Nevada Biodiversity Notes: Après nous, le déluge
Living as if there's no tomorrow has consequences, it turns out
Remember when we didn’t have to be afraid of summer? Please indulge me as I depart from my normal romp through the news, to dial in on drought, heat, water, and groundwater dependent ecosystems. What is happening now demands our attention. Our focus. The work is more important than ever before.
2021 may be the year we remember forever in America. The year when climate chaos became so apparent, so inescapable, that it became a, if not the, dominant force in all of our lives. In some places, of course, that time has already come. One could argue that in nations like Mozambique and Australia, that time has already come, what with repeated direct hits from hurricanes in the coastal African nation and truly apocalyptic and nationwide fire seasons Down Under.
But here, in America, the collective consciousness has been able to compartmentalize climate-fueled disasters for many years, even as they became more and more apparent. Even after Hurricane Maria utterly devastated Puerto Rico and Hurricane Harvey put our 5th largest metropolitan area underwater in 2017; even after the Camp Fire in 2018 wiped the town of Paradise, California off the map; even after heat records fall on a daily basis and evening lows are sweltering; still! Americans have by and large viewed climate change as an abstraction. And while perhaps the causal effects of it on these disasters have been widely understood and accepted, at least by a portion of the populace, the totality of them – the sum of the breakdown of the systems that have made our lives on earth possible – has never been properly understood by Americans.
Until now. 2021 is the year that everything changed. In 2021, the Western United States drought became absolutely acute, with the largest reservoirs in the country, Lakes Mead and Powell, reaching their lowest levels since they were filled. In 2021, wildfire season started in May, and smoke blanketed not just the usual places in the West but it found its way to the Acela corridor back East as well. In 2021, the well-known thermal refuges of the Pacific Northwest, places so infamously cold and rainy that the residents have no choice but to consume copious amounts of coffee to keep them awake during the day and copious amounts of overly-hopped and overly-hyped microbrews at night just to let them get to sleep through the misery of their 9 month winter, even there! turned into a fiery inferno with temperatures around or above 110°F.
Measured in distance from freezing, that anomaly in above normal temps in the region is about 85%. (Normal high in Seattle 74°, 110°-74°=36° anomaly; 74°-36° = 42° above freezing; 36°/42°=85% anomaly.) At my home in the Mojave Desert, an 85% anomaly on a normal high of 105° would yield a temperature of 135°F, which is close to unsurvivable. That’s not really how that works, but it gives a sense of the scale of how anomalous the temperatures were in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaking of my desert home, here on the edge of Death Valley, we are arguably suffering the current drought worse than anyone in the country. Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist from Alaska, created a map looking at the 12-month period July 2020-June 2021, and plotting it against every other 12-month period since record keeping began. The map shows that most of the West is within the top 10% of driest periods; and much of the southwest is in the top 1% of driest periods. But there are four counties in the West who are experiencing their driest 12-month period in recorded history: Oneida County, ID; Beaver County, UT; and right here at home in the Death Valley region, Nye County, NV and Inyo County, CA. Yes, the hottest, driest place on earth is experiencing the hottest, driest conditions it literally ever has since record keeping began.
And it’s obvious. It’s obvious anywhere you go in the northern Mojave Desert and southern Great Basin Desert right now that things are extremely grim. Right out my back door, the creosote bush is looking sickly and brown, crumbling between your fingers when you touch it (photos from last week, pre-deluge). The ephedra has turned light brown and gray. The Mojave yucca have turned yellow. The Joshua trees are taking on a ghostly pallor. The mesquite have begun yellowing. It looks like a dying ecosystem. And it’s not just right here. The whole southern tier of the Great Basin Desert – the Highway 6 corridor if you will – looks absolutely ghastly, with much of the sagebrush having partially defoliated and turned black. And in case you’re thinking “This too, shall pass,” as the Las Vegas Sun editorialized, it’s only getting worse from here.
And yet. And yet. Despite the preponderance of evidence that the basic systems that make life on earth possible are breaking down, we continue to act as if whatever happens next doesn’t matter. Après nous, le déluge – damn whatever or whoever comes next. As if sea level rise won’t increase dramatically in the latter half of the century, when many of us will be dead already. As if the global extinction crisis doesn’t jeopardize the very biodiversity that makes our own lives on earth possible. We continue to let oil companies drill, even as we make promises to make them stop. We continue to irrigate grasses and lawns even though, as Great Basin Water Network’s Kyle Roerink said of Lake Powell’s crash in the Review-Journal: “This calls for our society to question how we manage things moving forward.”
