by Martin Doyle
Wise’s office is littered with slices of old trees that have accumulated through the years. One—from a limber pine—she saved because it was her first time using a chain saw. Other slices—cross sections—from trees are scattered about her office. Each of these slices has been sanded down to better show the hundreds and hundreds of densely concentric rings. A few buildings away from her main office is her lab, tucked away in the basement of the botany building. There she carries on the business of analyzing tree rings, which is part adventure and part mind-numbing repetition: “The hardest part is finding new sites. If a tree is easy to see or easy to get to, it would already be cut down. For dendrochronology, you need old trees, and old trees, they are usually not in . . . well . . . safe places.” By site, she means a collection of old trees, and by old trees she means trees that are five, six, even seven hundred years old. Old trees tend to be far away from roads, on really steep slopes or cliffs. Old trees aren’t necessarily the biggest trees either, which means that Wise has to sample a lot of trees when she thinks she’s found an old patch to make sure she gets a sample from the really old trees that might be in the patch.
Sampling means coring, the process of slowly turning and boring a large hollow drill bit into a very old tree and then carefully pulling the bit out. After removing the bit from the tree, Wise removes the resulting cylindrical core from the tree. Each core is several feet long—about the radius of the tree—and about half an inch in diameter. Wise can obtain these cross sections to analyze without felling or otherwise seriously damaging the tree. She spends months each summer hiking the backwoods of the West in search of old trees and taking days to core them. During her last sampling run, she sampled about 40 trees per site, taking at least two cores per tree. “I often overdo it,” she says, “I mean, it’s a lot of work to get there, and you never know which tree is going to be the old one.” During her last summer, she had eight sites to sample—enough to send hundreds and hundreds of cores back to the lab.
Back home, she is in the midst of renovating the lab while analyzing the cores. Carpenters and painters on one side of the lab are sanding the new wood of a lab bench; meanwhile, on the other side, Wise sands the centuries-old wood of a tree core. The sanding is crucial because some of the rings in a tree may be only a couple cells thick. And those rings are potentially the most interesting because they are the drought years. So Wise and her students sand each tree core six or seven times, using increasingly fine-grained paper, until the last sanding with jeweler’s paper. From there the mind-numbing work begins: they place the core under a microscope and measure the width of each tree ring to the nearest 0.001 mm; that is, to the nearest thousandth of a millimeter. So for a single site that includes forty trees of about 500 years old, with two cores per tree, Wise and her students measure tens of thousands of tree rings. It’s data painstakingly won, earned by bending over a microscope while counting and measuring innumerable tree rings in a basement lab. As she acknowledges with a laugh, “It’s really hard to keep hourly undergraduates for very long working in the lab.” But the results can be striking.
Wise did some of her earlier dendrochronology work on the upper Snake River in Wyoming and Idaho. She collected some cores herself and used some collected by others to build a chronology of tree rings in the West that covers a period of just over four hundred years, from 1600 to 2005. She then used some streamflow data that had been collected on the Snake River since 1910 and overlapped the tree-ring data from 1910 to 2005 with the streamflow records from the same time. Through this work, Wise established the relationship between tree-ring widths and annual streamflow. She found that when streamflow is large, tree widths are large, and vice versa. But her meticulous efforts in the lab counting and measuring rings allow Wise to then work out the relationship between ring width and streamflow with a high degree of statistical precision. Knowing this relationship, she can use just the tree-ring data to calculate streamflow.
Wise’s system allowed her to compare the droughts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with those of the past four centuries and then ask some rather provocative questions. For instance, how exceptional was the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s in the context of the other four hundred years? Based on Wise’s reconstruction, the 1930s drought was unusual; but several other droughts were comparable, and a couple were even worse. At the time she wrote the paper, the 2000–2005 drought was on everyone’s mind because of how long it had lasted; Wise used tree rings to show that two other droughts—one in the eighteenth century and one in the seventeenth—had been even longer. For water managers in the Pacific Northwest, tree rings began to shed new light on just how severe things might actually get.4
Wise did her PhD work at the hub of dendrochronology—the University of Arizona. Scientists there have been compiling and studying tree rings for decades to better understand past climates of the desert Southwest, particularly around the Colorado River. One study got people especially concerned. In 1976, Charles Stockton and Gordon Jacoby published a fairly obscure report in the Lake Powell Research Project Bulletin. Like Wise’s study, it correlated the flow of a river to tree-ring data.
