trap muskrats a lot and hunt a lot of ducks in standing dead timber, which was all over the place. I mean, tree, you know, 10 inch, 12 inch trees, stone dead in marshes. And it never, like, it just did not occur to me all that time to think, wait a minute, this must've been dry

• 16:01Steven Rinella?

  for all the years it took for these trees to grow. And I just assumed that I was living, as everyone does, that I was living during normal times.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:11Steven Rinella?

  Right? And we were shooting wood ducks and mallards out and, and just dead timber all over the place, all over. And now that stuff is the woods or grass. And that water's not there.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:26Steven Rinella?

  You know what I mean? But in my head, it was just like, that's what life is like, you know?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  How was your experience?

• 16:31Steven Rinella?

  Even when you're leaning against the evidence that that's not normal, this tree grew here, you know?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  I think that's the big question is what's normal?

• 16:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah. So I could see at that time, trying to like, at that time, trying to figure out how much water you got.

• 16:47Steven Rinella?

  Unless, unless it was just settled as a percentage, but they're talking about real numbers.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there's some nuance with the upper basin and percentages, but for the most part, at a really high level, it splits up the basins into two.

• 16:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So explain how you, since, since the twenties or whatever, explain like, how has use increased so much? Is it just a function of there's more people or, or like, who's using up the water?

• 17:10Speaker 03

  So I think, you know, when

• 17:15Speaker 03

  we have to talk a little bit about the lakes, right? The Lake Mead and, and, and Lake Powell.

• 17:19Steven Rinella?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Those are the two big storage reservoirs on the Colorado River system. And they were designed to store water and basically to store water during wet years to be used during dry years.

• 17:32Steven Rinella?

  To store for how long potentially?

• 17:34Speaker 03

  I mean, they're there to store the water until, until we need it. And so those, those reservoirs, we could go back to the acre foot example, if they're, if they're full, they can store 50 million acre feet of water combined.

• 17:47Steven Rinella?

  Oh, wow.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Today, those reservoirs, and I'm sure you've probably seen the pictures of the bathtub rings at, at, you know, Hoover.

• 17:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And like dead dudes coming out of there.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, there's been some of those stories too.

• 17:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You don't believe those stories?

• 18:00Speaker 03

  I mean, but I mean, there, your, people are discovering things at, at much lower levels in the lake. And so I think today they're roughly 20, 25% at capacity. They're really low.

• 18:11Steven Rinella?

  They're at what capacity?

• 18:12Speaker 03

  20 to 25% capacity.

• 18:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Depending on the, depending on the lake. And so I think over time, again, back to my, back to, we have a mismatch between supply and demand, how much people are using versus how much water is available.

• 18:26Steven Rinella?

  Is that shrinkage because there, is that shrinkage? So tell me again, how many acre feet they hold?

• 18:32Speaker 03

  50 million.

• 18:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:36Steven Rinella?

  And, and they're at 20% capacity now. So they're shrinking. But that's not them shrinking because people are sucking it out. It's, they're shrinking because it's not falling as snow and rain.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Correct. It's both. It's both.

• 18:49Steven Rinella?

  It is both. Okay. Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  It's the use plus coupled with the, the changes in our snow and our river flows.

• 18:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  And so I think if you just take the pie and we'll talk really high level, right? And think about who's using the water. You know, ag uses about 70, 80%. That's used to grow food production in our country. If you, if you look at your dinner plate in the middle of the winter and you, whether it's broccoli, cauliflower, your leafy greens, your lettuces, your spinach, there's a, there's a good chance that was grown using Colorado River water in places like Yuma, Arizona, or California's Imperial Valley.

• 19:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Cities also use the water, you know, roughly 10, 10, 10 ish percent. We talked about this earlier, 40 million people drinking water is, is from the Colorado River. And that's, and that supports cities in Albuquerque, in Denver, in Phoenix, Las Vegas, in Los Angeles. And there's, you know, some cities are doing a really good job about trying to how we could stretch our very limited water supplies. Las Vegas is a great example. And if you just take their indoor water use, the water that people use in their homes, Las Vegas recycles about 99% of it.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  They, they've made those investments in water recycling and reuse technologies because it's, it's a city in the middle of the desert. And they are grappling with, how can we make our water go further? But it's not just ag and cities. You've got industries that are, that rely on the water. Businesses, towns, you know, scattered throughout the West as well as fish and wildlife habitat. I mean, I think, and for your listeners, Steve, when I think about water and how does that, what does that mean to the, to hunters and anglers? Water is habitat at gigantic scale.

• 20:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  And so, you know, that's an, also a very important component of, of who relies and depends on this river. Whether it, whether it's, you know, are we talking about migration corridors for elk and mule deer? You know, trout, we've got cutthroat trout in the headwaters. Water is the thread that connects all of it.

• 20:57Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. When with a agricultural increase,

• 21:04Steven Rinella?

  or agricultural production, are there people that draw from the Colorado River basin? Are there cities that aren't in that basin where you're, where, where that water is piped over to somebody else?

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 21:19Steven Rinella?

  How, how did it ever be that they get? How do they have a chance at that water?

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Sure. I mean, I'll take, I'll take, we'll talk about Colorado, New Mexico and New Mexico because of my, my experience. And, and, and New Mexico, their Colorado River use is actually, there's a 26 mile pipe that moves water from the Colorado River basin to the Rio Grande basin. And that supports drinking water for Santa Fe and New Mexico. In Colorado, there's a trans mountain, the big Thompson project is a trans mountain water pipeline that goes underneath the mountains that moves water from the Colorado River to support cities on the front range, Denver.

• 22:01Steven Rinella?

  But how, like, what is their argument to have it?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  That the state hasn't, the state has a water right.

• 22:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I see. Because, because some portion of the state touches the watershed. They have the right and they can opt, the state can opt to pipe it out of the watershed.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 22:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Did you ever see that, um,

• 22:22Steven Rinella?

  are you familiar with, uh, you know, John Wesley Powell?

• 22:25Speaker 03

  I am.

• 22:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's like lost his arm in the civil war and kind of did the, you know, map the Grand Canyon, had all kinds of crazy adventures doing that. Have you ever seen those maps he made where he had this proposal? And I don't know if he conceptualized it or if he just popularized the concept. He thought we drew the state lines all wrong.

• 22:50Steven Rinella?

  Powell said the, the Western states, and I've seen maps that apply this concept all throughout the country. Powell said the Western states should follow water shed lines. So if you imagine like, if you're looking at a map of, you know, a lot of these states are square.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 23:08Steven Rinella?

  Right? You look at like Wyoming, Colorado, three of my portions of Montana's border. You get these like geometric shapes, right? But then if you imagine Montana's Western border, which is a jaggedy ass line running all crooked across the map.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  It's a river.

• 23:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's a drainage. It's a drainage divide. And Powell came up with the idea that, that all the borders would look like very jaggedy, crooked, meandering lines, because they should all follow watersheds. And that, that way a state would sort of be more, you know, beholden to its environment. Right? Rather than doing like what you're talking about and moving water over mountains.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  I mean, as a hydrologist, I sure think it would be a lot easier to manage water at a watershed level. I mean, even thinking about fish and wildlife and, and our, our state wildlife management agencies, the amount of coordination that's required among states. I mean, fish and wildlife don't know a state line.