A Big Dam Deal
Not that we’re taking all this lying down. The intrepid Mr. Roerink has been leading the charge for a new approach to the Colorado River and Las Vegas’s water supply. In mid-July, he convened a remarkable gathering on the Hoover Dam – environmentalists, local businesses, politicians, farmers, social justice organizations. All met on a warm summer morning to proclaim: “Damn the status quo. No more business as usual,” as he started off the event with.
Most compelling were speeches from Imperial Irrigation District director JB Hamby & PLAN organizer Jose Silva. These young men, who speak for so many more people than just themselves, took a courageous stand that day on the Dam. Mr. Hamby called the ethos that allows for endless sprawl to suck up water and dry up farms a sort of “suburban manifest destiny.” Hamby has encountered blowback at home. Meanwhile, Mr. Silva spoke directly on behalf of the millions of people of color who rely on the Colorado River: “The consequences coming from the Colorado River will hit low-income communities and communities of color first.” He also was the only speaker to make direct reference to Mexico’s share of the River: “I’m of Mexican descent. I was born in Mexico, my parents are Mexican, and it hurts me knowing that while I’m in Las Vegas able to survive off the water supply here, there are people in Mexico that look exactly like me that don’t have access to that water.”
The Arizona Republic has the most comprehensive readout of the event, and I recommend giving a thorough read because each speaker had a different perspective on the River. Also worthy is the KNPR State of Nevada appearance from many of the co-conspirators.
And this while, as Jeniffer Solis reported in the Nevada Current, residential water use spiked a dramatic 13% as people stayed home during the pandemic. Since residential water customers comprise 98% of SNWA’s customer base, this led to an overall increase in Southern Nevada’s water use from the Colorado River during the pandemic. UNLV researcher Nicholas Irwin, who led the research to get these numbers, sounded a cautionary note about the water crisis in the Current article: “If the water isn’t there to guarantee enough water for future development that could discourage residential development, meaning fewer houses. Some businesses that may have moderate water needs may be deterred slightly from coming here unless there’s some assurance that the water usage is going to be there for them in the future.” Horror of horrors!
Never fear, however, says Southern Nevada Water Authority chief John Entsminger, who did a round of public relations outreach lately, with op-eds in the Review-Journaland The Nevada Independent. (Incidentally you may recall I critiqued someone’s “poor form” in submitting the same op-ed to multiple outlets in my last newsletter. Mr. Entsminger puzzlingly submitted two op-eds that are about 50% the same text. C’mon, guy.) Mr. Entsminger touts his agency’s laudable achievements in conservation, while encouraging further conservation measures in these op-eds. But notably, he omits event making mention of the elephant in the room: continued growth and the Clark County lands bill.
That’s not a quiet omission folks, it’s a screaming one. These op-eds came just a week or two before UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER) issued a new forecast showing Clark County’s population will go by 1,000,000 people by 2060. These numbers were then used by CBER director Andrew Woods and professor Stephen Miller in an op-ed in the Las Vegas Sun to justify the Clark County lands bill as “the kind of innovative solutions Southern Nevada needs.” I don’t know in what universe sprawl development into undisturbed desert lands -- you know, the same pattern of development Las Vegas has been following for decades -- is considered “innovative,” but there you have it.
Not Applicable
Speaking of pulling up the ladder behind you, much has been made of this New York Times article about the town in Utah that pulled the plug on new growth when their water supply ran short. I can’t tell you how many emails I got with links to this article saying, “Is Las Vegas next?” The answer of course, is an obvious and hard no. Comparing the experience of an agricultural community of 1,750 people who, for municipal use anyway, would use less than 1,000 acre-feet per year is so completely remote from the experience of a metropolitan area of 2.2 million people who use several hundred thousand acre feet a year and are dominated by some of the most spectacularly successful and lucrative businesses in the country is not particularly useful. Not that it’s not an interesting story, but… don’t hold your breath.
