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Urban needs drain Colorado River delta

High over the southern edge of the lagoon, a bald eagle appeared as if from out of nowhere, wheeling through the cloudless sky. Then, in a beating of wings that shook the desert air, several thousand snow geese took flight, honking in terror at the sight of a mortal enemy.

“Man, look at all those snows,” says Brad Andres, a wildlife biologist from Colorado. “I think two on the left are Caspian terns.”

Paul Meyers, a biologist from Alaska, pointed his binoculars to the west. “Here comes an osprey,” he says.

That morning at dawn, Meyers and Andres had set out from Yuma, Ariz. with a half-dozen fellow biologists for a tour of the Cienega de Santa Clara, a 40,000-acre wetland thriving in the midst of the bone-dry Sonoran desert, near the Gulf of California in northwestern Mexico.

A crucial stop on the Pacific Flyway, the cienega — Spanish for “marsh” — provides habitat for hundreds of thousands of migratory and resident birds, some of which, like the endangered Yuma clapper rail, are found virtually nowhere else on Earth. It is a birder’s paradise, where white-faced ibis, sandpipers, gulls, warblers, cranes and pelicans hunt among tall cattail reeds and rise in flocks that can momentarily darken a flawless blue sky.

“It’s crazy how wetlands out in the middle of the desert are always so incredibly productive,” Meyers says.

Remarkable though they may be, these wetlands are only a tiny fragment of what once was one of North America’s largest and most productive estuaries: the Colorado River Delta. In the days before the building of dams on the river, and the creation of giant reservoirs such as Lake Powell and Lake Mead, massive surges of freshwater created a wetland area here the size of the state of Delaware.

In 1922, ecologist Aldo Leopold explored the Delta by canoe, through a seemingly endless landscape of emerald-green lagoons and towering cottonwood and mesquite trees, where deer, bobcats and even jaguars roamed.

“The river was nowhere and everywhere…” Leopold wrote. “He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles…”

Today, those green lagoons — and the wildlife they supported — are all but gone, replaced by agricultural fields, cities, and barren salt flats that stretch as far as the eye can see. Canals and pipelines divert so much water from the river that it fails to reach the sea except in times of exceptional flooding.

Of the Delta’s former wetlands, only the Cienega de Santa Clara remains.

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“It’s the last relic we have of the wetlands of the Delta,” says Martha Roman, a field biologist for the Mexican state of Sonora. “It’s a treasure.”

Yet even this remnant wilderness is threatened, as water officials north of the border weigh diverting as much as 70 percent of the water that sustains it for use in cities and farms in the United States.

ENVIRONMENT VS. ECONOMICS

As American water officials like to point out, this remaining marshland is an artificial creation, more replica than relic. For while the Delta’s former wetlands relied on the spring floods of the Colorado River for life, the Cienega depends on millions of gallons of agricultural run-off from farms in Arizona, water delivered through a concrete canal built in the 1970s.

That run-off was intended for delivery to the Yuma Desalting Plant, which was intended to purify and return the water to the river. But due to a series of unusually wet years, and the high cost to operate the desalter, the water was allowed to bypass the plant, which stood idle. Instead, it flowed into the desert, and there, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Delta’s wetlands were reborn.

“For the longest time people didn’t even know these wetlands existed,” said Robert Mesta, a birds of prey specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who is coordinating conservation efforts in the area. “They just depend on the fact that canals leak.”

For Arizona’s water managers, though, Nature’s gain is their loss. An average of 110,000 acre-feet of water – enough to supply 220,000 Arizona households for a year – flows across the border to the wetlands. This volume is equal to about 8 percent of Mexico’s total share of Colorado River water.

Yet until the plant begins operation, that water is subtracted from Arizona’s river allotment, a supply already stretched to the breaking point by massive population growth and compounded by the worst drought since the region’s record-keeping began.

“Because the U.S. is not operating Yuma, we were delivering water into Mexico that was not being accounted for,” says Sid Wilson, director of the Central Arizona Project. “It was just ice cream for Mexico, and it was lowering levels in Lake Mead by a foot a year.”

If elevations in Lake Mead and Lake Powell sink to a pre-determined level, a shortage will be declared on the Colorado River, leading to immediate cuts in water deliveries to Nevada and Arizona. With less water available, the Southwest’s development-driven economies would inevitably suffer.