• 24:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Right? And, but we still have to figure out ways that we can make investments in their habitat to ensure that they're there.

• 24:23Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm. When, so with these states having the right to move that stuff over mountains,

• 24:30Steven Rinella?

  that's because they're like, they're chunk. And then when it comes to the, the, the disputes between states,

• 24:41Steven Rinella?

  who is the currently, who is the governing, what is the governing body for disputes? Not so much within, I'm sure there's fighting within Colorado about who's getting what water, but who currently

• 24:55Steven Rinella?

  makes the rule for who draws what water out of the river?

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Sure. I think his, just backing up really quickly, I think historically there are every state governor appoints a water commissioner to represent their states to negotiate on behalf of their state. And historically, the seven basin states have always come to an agreement about how we're going to manage, how we're going to manage the system. And that, that happened in 2007. They, the states negotiated what was called interim guidelines, basically because they were seeing the conditions on, on the ground change.

• 25:26Steven Rinella?

  In 2007?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's when the guidelines were finalized. And so, and so basically what happened is they were like, okay, there's less water. How are we gonna, we need some, some rules and we need to have some certainty around if the lake level is at X elevation, this is how much water we're gonna, we're gonna see in a cut for our state. So that was, but those guidelines were temporary. They were, it was a 20 year framework and it was supposed to just buy time for the states to figure out sort of like, what's going to be our long-term game plan? Like, how are we going to be able to use within the means of this river?

• 25:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  And, and so we're here in, in 2026, those guidelines have since expired. But the federal government, the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation, they have, they own and, and have a responsibility of operating the dams at Lake Mead and Lake Powell. So Lake Powell, that dam, that's the lake behind Glen, Glen Canyon Dam. And Lake Mead is, is the lake behind Hoover Dam. And so today, the seven states are, don't have a deal about what's going to happen in the future. They're still at the table negotiating about how, how we're gonna use less water, fundamentally. And so the federal government earlier this year, because they still have to operate these dams, they'd sort of develop a framework to say, hey, let's buy some time.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  We still have to operate these systems and we want to be able to give states some more time to figure out, to make the really tough decisions. Cause it's, it's hard. I think at the end of the day, everybody, all seven states are gonna have to have, are gonna have to have shared sacrifice and, and they're gonna have to compromise. It's not gonna be, everybody's gonna be happy. I think ultimately to get to that deal, people are, are gonna be unhappy because it's hard to cut, you know, to reduce your water use for when you've been relying on that at a higher, at a higher volume over, over decades.

• 27:18Steven Rinella?

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• 28:03Steven Rinella?

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• 28:47Steven Rinella?

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• 29:31Steven Rinella?

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• 30:16Steven Rinella?

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• 30:37Steven Rinella?

  If you go back to the twenties, were they,

• 30:41Steven Rinella?

  was there excess water? Like, what was the point when there sort of was no longer excess water?

• 30:48Speaker 03

  You know, I don't know the answer to that question. You know, I'd have to go back and look at what were the flows and the lake levels doing versus how much water was being used. But I mean, just from 1920s to now, our water use looks different. Our cities are bigger. They're certainly using more water. Ag at the time, I, I'm going to guess they were using less water in the 1920s than they're using today. And so there's a lot that has changed. And so even though you have what, what we call paper water rights, like you're entitled to that 7.5 million acre foot figure. Ultimately, you know, we have to do the hard thing and look at the data and look at what the river is providing today.

• 31:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  And, and make some tough decisions and it's, it's, it's not painless.

• 31:31Steven Rinella?

  Who is the, within the, the seven state, we could talk about the seven states and, and there's like tribal influence. Who is the voice of wildlife? Like who's the voice of fish and wildlife at a meeting about who gets water and what we do with the water?

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Sure. I think you said it well. Fish and wildlife don't have, don't have a seat at the table unless somebody brings them there. And so that's why organizations like TRCP, that were the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership,

• 32:06Speaker 03

  bring the impacts to fish and wildlife to the table. And I think if, if, and we're thinking about, you know, because, and I think, and I do think about this, right? We're humans, we're people. Everyone seems to be centered and centered around what's going to happen to our farms or ranches, water use, what's going to happen to our cities, what's going to happen to our travel communities. But you know, TRCP does a really good job about ensuring that hunters and anglers have a seat at the table and the decisions that impact fish and wildlife, fish and wildlife habitat or access to be able to hunt and fish are part of that conversation. And, and

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what that's what I'll say there.

• 32:46Steven Rinella?

  But but why would they, why does anyone have to listen to that consideration? Cause I'm guessing if you go back to nineteen twenties, there was no wildlife person in the room.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Probably not. I don't know.

• 32:56Steven Rinella?

  And at some point, someone had to inject like inject that into the question. Like, what about ducks? What about fish?

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:04Steven Rinella?

  Why would anybody need to listen to them?

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Sure. I mean, I think the the federal governments in the states are managing lots of different competing uses on the river. And so there's some of that there. That's why, you know, I think conservation and sporting organizations are, you know, make a difference because they do bring those issues to the decision makers.

• 33:25Steven Rinella?

  But they have to bring them in at a state level.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  State and federal level.

• 33:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  You know, and I think, you know, because I think and oftentimes there's such a big focus on all the built infrastructure. Right. But having a functioning river, you can't, you know, if if we don't make investments in our forest health in the headwaters, we do those restoration projects, those habitat improvement projects. And there's, you know, a lot of our partners, whether it's trout unlimited, um, up in the Price River in Utah, or or the nature conservancy in the headwaters of Colorado, or making those wetland restoration investments to ensure that water will, you know, hang out on the landscape longer, slow the flow of the river. So when we do have big snow years, it's not just melting off quick and and and moving it all the way down, right? Like functioning rivers, that we've got to have functioning rivers.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  That's got to be coupled with all of our built infrastructure.

• 34:21Steven Rinella?

  When when a state sits in in, when the different states come together and they start doing what you were saying about making, like they're going to have to make sacrifices or make compromises. What are the levers that that a state?

• 34:36Steven Rinella?

  What levers do they pull? When they decide they're going to reduce water usage?

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Sure. So I think a lot, every state's different because every state, every state has different water rights and how they sort of, how their state engineer manages that. And so some of it, some of it is voluntary, uh, water conservation. You know, some of it's compensated, you know, there is an infusion of federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, Bureau of Reclamation sort of infused funds to figure out how can we temporarily pay people to use less water? Most of that happened on farms.

• 35:10Steven Rinella?

  Explain that to me. How do you pay someone to use less water? What do you mean?

• 35:13Speaker 03

  So the Bureau of Reclamation would negotiate with irrigation districts or with farmers to say, hey, we're, we're going to compensate you to whether they, and and and they would, it's, it's a volun, it's, it wasn't being forced. You know, I think that's, that's the key piece here. It's voluntary, um, you know, and there, there, California made a lot of, you know, California was a key player here, right? They use a lot of water in the Imperial Valley and they entered into agreements with Bureau of Reclamation to use less water. They said, you know, we're not going to take our full allocation, our full delivery on the river. We want that to stay in Lake Mead, um, the reservoir there to store their water. Um, so that, those are temporary measures. Those are sort of in my mind, Band-Aid fixes, you know, to sort of figure out.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Because it's an adjustment, you know, I think communities are facing that real reality of like, how am I going to be continuing to farm and ranch like I have historically done?