Stockton and Jacoby had measured a series of cores from trees located throughout the Colorado River basin and correlated their ring measurements with the longest record available of river flows: those at—where else—Lee’s Ferry. Like Wise, they were able to look at drought frequencies and durations; but their findings on droughts were not nearly as profound or startling as their discoveries about floods. They found that “the early part of the twentieth century (1906 through 1930) was one of anomalously persistent high runoff from the Colorado River Basin, and that it apparently was the greatest and longest high-flow period within the last 450 years.” In nonscientific terms, Stockton and Jacoby were saying that the decades of data used to estimate flow on the Colorado River and then divvy it up in the Colorado Compact were in fact the wettest years in half a millennium. The basis of the Colorado Compact was an estimated mean annual flow of somewhere around 16.5 MAF per year; tree-ring data over a much longer period of time suggested that a more realistic estimate would be about 3 MAF per year less than that.
After Stockton and Jacoby dropped this bomb on the western United States, later studies using tree rings revealed even worse news. Not only was the early twentieth century consistently coming up as being a period of “exceptional wetness,” but as other dendrochronologists expanded to similar work throughout the West, they began to show that the droughts of the Dust Bowl and the drought of 2000–2005 were not as rare on the Colorado as people had assumed: “Overall, these analyses demonstrate that severe, sustained droughts are a defining feature of the Colorado River.”5
The results of these tree-ring studies have profound implications for the states upstream of Lee’s Ferry. Because the Colorado Compact commits the upper basin to delivering 7.5 MAF per year to the lower basin, the inevitable shortfall of flows will come out of the upper basin’s allocation, forcing the entire region to rethink its hydrologic future. The potential impact of this collision between the realities of dendrochronology and the Colorado Compact was best captured by Richard Lamm, governor of Colorado during the 1977 drought, who said, “The most disturbing day I spent in my 12 years as governor was having tree rings explained to me.” Arizona faces a similarly problematic situation because, aside from a few hundred acre-feet here and there of present perfected rights, the state gave California seniority in exchange for funding the CAP. In a sustained drought on the Colorado, when Lake Mead falls ever lower and Lake Havasu dwindles, California will continue to divert its 4.4 MAF, and Arizona will have to make do with the leftovers.6
All of the historical climatological changes the dendrochronologists have documented were natural oscillations driven by ocean currents and atmospheric circulations, cycles that have gone on for hundreds or even thousands of years. Human-induced climate change is likely throwing this system out of whack, or at least amplifying the natural oscillations. W
ise and other dendrochronologists and climate scientists predict that future droughts will be drier, and future floods will be wetter. Infrastructure built for past climates may no longer be adequate to store the floods of the future or to supply water through the length of droughts in the future. Even slightly warmer temperatures in the West cause more precipitation to fall as rain instead of snow and cause the snowpack to melt sooner. All of this means that planners and engineers cannot rely on snow to store water in the spring or snowmelt to provide water in the summer, and more reservoirs or larger reservoirs will be needed to store the same amount of water. All the while, the population continues to grow.7
Stretching along the lower Colorado River, south of where Vince Vasquez was buying farms to sell water, are the irrigated tribal lands of Native Americans. The fields here differ from those to the north in that they’re larger and less fragmented by any fallow fields or even buildings. They are also planted with lots of cotton, which right now is less profitable than alfalfa.
It is unusual in the United States for tribes to seemingly have the upper hand in natural resources. The tribes have been pushed around and taken advantage of since the first European explorers “discovered” America. Even today, on sovereign reservations, tribes are rarely left enough to scratch out a living. But in the case of Colorado River water rights, the tribes finally have some advantage. On the lower Colorado, the Supreme Court said that the tribes were entitled not just to reservations of land but also to water: “enough water to irrigate all the practicably irrigable acreage on the reservation.” But importantly, this was not going to be new water for the states where tribes were located: the water for reservations comes from each state’s allotment; for example, tribes in Arizona would get water from Arizona’s share. The Court also said that the priority date of a tribal water right dated to when the reservation was created, thus giving many reservations some of the most senior claims on the river. Tribes had regained some of their water sovereignty.8
On other western rivers, including the Klamath, tribes have been similarly exerting control over water rights—both the right to use water for irrigation and the right to have it left in the river to sustain fish and river-dependent wildlife. As far back as a 1908 Supreme Court case, it was recognized that tribes have “reserved” water rights. These rights belong to the tribes by virtue of the reservations, so they are similar to eastern riparian water rights: they didn’t have to be used for irrigation to be secure; they went along with the land regardless. But it was never clear whether these water rights were enforceable if the tribes were to make a claim.
The shifts in climate, growth in population, and never-ending demand for water have increasingly tested these rights throughout the West. Increasing water stresses also put to the test all the previous assumptions in the Klamath River basin about water rights, property, and sovereignty. Farmers of the Klamath basin, like Tom Mallams, had assumed that water was their property. The state had granted them property rights to water, with associated dates of priority, and the farmers had built their farms and their lives around the assumptions built into these water rights. The Oregon farmers’ approach was no different from that of farmers in Kansas building a farmhouse and barn based on the amount of land—property—they own.