Gloomy predictions about imminent shortages on the river have been tempered somewhat by heavy snowfall in the Rocky Mountains. At the moment, spring runoff is estimated to be about 117 percent of average, which would add about 10 feet to Lake Mead’s elevation, and forestall a shortage at least for a few years.

Nevertheless, booming population growth in the region, and the prospect of more dry years on the horizon, has water managers scrambling to secure every drop of water they can. One of the most attractive options has been halting the flow of agricultural runoff and other unregulated water into Mexico, and keeping it for use in the United States.

Yet while that water has been targeted under the banner of conservation, much of it flows down the main channel of the river, sustaining the Delta’s remaining wetlands.

“Some of the water that flows off of these fields really does support some important habitats,” says Karl Flessa, a paleobiologist and chair of the University of Arizona’s geosciences department, who has studied the Delta for decades. “But that flow is likely to be reduced to near zero, so that the United States can retain as much water in the river as possible.”

FEW OPTIONS FOR CIENEGA’S SURVIVAL

The Yuma Desalting Plant has been eyed for years as a potential tool for reducing accidental flows into Mexico. Were the plant put into full operation, however, flows to the Cienega would be reduced to a brackish, pesticide-laden sludge.

According to Jim Cherry, Yuma area manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, after a successful test run at 10 percent capacity last year, the plant could be restarted almost immediately. “It ran beautifully,” he says.

The reopening of the plant was simply a matter of time, Cherry adds.

According to Wilson, flows to the Cienega could eventually be cut by as much as 70 percent, down to about 30,000 acre-feet. But Wilson, who has been deeply involved in delicate negotiations with environmentalists and other groups over the fate of the Cienega, argued that such a reduction might not spell disaster for the wetlands.

“I don’t know how much water the Cienega needs, and neither do the environmentalists,” he says. “Nobody really knows.”

And while Wilson said he recognized the value of the wetlands as a unique habitat, he could not guarantee that they would avoid the impact of future shortages on the river.

“The Cienega, like the rest of us, will have to learn to deal with drought,” he says.

With a growing recognition of its environmental importance, it appears unlikely that flows to the Cienega de Santa Clara will be dramatically disrupted in the short-term. Even more promising to its long-term survival are several alternative strategies for providing water to the region.

The Yuma area suffers from an exceptionally high groundwater table, water that is too salty for use in agriculture. Were that water pumped into the desalting plant, it could replace the agricultural run-off that currently flows into Mexico.

“We’ve been looking at whether it makes sense for this plant to be operating a little bit differently,” Cherry says. “This is a more sustainable use of the desalting plant, and it would still allow the Cienega to flourish.”

Still other options exist, such as paying Yuma farmers for their water rights. “In times of real drought, where you don’t have supplies available to go to the Cienega, part of the solution might be short term, temporary leases of land, and fallowing of that land,” said Wilson. “That would free up some water to go down to the Cienega.”

MEXICAN INVOLVEMENT NEEDED

To environmentalists, while the long-term survival of the Cienega would represent a major victory, much more work remains to be done in the Delta, where around 95 percent of the original wetlands have vanished.

The task of restoring the greater Delta is complicated considerably by its location in Mexico. In the U.S., tens of billions of dollars have been spent restoring estuaries and wetlands such as Chesapeake Bay, the Everglades and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California.

“You don’t see the same corresponding effort going into restoring the Delta, I think because it’s simply on the other side of the border,” Flessa says. “The United States hasn’t taken its full responsibility in assisting Mexico in restoring some of these habitats.”

North of the border, a $626 million effort to restore riparian and marsh habitats along the river is underway, led by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. That restoration work, aimed at shoring up populations of endangered birds and fish, ends at the U.S.-Mexican border.

Wildlife in the region, however, does not respect international boundaries. “The common interest is that these birds are found on both sides of the border,” Mesta says.

The key ingredient in further restoration of the Delta is water — lots of it. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 1 to 2 percent of the Colorado River’s total flow would be necessary to begin repairing significant amounts of habitat. But the river’s supply is under tremendous strain, with essentially every drop already divided up between users in seven U.S. states and Mexico.

Not represented at the negotiating table, of course, are environmental uses such as the Delta.