• 36:07Steven Rinella?

  But but, may I not put my question right? Let's say you're, let's say you're an agricultural producer in Imperial Valley in California.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 36:15Steven Rinella?

  And you're, you're managing that whatever thousands of acres of, of like food crops. And you historically had access to enough water to do whatever, whatever acreage, whatever crop cycles you wanted to do. And all of a sudden now it's like, there's not as much snow, rain is falling in different patterns. There's not as much water.

• 36:42Steven Rinella?

  I could see that someone, on one hand, I could see that someone from the government goes to them and says, like, tough titty. There's just not as much water, right? But you're talking about compensating them like, like, what is the argument? What is the compensation argument? You're, you're, you're saying to them, you can't have as much water. So here's money to make up for the money you would have made selling produce? Like, like in what form does it come?

• 37:08Speaker 03

  It, it's complicated and I don't have, I don't necessarily have a good answer for you. So, so part of it, so we just look at the lower basin, the states between California, Arizona and and Nevada. Lake Mead is that reservoir there at the Nevada Arizona border.

• 37:21Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  And so the, the Bureau of Reclamation is looking at lake levels. I think all water users are looking at lake levels. And then there's a decision made and oftentimes the three states will sort of agree, like, how much water is going to get released? And then the Bureau of Reclamation will release it. And so that stuff happens in real time. And, and I think the, the complicated factor here is that the water rights, what you have on paper, like, how do you rectify the difference about like what you're entitled to versus like what's actually the difference?

• 37:50Steven Rinella?

  For sure.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Versus what's actually in the river. And so I think in, in their, in the twenty twenty-two, twenty twenty-three timeframe, there is a, a real, you know, sort of crisis on the river where we, where at least, you know, in the lower basin, there is hard conversations about, we just don't have enough water that we traditionally did. And so let's, can we figure out about like how much, you know, what is Arizona's water reduction going to look like? What's California's water reduction going to look like? What's Nevada's water reduction going to look like? And those three states came to an agreement to, to, to share that shortage. And so it's, it's ultimately, we come back to this collaboration piece, like we're, the hard decisions are made by working together. So that there's, and so, and a lot of that too will depend on, and it's complicated.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  And I'm, you know, I'm not an expert on all of the nuance here, but so at the state level, they'll sort of make those decisions. And then that will have real impacts on, on the farm. And I think farmers will have to make decisions based on sort of what their allocation is going to look like that year.

• 38:46Steven Rinella?

  What, can you remind me what percentage of the water coming out of the river is being used for agriculture?

• 38:51Speaker 03

  About seventy, eighty percent.

• 38:53Steven Rinella?

  And can you remind me the other pieces of the pie?

• 38:56Speaker 03

  I mean, the city's about ten percent. And then, of course, you've got to factor in evaporation and system loss, just, you know, rivers are leaky.

• 39:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So the fact that there's evaporation and the fact that rivers are leaky is no one's going to do anything about that. You're not going to put like Saran Wrap over Lake Mead or something, you know what I mean? So how is the, like, I'm familiar with this conversation. When I, really, when I set up, like, I've, I've always read articles and headlines about this issue. I'm familiar with it being addressed as an urban problem.

• 39:33Steven Rinella?

  And I feel like, and I want to talk about Las Vegas, the recycling program. But I'm more accustomed with it being that more and more people want to move to these places. These places are exploding in population. There's all these new cities. But in hearing from you, I feel like I've been slightly misled.

• 39:52Steven Rinella?

  Because how is it not just more like, why is it not more, it more strictly a conversation about agriculture?

• 40:00Speaker 03

  It's part of it.

• 40:01Steven Rinella?

  But it, but it's all the part, I mean, but it's seventy percent or did you say eighty or seventy?

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Seventy, eighty.

• 40:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Like, it's an ag thing. And I'm not even blaming eggs. I get like, we have to eat, like, I'm a big, like, I'm a, just generally a big farm ranch supporter, cows not condos kind of guy. I look at farmland as wildlife habitat. I look at ranchland as wildlife habitat. Love to see it. Like, I want that community to thrive. But, not but, and, um, it just feels to me like that, that talking about human population is kind of a, almost a distraction.

• 40:46Steven Rinella?

  I mean, am I wrong?

• 40:47Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't think so, but I think, I think one of the major misconceptions of Western water is these dichotomies, right? It's fish versus farm. It's urban versus rural.

• 40:58Steven Rinella?

  That's how I view the whole world. Everything is versus everything.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Ag versus conservation. But I think really, when we're looking at trying to figure out how we're going to manage our system and live within our means and try to figure out what those solutions are, um, we know, we, we, we have some of those tools. And we know that partnerships, partnering with our farmers and ranchers is better than going around them.

• 41:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Right? We've got to figure out tools and solutions that work for everybody. We know that voluntary conservation works. We know that modernizing irrigation infrastructure works. And I'm talking about, there's a lot of, um, and if you're looking out west on, on, and from an irrigation perspective, a lot of these canals are, are, are earthing canals. They're not lined. And so, right, they're leaky. And so like, where, you know, where does it make sense to make those investments? To line the canals to be more efficient? Where does it make sense to put a, put a automation on a gate? So that you're, when you're opening that gate, to be more precise about actually delivering the amount of water that needs to be?

• 41:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, instead of running that sucker all summer.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  Right. And, and, you know, and I, I think one of the things that surprised me and, you know, I, I recently just over the spring went on a tour of, of, of various locations in the lower Colorado River. And I think what's surprising to me is I think there's this misconception that, um, every, everything is modernized and automated. And it's just not. It's expensive.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  And it, it takes time and investment to, you know, whether it's to get a grant from the federal government to help, to help modernize and improve irrigation efficiency.

• 42:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  Um, it's trying to figure out, you know, can we be creative about conservation organizations, working with farmers and ranchers? Like, can they make small adjustments on farm that can have a water efficiency benefit, but also efficient wildlife habitat benefit? There's lots of tools in our toolbox. It's just the challenge is doing them over the long term and at scale and in a meaningful way. And some of this stuff is, comes down to cost.

• 42:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  It's expensive.

• 42:57Steven Rinella?

  I want to talk about that, but I realize I'm, I want to back up for a minute on like very basic hydrology.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 43:03Steven Rinella?

  Because I was having this argument with my kid. I explained to you earlier when we were talking, I had this argument with my sixteen year old the other day.

• 43:11Steven Rinella?

  Maybe I was wrong. I was telling him, water is, like, like basically, water isn't created or destroyed.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 43:21Steven Rinella?

  It's like, there's a finite set amount of water on planet Earth. It could be in clouds. It could be in the ocean.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Could be in glaciers.

• 43:31Steven Rinella?

  It could be in glaciers, aquifers, but there's like, there's an amount of water and it's just there.

• 43:37Steven Rinella?

  So when we talk, can, can you explain when, like, at a very basic level, and you can stick it to the Colorado River as much as possible? When we, even the fact that we're saying using water?

• 43:50Steven Rinella?

  Since you're not, you're not, since you're not using it up, what do we mean? What do, like, I, I kinda know what I mean, but I've never articulated it. What, like, what do I mean when I say you're using the water?

• 44:01Speaker 03

  So I think for people, that's water coming out of your tap, drinking it, using it to wash dishes, using it to water your lawn.