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
Adam Sullivan has been elevated from his current acting role to become the permanent new State Engineer of Nevada. Mr. Sullivan is a competent administrator, who knows his stuff about Nevada water, hydrology, and law as well as anyone in the state; and he will dutifully execute the duties of the Division of Water Resources. I think he probably also won’t make any waves. Communication and stakeholder engagement has been a significant problem for the Division in recent years. Perhaps now that Mr. Sullivan is there more permanently he can overhaul the public relations aspect of the Division’s operations. Because the State Engineer dumping a bunch of wildly unpopular proposals on everyone every two years in Carson City has been a spectacular failure for like a half decade running here, at least. And half the basins in the state are still overappropriated. So perhaps a new approach is in order.
Creating Water, But For What?
A new bill has the potential to free up some water on the Colorado River. The Large-Scale Water Recycling Project Investment Act would start a federal grant program to invest in, among other things, a significant water recycling project for southern California. Rep. Susie Lee is a cosponsor and was touting the bill as tangible action taken on the water crisis. Read more in the Review-Journal. (That’s not the first piece written by Blake Apgar at the R-J that I’ve linked to in this missive – he’s looking more and more like the new environmental reporter at the state’s biggest newspaper.) SNWA will also be chipping in on the cost of this facility, with the upshot being an extra 20,000 or 30,000 acre feet per year of water rights on the Colorado River. This is exactly the sort of thing that Nevada activists have been suggesting for many years.
But the question remains, as it did with SNWA’s legislation this year to ban ornamental turf – what will the new water be used for? The ubiquitous Mr. Roerink posits in this Review-Journal op-ed that sponsoring this bill to free up water through recycling, while simultaneously pushing the Clark County lands bill, which would create vast new commitments for Colorado River water in southern Nevada, is not a coherent approach to dealing with the Colorado River. “One bill needs to pass this summer. The other doesn’t. The future of our community hangs in the balance,” he says.
Et Tu, Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems?
It’s long been posited that groundwater dependent ecosystems sustained by deep-sourced carbonate springs, like those found across the north Mojave and south and east Great Basin, are more resilient to drought. Relatively “immune” from the vagaries of variable precipitation, since they are discharging fossil water from the Pleistocene and annual variations in current precipitation should have little effect on spring discharge.
A really powerful paper came out last year in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment called: “Oases of the future? Springs as potential hydrologic refugia in drying climates. The paper proposes a framework for evaluating the relative likelihood that springs will persist as refugia for biodiversity into a warmer, drier future. The upshot was that perennial springs sourced from deep aquifers (like the Great Basin’s carbonate) should be regarded as having the best chance of persisting through a warming climate. And thus, our conservation efforts should likely be focused on protecting the waters that feed those springs as well as the springs themselves. This was so important to me because it seemed to provide a theoretical underpinning to what I’d always believed – that the work we are doing to protect these carbonate aquifer springs is the best thing we can do for the desert in a time of changing climate.
Theoretical underpinnings are all well and good, but then reality sets in. Unfortunately, while it’s true that spring discharge should not appreciably change given climatic shifts, what happens to that water when it reaches the surface has been thrown all out of whack. Finally, now, this current drought has laid bare the theory of carbonate aquifer-sourced groundwater dependent ecosystem immunity. Carbonate aquifer-sourced groundwater dependent ecosystems are feeling the effects of drought, almost as much as anywhere else is. It’s especially apparent across Nevada’s three major carbonate groundwater flow systems in the southern Great Basin/northern Mojave: The Amargosa River/Death Valley Regional Flow System; Railroad Valley; and the Upper White River Flow System. In each, groundwater dependent ecosystems, which exist solely because of carbonate aquifers discharging Pleistocene fossil water, have struggled this year. Three square bulrush is dying back; juncus is browning off; stream reaches aren’t going as far; terminal ponds are drying into mud flats; and formerly moist mud and alkali flats are starting to dry and crack underfoot.
The Amargosa River provides a sobering example. Carson Slough is a groundwater dependent ecosystem along the Amargosa River sourced by discharge from Ash Meadows – its formerly moist habitats for rare plants like the Alkali mariposa lily (Calochortus striatus) or the federally threatened Ash Meadows gumplant (Grindelia fraxino-pratensis) now cracked and dry, with few if any of the plants coming up this year. Formerly verdant places in Ash Meadows itself, like the alkali meadows that are habitat for the extremely rare and unprotected Ash Meadows ladies’ tresses (Spiranthes infernalis) look brown and desiccated. Die back is occurring in all the marshes in Tecopa, with vast patches of brown threesquare bulrush desiccating in the sun. All this while, according to data in NWIS, discharge at the springs which feed these meadows and Carson Slough, remains mostly consistent from year to year.