Dr. Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta directs the water and wetlands program for Pronatura, a Mexican environmental organization. On a recent bird-counting trip into the Delta’s remaining wetlands, he and his team identified 109 species — among them eagles, hawks, the endangered snowy plover and even a great horned owl.

Hinojosa has seen the Colorado River reach the sea a few times in his many years in the Delta, during times of major floods. He says he hoped one day it would be a regular occurrence, allowing the Delta to flourish once more.

“If we want it to happen again, we need to make a legal allocation [of water] for the environment , with both countries working together,” he says. “That’s a big challenge, but I think it’s very possible.”

WATER USERS BICKER OVER RIGHTS

High anxiety over water for human uses in the region, however, make the prospects for significant new allocations for the environment uncertain at best. Negotiations over the Colorado River are extraordinarily complex, involving seven U.S. states, the U.S. Department of the Interior and Mexico.

The Delta’s location south of the border provides additional cover for those who would rather prefer to steer the river’s water towards development.

Wilson, for instance, praised efforts by Mexican environmental groups working to secure water rights for the wetlands. But he expressed doubt that the U.S. was obligated to provide additional water supplies to the area. “It’s really a Mexican issue, to begin restoring the Delta,” he says.

Others feel that responsibility should be shared among all river users.

“Saying that Mexico should use its allocation to restore habitats in the Delta, would be like saying the state of Louisiana is responsible for the dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi River, and that none of the upstream states in the Mississippi River system should bear any responsibility for putting excess fertilizer in the river,” Flessa says. “It’s simply unfair, regardless of the fact that it’s in another country.”

A number of U.S. environmental groups are working towards just that goal, including the Sonoran Institute, based in Tucson, as well as Environmental Defense and the Pacific Institute. But fair or not, implementing a policy to allocate U.S. water for the Delta will be far from easy.

Unless the Southwest breaks out of its current drought and enters a prolonged wet period, increasing demand from cities and agriculture seems almost certain to keep supplies stretched tight. With demand already exceeding supply, securing water for any new purpose—much less an environmental use in a foreign country—won’t happen without a long struggle.

After all, as Mark Twain once observed, “In the West, whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.”

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.

On the Rim, a life geologic

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK — A group of Frenchmen couldn’t leave the United States without getting a sneak peek of it. A married couple from Chicago caught a train ride just to see the sun set over it. And a Phoenix man chose to celebrate his 50th birthday by hiking into it with friends.

Making Grand Canyon National Park meaningful for all of these people and 4.5 million others is part of Stephen P. Martin’s job description.

But the park superintendent job isn’t just a hike in the park. Martin, who took over in February, must occasionally handle the grim details, such as questions about a controversial new book called Over the Edge: Death at the Grand Canyon and the recent death of one of his field biologists, Eric York.

Today, in fact, is one of those days. A flood of phone calls renders his appointment book useless. Among them is a message from a reporter for National Public Radio who was seeking comment about a 4-year-old girl who fell to her death at the canyon.

After a 30-minute interview with TZR, Martin meets with fundraising volunteers, followed by members of York’s family, who have not seen the canyon before.

There are other visitors, too. Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Lyle Laverty, is also in town because of the tragedy, and investigators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are probing whether rangers followed procedures because it was a work-related death.

York, 37, was found dead in the park on Nov. 2. Internet stories carried the news around the world. Officials later said it is highly possible that York contracted pneumonic plague – a deadlier strain of the plague that wiped out one-third of Europe in the 1300s – from an infected mountain lion on which he had performed a biopsy. Services for York were being held that weekend.

From any angle, it’s a crazy week for Martin. But during the interview, he’s the picture of calm and offering thoughtful comments about York and the circumstances surrounding his death.

“We know a lot about many things, but I think that that’s the other thing we’re finding —is that the more we learn, the more we know that we don’t know a lot,” Martin says.

“He was very qualified. He was very passionate,” Martin adds. “Every once in a while events conspire against even the most dedicated of employees…It’s a really tough time for us, but it’s also a time to really celebrate the fact that we have people like that that are willing to dedicate their lives to making the earth a better place.”

When hobby becomes career

Martin built an appreciation for wildlife and natural resources early in his life. His parents moved to the West because they enjoyed the outdoors and, as a child, he embraced it as well. He participated in organized sports, spent time boating and rock climbing, and joined the Boy Scouts of America.