• 44:09Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Uh, for farmers, that's, um, that is, you know, oftentimes you have diversion off of a river that then will put water into a canal, but then they will use to water crops to grow food for our country, or the, or to grow hay and alfalfa to feed our livestock. And, and you know this better than I do, I fish in wild life habitat, like, how do they use water? They need water to survive.

• 44:35Steven Rinella?

  Sure, but what, but, but, what is happening to it within, like, if you imagine within the base, like, I, I imagine if I'm where I live, my, uh, there, there's a creek, Bridger Creek would be my most immediate drainage, okay? If, if I'm running my faucet, you know, I'm, my water's not pulled from there, but well, also, we have a well, so if I'm running my faucet,

• 45:01Steven Rinella?

  and you'd say, like, I'd yell at my kids, like, you're wasting the water.

• 45:05Steven Rinella?

  How is the water, how is it not just that you're just diverting the water?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  I mean, you are diverting some of it, and I think a lot, it, there's a lot of variation in cities, right? We talked about Las Vegas, basically, all the water that goes into your drain, after you shower, it, you know, goes into pipes that go to treatment facilities that treat, that recycle and treat that water, that can then go back into the pipes and back to your home.

• 45:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Right? They are, they're a system that's very efficient, but there are other towns and communities that, that don't have, that don't have, that don't use that technology.

• 45:34Steven Rinella?

  And so walk me through where the, what, like, the, where the used water is going.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  So some of it gets discharged back into, to rivers.

• 45:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so it's raising the river back up?

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Sure, and some of it, I mean, there's, there's examples where, depending on it, and a lot of it's, there's complication, there's nuance here, could be used to recharge groundwater, they might apply some of that water in targeted ways to recharge groundwater.

• 45:56Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Everyone's water use is different, right? Not everybody's, is, water that comes out of their tap comes from a river, some of it comes from the ground.

• 46:04Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  And so there's very, there's a lot of variation there, and I think it really depends on where you live.

• 46:09Steven Rinella?

  I wanna bring up an extreme form of, of, of diversion.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:13Steven Rinella?

  It would be like, like, you know, you always, do you have little kids?

• 46:16Speaker 03

  I have, I have two kids, yes.

• 46:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay, big part of having kids is yelling at them about playing with the garden hose.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  We're just entering that era, my kids are young.

• 46:23Steven Rinella?

  Standing there for hours on end, just running the garden hose. We always laugh, cause we have a shack in Alaska, and we just pump water out of our, there's a creek that flows out under the corner of our shack, it's on pilings, right? We pump water, we draw water out of the creek, and basically you just watch it flow back into the creek.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 46:45Steven Rinella?

  Right? So it's the one place where kids can go and just stand there eight hours a day.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  And you'll hold guilty.

• 46:52Steven Rinella?

  Playing, playing with a hose, and you can't, you realize, they're, they're not wa, it's, it's, you can literally watch it flow back into the creek.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:01Steven Rinella?

  So it's, it's, the water is detained for a minute. It's diverted, but it's not gone. So on a very, like, what I'm trying to get at, is that on a very basic hydrology level.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 47:14Steven Rinella?

  How, how is, how is ag, like, how is ag using the water in a way that we talk about it as though it's gone?

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 47:23Steven Rinella?

  Because they're, because from that point on, it's not accessible?

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:27Steven Rinella?

  Is, is that the issue?

• 47:28Speaker 03

  In some ways too, right? I mean, I think you think about runoff from, from the water running off of a field.

• 47:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Right? And so depending on where you are, some of, some of that's captured and then reused, right? It can come all the way down a system. Some of it, the water quality might not be good to grow crops in, you know, cause nutrients and fertilizers are applied on farm, depending on the crop that they're growing.

• 47:47Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  And so it depends, some of that is just, is water that might, the, the water quality piece is, is a component.

• 47:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  And so I think as rain falls to snow in our mountains, right, and that, that snow ma, that snow melt, that snow melts, it filters into the ground, and eventually might, it eventually goes into a river until it flows down. There's, you know, diversions off the river, there's the lakes that store the water, and then they release the water that could be used to sort of move that water to cities or to, to, uh, farms. There's pipes that move that water across mountains to cities like Denver.

• 48:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  And cities, city, like, in New Mexico. And so it, it depends, and I'm not an expert on it in terms of, like, where does all the water go after it gets applied on farm?

• 48:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  That's not my area of expertise.

• 48:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but it somehow winds up back in the system somewhere.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  It can.

• 48:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:38Steven Rinella?

  Can you, can you touch on, uh, then we discussed earlier, that, that, to jump over to a different system, that at times the Rio Grande is just not flowing?

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 48:50Steven Rinella?

  When did that, when did that begin to happen?

• 48:52Speaker 03

  So I think it's important to know for the Rio Grande, the Rio Grande is just, has, the baseline is getting drier. And again, similar to the Colorado River, there's.

• 49:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, uh, outside of use.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  Outside of use, yeah, I mean, use coupled with the baseline getting drier, and so you just have a lot less water to start with. And so, I mean, I, I, you know, I pulled data from the US Geological Stream Gauges at, you know, on the Rio and, and Albuquerque and New Mexico, and I wanna say it was eighty plus days of just no flow this summer.

• 49:26Steven Rinella?

  This summer?

• 49:27Speaker 03

  This summer.

• 49:27Steven Rinella?

  Eighty days where if you look up the flow, it's zero.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Zero, it's dry. And there is a, a late September.

• 49:33Steven Rinella?

  Zero CFS.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  Zero CFS. There is a, a monsoon in September.

• 49:37Steven Rinella?

  Does it really just say that? It just says zero, or whatever?

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like.

• 49:42Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Um, and so, I mean, that's the reality, I mean, that's, that's what's happening today. And so, you know, that has real impacts on people that rely on that river.

• 49:52Steven Rinella?

  Farming with that water, even if no one was farming with that water, that water would be, it would just would be, maybe it's just not, like, that reality would be fixed. Just because, like, like, not even, that's not even entirely, that river's not even entirely a victim of human use, it's a victim of climate.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  It's both, both.

• 50:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Steven Rinella?

  So even out, like, like, outside of agriculture, that was, could potentially still be happening.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if I had a crystal ball, I'd love to know the answer to that, but I mean, a lot, it's, it's over, it's water use coupled with drier conditions, just period.

• 50:29Steven Rinella?

  So are there people, on that Rio Grande question, remember we were talking about that you have this paper, you have this legal document that says, like, hey, I'm entitled to blank water?

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:40Steven Rinella?

  Right? You're, you have a water right. And

• 50:46Steven Rinella?

  this is illegally, has traditionally been illegally binding document.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:51Steven Rinella?

  But then you get new situation where it's like, buddy, the water's just not there, like, I don't know what to tell you. It's, it's not that I'm keeping it from you, it's just that it's not there, right? So if you have a water right, let's say you're below where the Rio Grande is zero CFS, and you have a water right, do you have a complaint? I mean, you have a complaint, but do you, do you, I mean, like, wha, what comes of you, or, or do you go talk to the person upriver and say, hey, you need to let more through, because I'm not able to draw what I'm legally?

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Entitled to.

• 51:24Steven Rinella?