But when the extreme droughts of the twenty-first century hit, it became painfully clear that water rights were not as secure as farmers in Oregon had thought—because the state of Oregon was not as sovereign over water as they had thought. In 2013 the tribes on the Klamath decided to assert their legal rights to water by “making a call” for water—requiring farmers like Mallams to cut back their upstream diversions significantly and instead let streamflow go downstream unused to sustain the fish central to tribal culture. Mallams was frustrated partly because his state-given rights were being superseded by tribes, whom he associated with the federal government.
In his calm, measured tone, Mallams walked through his reasoning: “That water belongs to the State of Oregon. Water is the property of Oregon. But now the right to make a call on water has been handed to the federal government. When the tribes make a call on the water, they make it through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and that is the federal government. The federal government now controls the water. The states have capitulated to the federal government.” For Tom Mallams the question is, if the State of Oregon must relinquish the power to decide who owns water in times of extreme drought, then what sovereignty does the State of Oregon really have?
Conversely, tribes like Leaf Hillman’s, which had assumed the worst after centuries of broken promises, were given the most valuable asset of the West: senior water rights. Through myriad lower court and Supreme Court decisions, and increasing societal recognition of the legitimacy of their claims to the use of water, tribes had become the hydrologic sovereigns of the West. Though their reservations were still small compared to their original areas, their situation was beginning to improve. Hillman says that if the Karuk Tribe is a sovereign nation able to set its own rules, except for water, then is it really sovereign? As he captured it, “There can’t be gradations of sovereignty. If there can be limits put on sovereignty, then it isn’t sovereignty.”
Klamath farmers were living in a new world, and they knew it. As we shook hands before I left his office, Mallams gazed out the window at what seemed to be an ever-cloudless sky. He enjoys being a commissioner but knows that eventually he will need to retire and give up some of his role in fighting all these water wars. He wants to go back to farming, “But I might not have the water to go back. The way things are now, there is no security for water. Zero. You have no security.”
This is the reality of water in the West: a zero-sum game. The system of sovereignty and property has been used for centuries to establish who controls what—or, in the West, who controls water. Droughts, disappearing species, and burgeoning population all increase demands on an already overextended system. Yet the changes in sovereignty and property have an equal or even greater effect on the farmers, tribes, and water brokers of the West. And they raise questions about the future of western rivers.
PART THREE
TAXATION
CHAPTER 7
Running Water
Being able to blithely drink water from just about any faucet in the United States without concern is one of the greatest achievements of American society. While we may not always like the taste, we do not typically have to think twice about drinking the water from whatever water fountain is available at a rest area, an airport, or a bus station. We don’t even have to worry about whether the water is potable, which reflects an accumulation of technical sophistication that has enabled an infrastructure system that sprawls out into the landscape to gather water from diffuse sources, draw it through pipes and pumps and canals, purify it, and then distribute it through more pipes and pumps to every home, office, and city park water fountain. When it comes to wastewater, we casually flush toilets expecting that pipes and sewers will do whatever it is they do, underground and unseen.
A functioning water system—clean tap water and a reliable sewer system—is a staggering accomplishment of technology. But water systems are equally the result of the development and use of finance by governments—to develop a budget, borrow money to finance large investments, and then secure the revenue to pay their debt. Running a government, whether a federal agency or a city sewer, means running a budget. And budgets reflect power; taxing, revenue, debt, and spending all indicate society’s acceptance of the government exerting some monetary control. Budgets are simply mechanisms for making economic and political choices.
Since the founding of the United States, political ideology has been inseparable from fiscal ideology. A central disagreement between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson was what to do about the debt accrued by the individual states in fighting the Revolutionary War. Jefferson wanted to leave the states to fend for themselves financially while Hamilton wanted the federal government take over the debt from the state
s. This disagreement in proposed fiscal policy reflected a larger ideological divide. As both Jefferson and Hamilton recognized very early on, government debt is an indicator of government activity because taking on debt requires shouldering the obligation to collect sufficient taxes—revenue—to pay off the debt. Whereas Hamilton’s approach would require a federal tax to pay off the debt it took from the states, effectively increasing the federal government’s role, Jefferson believed in limiting the role of the federal government as much as possible. In 1811 Jefferson praised the tariff (a tax on international imports) alone as the sole legitimate source of federal government revenue. By taxing the rich and leaving the small farmer untouched, the tariff would be an effective, redistributive fiscal approach, particularly if the revenue was used for projects like canals and roads that benefited farmers:
We are all the more reconciled to the tax on importation [tariff], because it falls exclusively on the rich, and with the equal partitions of interstate’s estates, constitutes the best agrarian law. In fact, the poor man in this country who uses nothing but what is made within his own farm or family, or within the United States, pays not a farthing of tax to the general [i.e., federal] government, but on his salt; and should we go into that manufacture as we ought to do, he will not pay one cent. Our revenues once liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spare a cent from his earnings.1