The signs of drought and heat are evident, even in these supposed “climate refugia.”
There’s a couple of reasons we can hypothesize for this. The first is the effect of dry soils. This effect was much discussed this spring, as spring snowmelt in the Colorado River Basin fell far short of expectations. Much of the blame was put on extremely dry soil conditions – when the soil is dry, it acts like a sponge, soaking up moisture in a way it would not have in pre-drought conditions. The same effect logically should apply to groundwater dependent ecosystems. There’s the same amount of Pleistocene water squirting out of the carbonate aquifer spring systems, but the soils surrounding the spring are hyper-dry and are absorbing water (and dissipating it away through capillary action) faster than the groundwater dependent ecosystem can access it. So we see dieback of carbonate aquifer-sourced groundwater dependent ecosystems, particularly at the margins because the water is being “used up” by the soil before it can reach the vegetation it used to sustain.
The second effect is, of course, the heat. In case you haven’t noticed, the southwest has experienced a record-breaking heatwave, or at the very least record tying. Death Valley tied its all-time record of 130°F, set last year; and Las Vegas tied its all-time record of 117°F. And while those extremes certainly make you sweat, it’s been the persistence of the heat that’s been so remarkable. Las Vegas had 8 straight days above 110°F in June; and then 7 straight days above 110°F in July. High temperatures of course increase the evapotranspiration rate of plants, thereby increasing their water needs. So again, the same amount of water is coming out of the springs, but it’s being used quicker by the existing vegetation, meaning there is none left by the time you get to the margins of the groundwater dependent ecosystem. Hence the die-back, particularly at the margins.
Of all the concerning developments we see around us, this is the one that keeps me up at night. A huge preponderance of Nevada’s biodiversity is associated with carbonate aquifer-fed groundwater dependent ecosystems. The operating theory has always been “protect the water, you protect the ecosystem.” I basically have that tattooed on the palm of my hand as a reminder any time I forget what we’re doing here. If the groundwater dependent ecosystems all go, it’s a strong argument for quitting our jobs and taking up fossil fuel pipeline monkeywrenching as a vocation.
Le Déluge
I wasn’t just using a literary device, we literally had flooding last week. Our little north Mojave Desert valley had a couple of storm cells move through during the monsoonal pattern last week and we got 2.15” in two storms across 18 hours. The second one delivered a whopping 1.7” in less than an hour – the biggest storm I’ve ever seen in 17 years in the Mojave Desert. My first instinct was to head for my beloved Amargosa River. In a particularly infamous incident in 2015, a colleague and I rowed an inflatable dinghy down the crest of a 1,000 year flood on the Amargosa. We should’ve died, but didn’t. Proof: Photos & video. Anyway I wasn’t ready for a repeat of that possible Darwin Award submission, but I did want to see if it got moving. Alas, the storm cell kind of ran up the west side of the Spring Range from Sandy Valley north, so while Pahrump was buried under literally feet of water in some places, Tecopa got just 0.18” and the Amargosa River was placidly flowing but nowhere near flood stage. I did find some water moving on a wash draining the north face of Shadow Mountain in the Resting Spring Range – and that water was bound for none other than Carson Slough, where god willing it will give a little boost to our rare plant friends.
It’s a little unbelievable but this one storm actually took this little corner of the Mojave Desert from “exceptional” to “extreme” drought per the Drought Monitor. I find that a little dubious. If it was winter or spring, the argument could be made, but with temps spiking back right up to the mid-100s, that water is evaporating off quickly. There’s some green that has emerged since then, but most things that germinate will die off in the heat before getting anywhere.
Nonetheless, there’s little more magical than the desert in a storm and we’ll take the moisture where we can get it. Après nous, le deluge. We can only hope.
Friends, the work ahead of us is long & hard. The situation on the battlefield is grim. The emergency room ward is filling up. It’s time to roll up our sleeves to meet this moment.
Onward,
-Patrick