  Entitled to.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's com, it's complicated, I'm not a lawyer, but, but, but these decisions are sort of later, the, the compacts, like, the Rio Grande also has a compact too, it's a compact between New Mexico, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas that sort of governs how much Colorado is on the hook to deliver to New Mexico, how much New Mexico is on the hook to deliver to Texas. And there's some flexibility in there about what's gonna happen during shortages, but, but, but still, ultimately, folks have to figure out how to use less water. And so, and, and I'll say on, on litigation, I think litigation is costly.

• 51:59Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  And doesn't always necessarily land the solution that works for communities.

• 52:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  I think ultimately, it's getting all those water users at the table to figure out, you know, there's, factoring in water rights, cause there, that's, that's a real legal framework, but that, but that legal framework isn't gonna produce water.

• 52:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  You know? And so they have to, these are hard conversations that are happening in the Rio, that are happening in the Colorado River Basin, and across other west, western rivers, and I think, in my mind, the best solutions are actually done locally. How can we look at our rivers and bring people together, our conservation organizations, our tribes, our local and, uh, state decision makers, our water users, our farms and ranches? How can we all come up with a, with a plan to figure out how, how we can use our water? And one example, you know, and, and I got exposed to this when I was, um, at Washington State University, my PhD advisor was working on a project in the Akama River Basin, this

• 52:58Speaker 03

  is in the state of Washington, it's the center of the state, and they were having a challenge with their, with water supply. And I think ultimately, the water users sort of had a, had a reckoning, they were like, okay, we need to figure out a game plan, what's our long-term game plan to figure out our water supply? It was tribes, it was, it was local and state decision makers, it was the farmers and ranchers in that region, um, and it was conservation organizations, and they developed a long-term strategy about what investments needed to be made on, you know, upgrading, aging infrastructure, the irrigation, modernizing irrigation infrastructure, what investments need to be made in the headwaters to ensure there's, there's, uh, water for trout? And how can we ensure that tribes can effectively use their water?

• 53:41Speaker 03

  I think there's a, there's a, sort of an, uh, you know, for tribes, they were there first, and they are truly the most senior in the system.

• 53:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  And they might have, they might have an entitlement to that water, but can they benefit from it? Do they actually have the funding and infrastructure needed to, to use that water in their homes or in their communities?

• 53:59Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  And so they came up with what's called the Akama Basin Integrated Plan, and, you know, they, the, the, all those water users together, and they're working, you know, project by project, they're working on trying to get funding to support it, and to figure out, you know, how are we gonna make investments in the forest, how can we line canals to improve irrigation efficiency, and so those, those are real success stories.

• 54:19Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Because it starts local.

• 54:22Steven Rinella?

  What would it, i- if you go to, if you go to the Colorado in the Rio Grande?

• 54:29Steven Rinella?

  Before we get into like, before we get into reality about how this problem will get remedied or stop being so severe, before we go to reality, let's play like fantasy for a minute.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 54:42Steven Rinella?

  What would it?

• 54:45Steven Rinella?

  I guess the question, is it out of the question that just weather is going to save us? Meaning like rain and snow?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:52Steven Rinella?

  It just like rain and snow ain't coming to the rescue.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  I think that's-

• 54:56Steven Rinella?

  Like it sure doesn't seem like that.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  I, I think that's right. And I sort of goes back to like my question is what's our new normal? You know, I think, you know, if you spend time outdoors, you're looking at the landscape and even if you spend time looking at data like I do, um, you're looking at our snow is not as thick as it used to be.

• 55:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Our drier soils are sucking that water up and they aren't making it to the rivers and lakes like they used to be.

• 55:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  And so I don't think that, you know, you know, we can pray for rain, but I think we have to have that realistic conversation about living within our means and, and finding a solution that works for everybody.

• 55:35Steven Rinella?

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• 56:20Steven Rinella?

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• 57:03Steven Rinella?

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• 58:22Steven Rinella?

  I kind of mentioned this to you before we started recording, where I was like, the one scenario that I can't picture happening.

• 58:31Steven Rinella?

  I, I can't picture a scenario happening where, where a state says, hey, no more people can move to this town.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:39Steven Rinella?

  Phoenix is done.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:41Steven Rinella?

  Right? Denver, whatever, like it's done. The, the population is capped. I can't, I sort of can't picture that there would be farms where the, the farmer is like, I'm out of business. I'm done. There is no water.

• 58:59Steven Rinella?

  Am I wrong that, that, that we could get to a point where you really see sort of like that, that there's, that the demographics of the country have to shift according to water loss and water use?

• 59:12Speaker 03

  I mean, if I had a crystal ball, I'd love to answer that question. I, I don't know the answer to that, but I do, you know, I sort of, I view it in some ways too that,

• 59:23Speaker 03

  yeah, I mean, I sort of have the same philosophy as you, but I don't know. I don't have a good answer there.

• 59:26Steven Rinella?

  Like you feel that something will happen, but it won't be that.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:29Steven Rinella?

  It won't be that they can't-

• 59:30Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, I think, I mean, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, but I do think that maybe our cities will, their water infrastructure will look differently. Maybe they'll have more Las Vegas peppered, Las Vegas is peppered through the west in terms of the water recycling infrastructure.

• 59:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  I mean, and I think ultimately, I mean, water out west is, is cheap, so to speak. And so I think a lot of these, the, the solutions that we know about, then we know that work sometimes are expensive. And so that's a, it's a real factor. And you know, we want to make sure that people can afford their drinking water. And not make it so costly that we're pricing people out of the cities that they grew up in. It's a real factor. Water, water, our managers are, are grappling with every day.

• 1:00:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. The, the cost thing is interesting that, that you do, there's some things that are inexpensive enough that you just sort of, you, you use what you want. Right? Like at home, you know, I don't know, it takes something like, like, like not many parents yell, would yell at their kids about using too much flour.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:00:31Steven Rinella?

  Right? There's just like some things, you know, I don't know. It's just, it's flour, right? Or like too much, you're using up too much white rice.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:39Steven Rinella?

  You know, but you might, you, you might go bust your balls about butter or orange juice or something. You know what I'm saying? Like there's like a perception of use and cost where you admonish people for wasting things of high value. And right now with like gas and diesel at these historically high prices, people are honest to God, changing behaviors.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 1:01:03Steven Rinella?

  When they make these predictions about how much fourth of July traffic there will be, how much Memorial Day traffic there will be on highways, they factor in the cost of gas because the cost of gas is going to dictate how people, how far people are willing to drive. Meaning you're making like day-to-day logistical adjustments because the resource is so expensive. When, when you consider this puzzle of water use, how do people factor in like, well, maybe water should be, I don't even know how you put a price, like how, you probably know how you price it now. Maybe water should be two bucks a gallon.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Steven Rinella?

  Like what would that do to water use?

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's easier to do with cities, right? So you could sort of tier that like, and I'm not, this is not my area of expertise, but I've certainly looked at the data of like, you have a water utility that provides drinking water to a community. And you pay X amount of, of, you pay X amount at a rate for your gallons per day. Then if you use more, you pay more. So there's, I mean, there's people studying this. I thought, I'm, this is not my area of expertise about like, how can the, the change in water price, you know, have a, have an impact on behavior.

• 1:02:10Steven Rinella?

  But it, but it's a factor, right?

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 1:02:12Steven Rinella?

  It's a thing people look at.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. And I, and I, in Melanie's personal opinion, I do feel like water is too cheap out west. And I think at some point, maybe that, maybe that is a factor in trying to figure out like, do we look at the cost of things? I don't know.

• 1:02:24Steven Rinella?

  Where's, where's water not cheap? If water's cheap in the American West, where is it not cheap?

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  You know, I, I spent the last decade in Washington DC and I'll, I'll say my water bill is pretty high there.

• 1:02:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  But I don't know. I don't, I don't have a good answer there. I think a lot of it depends on where, where the source is coming from.

• 1:02:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Is it scarce?

• 1:02:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So what like, what are the, what are the adjustments? If, if you crystal ball it, right? And that the weather doesn't save us. What are the adjustments in deals that will get made? In the Colorado Basin.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:03:07Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, let's say you were, let's just say you had some kind of authority. Where you're like, in the end, like, I'll do it. I'll make the decisions. Here's what's gonna happen. Like, what is gonna be different about life?

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  Everybody's that's in the field of water management, which is they had that. But I think fundamentally, I think there is no magical solution or silver bullet that's gonna get us out of this situation that we're in now. But we have tools and we have solutions that work. We know that voluntary water conservation on farms and ranches works. We know.

• 1:03:42Steven Rinella?

  Tell me a little more what that means.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Water conservation, so this could just be.

• 1:03:46Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna say voluntary water conservation.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  People not being forced to, right? Where I'm not gonna come in and say that you're forced to have your water cuts, right? And so it's allowing farmers and ranchers to make decisions that work for them in terms of what they're gonna apply on the field.

• 1:04:01Steven Rinella?

  But you mean like, like, literally would be? Someone goes to a producer, an agricultural producer? Or they're just aware that there's water problems? And someone says, please, out of the goodness of your heart, can you do X, Y, and Z? And like, we have money to help make these changes. Like, this is a thing that's happening out in the landscape.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I'll say it's a little complicated. There's agreements that are in place, right? So like in the Upper Basin, in the Colorado Basin, there's our like water contribution programs where they're trying to, you know, work with agricultural producers to say, who would like to volunteer to use less water? And there'll be variation. So some, you know, a farmer in Colorado might just decide, you know what, I'm gonna use less water to irrigate my crops this year. It's called deficit irrigation. Or maybe I'm gonna take some X amount of acres out of production this year and fowled my fields. And then they'll get compensated for that. So there's programs that exist there, and I'm not a total expert on this. I know enough to be dangerous. So that's voluntary water conservation. I mean, we talked about water recycling and reuse and, you know, desalination technologies where it makes sense.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  Like, you know, Kansas City's make those investments. It's expensive, just straight up, it's expensive.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  We know that habitat and restoration projects work. You know, to move water out onto the landscape, to store it there, to get rivers functioning and behaving like rivers historically have been doing. An important component to rivers and watershed health and our water supply. And I think it's making sure our communities are prepared and have the tools necessary to be able to manage with the flexibility they need to adapt. And I think, you know, I was in prepping for this podcast, I was, you know, trying to think of, you know, what were some tangible examples or things that we could think about? I think, you know, when we're talking about wildlife managers, and if you're managing an elk herd, you don't wait for it to crash and hope things work out.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Right? You monitor the conditions. As a manager, you adapt and you plan ahead.

• 1:06:06Steven Rinella?

  Pay attention to trends.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I think, you know, and I understand there's nuance there. Water management needs to take some lessons from wildlife managers.

• 1:06:17Steven Rinella?

  With the, I don't know if you're familiar with this. You see a lot now, you talk about like rivers behaving like they like they ought to behave. Are you familiar with

• 1:06:30Steven Rinella?

  the argument, you see it more and more now, but the argument about like the importance of beavers on the landscape?

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:06:36Steven Rinella?

  So that's one where like, they hold a lot of water back with dams. But what are other, like, what are other ways in which the rivers aren't, when you say that they're not behaving, behaving like they ought to, like, what are they doing or not doing that they used to do? You've mentioned that a couple of times.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. And we can get back to beavers in a sec. So I think just basics, right? You've got snow in the mountains. And historically, that snow melted, it would recharge groundwater, groundwater would flow into rivers or, you know, would flow into the rivers that would make it into our lakes. I think now, as there's warmer temperatures across the West, and that's changing how water moves across the landscape. Maybe you have less snowpack. Maybe you have those dry soils are actually sucking it up and that water isn't making it to the ground, isn't making it to the aquifer, or isn't making it to the river. And so, you know, where maybe you have a big rain event and maybe that water just moves really quickly through the system instead of slowly moving across the landscape.

• 1:07:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but how would you fix that, though?

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  So, so there are a lot of great restoration and habitat conservation projects that are happening all throughout the West and all throughout the Colorado Basin. So, an example, and we just, TRCP just led a tour with some of our partners, National Wildlife Foundation and National Forest Foundation, National Wildlife Federation, excuse me, and the National Forest Foundation, where we did a site tour is on the White Forest in Summit County in Colorado. It's called the Soda Creek Project. And they built beaver dam analogs, right? We put, you know, you know, the folks that did the restoration project put like logs in the river and sort of basically to mimic habitat for beaver, to create these ponds, essentially to like, you know, to restore that wetland there, to get more water out onto the landscape. That's important for

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  bird, migratory bird, you know, waterfowl, duck habitat. It's also important for, you know, because oftentimes I think in the West too, especially with warmer temperatures, as rivers are becoming disconnected. And so like moving that water on the landscape, making sure our streams are connected, creating habitat for trout, whether that's like putting in giant boulders or logs across a river to create that key habitat for.

• 1:08:43Steven Rinella?

  So slowing the movement of water down.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  Slowing the movement of water down. And the goal for that Soda Creek Project is, you know, the goal is to get beavers to move in and to continue to maintain that work. So I think it's, it's not just doing a one-off project. It's going back to make sure that when you do that restoration project, is it still functioning and is it still having that benefit on the landscape? I mean, it's doing all of these projects together. Every individual project adds up over a longer period of time. You know, not just doing a quick, a quick fix, a quick fix. Let's not, you know, we're not gonna just infuse some money to do a bunch of different projects and then go away. We have to figure out that sustained pace of individual projects, mining our canals, upgrading our agriculture and infrastructure,

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  making those investments in drinking water infrastructure as well. All of that adds up.

• 1:09:36Steven Rinella?

  What will be, if you go back to that 1922 summit,

• 1:09:41Steven Rinella?

  or whatever they call it, get together, deal? What will be the next sort of like rule? Do you know what I mean? Will it ever be that everyone comes together, the states come together, and they go like, hey, it's a new reality, man. There's 25% less water. Let's make a big old bargain and everybody's gonna sign it. And then we're all gonna agree on that for the next bunch of decades. Is there a version, like, is there a version of something like that that'll happen? Where it just brings like absolute certainty to the, to the solution and everyone's gonna, you know, get it notarized and that's just how we're gonna live from then on?

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  Sure. I don't, I don't view that we're gonna change our water right law across the West. I just don't think it's gonna happen. If I was water czar, that's the first thing I'd change.

• 1:10:29Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  You know, just take it off. Let's look at how much water is in the system.

• 1:10:33Steven Rinella?

  We developed a system that isn't.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  And like, you could take into consideration who was there first. And like, there's lots of different nuances here. So that's just Melanie's personal opinion, but.

• 1:10:41Steven Rinella?

  But give me, hit that, like, like, you know, I realize you probably don't wanna get all kinds of mean letters from people with water rights, but, but lay out for me, just conversationally, lay out for me, like, what is the problem with water law? When you say that it could be revised, like, what is the problem with it?

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  I think the challenge is if, if there's a senior water rights holder at the very bottom of the river,

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  under the current water law, and I'm talking at a really high level, you know, there's a lot of nuance here.

• 1:11:11Steven Rinella?

  You don't need to name names. You don't need to say Bob's farm.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, the people upstream have an obligation to deliver the water because they are senior on the system. And so all those, all the people upstream are junior. And so, and that's challenging.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  And so that's, it's just the reality of the situation. So I think in terms of today.

• 1:11:30Steven Rinella?

  This is not likely, you're saying that this is not, this is like people that talk about having a new, having a new constitutional convention, like scrap our constitution.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  But this is why I think that, at least in the Colorado River Basin, there has been some success because the seven states have gotten together, understanding the law of the river, all these previous compacts and laws and court cases and everything else, to sort of have those hard conversations about like, how are we gonna manage our system? We don't have a deal today. The seven basin states don't have a deal today. But they're working toward that. And I remain hopeful that they're gonna get there. Because at the end of the day, the states wanna come together to figure out an agreement. They don't want the federal government telling them how much water they can and can't use.

• 1:12:14Steven Rinella?

  So when do they, like, when will they make a deal? Or is it unlikely to happen?

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  I believe it will happen. If I had an answer to that question, I think a lot of people are wondering when the seven basin states are gonna come together with a deal.

• 1:12:30Steven Rinella?

  But right now, there's not like a binding thing.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  I mean, you have, you sort of had the foundational agreements, the law of the river, and the beer of reclamation, the federal government had to step in to sort of like have a temporary game plan about how they're gonna operate the system. But there's no sort of, those interim guidelines, those 2007 interim guidelines expired. So there's not, there's not a seven basin state deal or agreement about how to, what's the best way to manage our, our river. Not right now. There will be. I have hope.

• 1:13:00Steven Rinella?

  But is it, remember how when we started out talking, I was saying, I feel like I've been reading the same story for forever?

• 1:13:11Steven Rinella?

  I'll be reading this story for the second half of my life.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  I'm sure.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 1:13:19Steven Rinella?

  It's not, it's not gonna be like, hey, we figured it out.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, maybe, I mean, maybe in the sense of that there's a real reckoning with, we're gonna have to have a different water use and a, and a different way to manage our water. We can't be doing it like we did a few decades ago. That's just, we can't do, there's just not enough water to go around.

• 1:13:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  But, but really, when we're like, we're thinking about success, I think a lot about, you know, what is success? It's one is making sure there's water in the river, right? And I think a lot of people don't even think about water until it's not there.

• 1:13:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, oh, hundred percent.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  Right, and there's like, a lot of folks thinking, and conservation is part of that. It's like, we gotta figure out what solutions we can do today to prevent that water from going away, right? We wanna continue to have water in the river.

• 1:14:03Steven Rinella?

  And that's that upstream work you're talking about.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  But even in the downstream, I mean, in Arizona, there, I toured a project in Yuma, Arizona, where they restored wetlands along the Colorado River, which used to be, used to have a bunch of trash, and it was overgrown with salt, with salt cedar, tamarisk. And they pulled out all those invasive species, they planted willows and cottonwoods and mesquite trees, and there's a recreation trail there. So like, there's projects that happen throughout the basin, it's not just in the headwaters.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  And that, you know, that was, that was a success project in, in the lower basin.

• 1:14:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What, if, if you look around nationally, what would you picture being the, um,

• 1:14:46Steven Rinella?

  where will this conversation be happening next?

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  The conversation about, like, Colorado.

• 1:14:51Steven Rinella?

  Like, where you said, no one thinks about water till you don't have it.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Steven Rinella?

  Right? It, it's, I, I grew up in Michigan, there was not a daily conversation about water use. You know, you weren't, people would irrigate, they'd suck water out of some local lake and spray their lawn all summer. People didn't look mean at them, do you know what I mean? It was just like, it's like, it just wasn't a conversation.

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:15:17Steven Rinella?

  Right? I lived in all kinds of northern tier states, and, um, Alaska, whatever, most of the time you're not having a water argument.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:15:28Steven Rinella?

  Like, where, if you had to picture, what parts of the country would you, would you, if, if you had to say like, hey, um, be advised, this could be you down the road, like, where will the next spots be?

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Steven Rinella?

  Where, where, where there's like a water war?

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  Sure. I don't know the answer to that question, but I, but I'll take us back that in terms of, and we talked about, people don't know, or think about water until it's gone. I'll encourage all of your listeners, learn where your water comes from. Learn about what's happening in your community, about what's impacting where your water comes from. I, I think one of the things that surprised me most, and when I travel, I always look up, where's, where's the drinking water coming from? So just, just curious, there's a lot of people that just don't know, they have no idea, they turn their tap on and don't even think about where it comes from, or where it goes.

• 1:16:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I did a, I did a book, um, I did a book about raising outdoor kids.

• 1:16:23Steven Rinella?

  I published it a few years ago, called Outdoor Kids in an Inside World, but in there, one of the things I suggest is that your kid learns, wherever you live, that your kid learns

• 1:16:39Steven Rinella?

  the water that's by them, and its path to the sea.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:16:44Steven Rinella?

  And that they'd be able to walk through, like, well, I'm on this creek, which flows into that river, which flows into that river, which flows into that river, and that dumps into the sea. As being like a fundamental thing that I think, that's, I'm agreeing with you, that'd be like a fundamental thing that I think people need to understand. And I've often joked that there's states where, there's states where more people know that than, than others.

• 1:17:10Speaker 03

  And I think, I mean, I think the West gets a lot of attention with drought, right? Like, you know, and a lot of the wildfire activity, et cetera, but like, even, we, and I lived in DC, but there's still a drought in, on the Potomac, we get, the drinking water in DC comes from the Potomac River. And there is, you know, there is sort of a real, um, uh-oh, um, the intake structures, that the, the pipes that pull water out of the Potomac to deliver water to people in DC, we're starting to get to a moment where I think the DC water utility was starting to think about, like, okay, we need to think a little bit more about water conservation. So even places that appear water-rich, right, their rivers are huge.

• 1:17:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  They're gonna have those, I think that's gonna be a, a problem that many communities across the US are gonna be grappling with.

• 1:17:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, another thing I wanted to ask you about is, do, does, in the future, do our, is it, in the future, are our coastlines, like, lined with desalination plants? Do you know what I mean? Like, like, what's up, what's up with that?

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I think, so, de- desalination basically takes salty water and cleans it so you could, so folks can drink it, or use it for whatever they need to use it for. Um, there's a lot of focus on ocean desalination, cause you're close to an ocean, there's a lot of water there. There's also brackish groundwater, like salty groundwater, that communities, like, in Texas, there's a lot of, you know, salty groundwater, they're looking at desalination as a tool. I think a lot, part of it is, like, does the math pencil out? And what, what's, what, what's our source water? Like, what, what are we currently using? Does water recycling make more sense? Does water reuse make more sense? I think every community's gonna be different. I don't really see a, a universe, maybe, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I could be wrong, about just being a bunch of desal plants up and down the coasts.

• 1:18:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And I think if you were in that situation, it would be that you're looking at, like, um, you'd be more aware, probably, like, in places where that's the reality, Middle East and elsewhere, you, you're, you're probably looking more at, you'd probably, those people probably learn to think of water more as a thing that costs blank.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:19:17Steven Rinella?

  Like, a, a thing that costs X per gallon, and you view it like a product you're buying.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:19:24Steven Rinella?

  When I'm messing with my kids, not really messing with them, but just trying to get them thinking about things the right way,

• 1:19:31Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell them while we're eating dinner, and they're, they're sick of the conversation, but I'll be like, in your life, people will, there will be people that are having wars over water, I'm trying to scare them good. Like, people will be having wars over water, and they'll be eating bugs. You know, I tell them this all the time, they kind of dismiss it, but I'm just trying to get them prepared for the idea that, like, there will come a time when there's things that you're taking for granted that will not, that will not be available.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 1:20:02Steven Rinella?

  And I always, and I'm trying to pound in their head that, like, they're gonna need to learn, like, maybe not them, but their kids, someone's gonna need to learn to think of water and food differently.

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. I, I think success looks like if, if our, if, if our kids don't have to take this stuff for granted,

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  and don't have to think about it.

• 1:20:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I could see that being a big way toward, a big way toward the solution is if, if, if more and more people viewed it as a commodity.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:20:31Steven Rinella?

  Or more and more people viewed it as, it's like a finite thing, that you're in some way or another, cause everybody's paying utilities.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:20:40Steven Rinella?

  Right? Maybe, maybe your rent is baked into your rent, but like, your rent reflects the, like, even if you don't pay the utilities directly, the part of your rent that comes in reflects the purchase of the utilities that is going into the place, but we just don't think of it.

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  Yep, I agree.

• 1:20:56Steven Rinella?

  As a thing.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  I agree, I need to get my kids that book that you wrote.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Don't, don't be fooled, I'll def, my kids will know where their, where their water comes from.

• 1:21:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what's not in the book is scaring them about eating bugs and having wars over water. You have to just kind of ad lib that in. But it is, it is like a, a, a, it is like a, it's a shift in mindset.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think when I, so when I, what started my, my work in the water, and when I was, I got my PhD at Washington State University, and I did this project in the Spokane River Basin, and we, and, and it wasn't, and my PhD advisor's philosophy was, let's solve a problem that the community wants to be solved, let's just not think about something like, we wanna, that we're personally interested in. And so, my project evolved, and, and one of the questions was, how can we improve water management in the Spokane River Basin? That's in eastern Washington, northern Idaho, it's a tributary that flows into the Columbia River. There's a groundwater source there, they're really connected. And so I built a model with water users there, we ran scenarios, et cetera, and, and we facilitated a lot of conversations about,

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  you know, how can groundwater pumping in Idaho impact flows in the river, et cetera? But ultimately, what came out of that was sort of surprising, is the water managers were actually like, hey, we actually need to do a water education campaign, because people don't know where their water comes from. And we need to be coordinated across state lines, and across the whole basin, so that the message is some, is, is the same. One, on, on where does your water come from, but also on, on just what can you do in your household to conserve water?

• 1:22:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  And so, you know, it's one of those, one of those things where it's imprinted in, in me, in terms of, a lot of people just don't know where their water comes from.

• 1:22:36Steven Rinella?

  You know, uh, a thing I wanted to come back on, so, kind of of a last point to bring out with you, is, you brought it up, but we never really dove into it.

• 1:22:47Steven Rinella?

  You're talking about recycling water in Las Vegas, where I would view if I go to Las Vegas periodically for work stuff and I'd see all those big fountains, you know?

• 1:22:57Steven Rinella?

  And I'd be like, how dare you? How dare you? And when I have to read all these articles about all this water use and here you got these big damn fountains, but I had no idea that there was that they're recycling 90 some percent of the water in the city?

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the indoor water use 99% is recycled in the Las Vegas area. And and Las Vegas has different rules about, you know, what type of water gets applied on golf courses, they have incentive programs for encouraging people to pull out their grass and have zero escaping because outdoor water use is is still a good chunk of the water use in Las Vegas. And so in my mind, they really are pushing the needle on on being innovative and trying to stretch that limited water supply.

• 1:23:40Steven Rinella?

  And like, but that's like a regulation thing, like regulating how much water people use.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  Local and state decision makers.

• 1:23:48Steven Rinella?

  Putting it in there, like you can't, you can't do this or can't do that. What's it called where you tear your grass out?

• 1:23:54Speaker 03

  Zero escaping.

• 1:23:55Steven Rinella?

  You just go gravel?

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Put native plants in that don't need a lot of water.

• 1:24:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. Do that? So that's like, that's like a regulated thing there.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  I don't know for sure, but I, but I I'm fairly certain that it's a voluntary thing that, you know, the, and I don't know exactly who who funds it, but the city and the Southern Nevada Water Authority are involved about trying to figure out how we can pay people to pull their grass out.

• 1:24:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, with the recycling waters, it's an interesting concept to imagine that you'd ever have a closed loop system on water. Like picture that you'd have a municipality that was so good at water recycling that it was like, there was just like a set amount of water within the system and it just gets.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  Reused.

• 1:24:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the harder fact is is the.

• 1:24:45Steven Rinella?

  It would be like, it would be like cooling in your truck, you know? It's like getting used and now and then you like change it out or whatever, but it just is living in there, flowing through the system.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:24:56Steven Rinella?

  Instead of something totally passed through like fuel, you know?

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:24:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So are you like?

• 1:25:05Steven Rinella?

  Deep down, are, do you sit at pessimism or optimism about the Colorado River?

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  I'm an optimist.

• 1:25:12Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  I am. Because I, I, I really do believe we have the tools in our toolbox and and the solution's there. It's not going to be painless. I think everybody is going to experience discomfort.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  And and whatever that that seven basin state agreement looks like. There are hard decisions that people are are making today about what the future of our water use looks like. But it's not all doom and gloom, you know? I am hopeful. There's, we talked a lot about, you know, this water conservation on farm. We talked about the importance of investing in restoration and habitat projects to help rivers function like they used to. And then, and really comes down to our local communities, getting people at the table to have those tough conversations to figure out where, where, where do we have common ground? And where can we map out a plan to get us to where we need to be based on the water that we have today?

• 1:26:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Hopefully some fish at the table, too.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 1:26:12Steven Rinella?

  Bring a duck and a fish in at the table.

• 1:26:15Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 1:26:17Steven Rinella?

  Man, thanks for coming on and explaining all this, Melon.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, Steve.

• 1:26:20Steven Rinella?

  Again, we're, we've been speaking with Dr. Melanie Thornton, who is with Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership as the Western.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  A senior director of Western Water.

• 1:26:32Steven Rinella?

  Senior Director of Western Water. Thanks so much.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  Of course. And I think if you're interested in wanting to stay engaged or or become involved in water resources, follow us on social media at the TRCP or visit our website at trcp.org.

• 1:26:46Steven Rinella?

  All right, thank you.

• 1:26:47Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:27:15Steven Rinella?

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• 1:27:59Steven Rinella?

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• 1:28:41Steven Rinella?

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• 1:29:14Speaker 00

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