“I think deep down inside, we have a belief that parks are extremely important to people today and they will be even more important to people in the future,” Martin tells TZR. “So, I think that there’s a passion and a goal to make the world a better place through protecting areas, through sharing areas.”

He got his foot in the door at the Grand Canyon while obtaining his bachelor’s degree in natural resource management from University of Arizona in Tucson.

“I met a professor, who became my advisor, that was involved with research at Grand Canyon,” Martin says. “Through that association, I actually ended up working here at the park and that helped shape my studies and interests.”

Life and counter-culture soon came into play. Martin met his wife, Cyd, who is also a park service employee, while working at the Grand Canyon and on the Colorado River in 1973.

Two years later, renowned Western author and conservationist Edward Abbey released The Monkey Wrench Gang , a book about a motley bunch that plans to sabotage development projects on behalf of the environment during a Colorado River trip.

Some book critics say it is a comedy/satire. Others say it’s a bad influence on hardcore environmentalists and underground fringe groups.

Martin says there’s no place for that kind of thinking in conservation circles.

“You can’t break the law in order to further even the best of causes,” Martin says in reference to Abbey, who he remembers once worked as a fire lookout at the Grand Canyon.

“Throughout history,” he adds, “I think anytime people have resorted to any kind of destructive or violent acts, it harms the very cause that they’re involved in…You have to channel that frustration and make it happen by changing the laws, by having the public ban together and do things through its collective social influence.”

Today’s struggles: Traffic, pollution, money

Positive influence is definitely something Martin strives to bring to the Grand Canyon. But he also inherited pre-existing challenges that park superintendents have juggled for years.

The sounds of the Grand Canyon are one of these touchy issues. Under pressure from lawmakers and environmentalists, those who run the park face a federal mandate to restore natural quiet in 2008.

“We have issues that have seen a lot of publicity like how to protect the natural sounds of Grand Canyon because so many people enjoying visiting the park in so many different ways,” Martin says. “That also, then, affects other resources and other visitors, and so we’re working really hard to balance those two uses and find the appropriate place and time for over-flights.”

Increased tourism is a blessing and a curse. The gate fees help fund much of the park’s needed improvements while contributing to air and noise pollution. Although the park is not even close to reaching the agency’s predicted 7 million annual visitors by 2010, the existing 4.5 million visitors to the South Rim are creating an air-pollution hazard during peak times.

To this end, park officials will add more traffic lanes at the South Rim’s approach to ease the traffic snarl. The project would add an extra lane one mile long and a bypass lane that’s a half-mile long for $2 million, plus leave room for one more lane in the future.

Some might say this would create more traffic. Martin says it’s necessary for the user experience. Either way, the park has come a long way: Martin buzzes around in a hybrid Ford SUV while park shuttle services run on compressed natural gas, which burns cleaner than gasoline.

“How you move (patrons) around, how you get them to that inspirational experience, is something that is really important,” Martin says.

He is also working closely with the Hualapi Tribe, which opened Skywalk on the canyon’s remote West Rim in March.

The U-shaped walkway extends out over the canyon wall and offers visitors a view below through its see-through floor. Admission is $75, and the tribe is pegging its financial future on it.

But in October, they were more interested in sewage and housing. Martin should know: He and other officials met with tribal leaders to discuss the removal of sewage, adding running water and improving housing at remote tribal outposts.

The public-meeting part of his life is part of Martin’s diet. It’s the only time this oatmeal-in-the-morning guy breaks tradition and switches to a granola bar and Red Bull.

Which brings us to money.

Martin is 55 and a career park serviceman. Notches on his belt include leadership posts from Alaska to Washington, D.C. This includes Grand Teton, Denali, Gates of the Arctic Yellowstone and Voyageurs national parks, plus a desk job near the Capitol as the agency’s second-in-command.

He’s no rookie at fundraising. During his tenure as one of the agency’s top deputy directors, Martin helped create the Centennial Challenge, a major campaign to raise cash for national parks.

Thankfully, Congressional support of national parks has increased over the past five years, agency officials have said, and this year is one of the wealthiest on record.

The canyon costs $21.7 million to operate each year. President Bush increased funding for parks in February by $258 million, closing a huge gap that park advocates say has hurt park amenities in the past.

But for Martin, the budget doesn’t come close to covering the canyon’s needs. Today, there are 550 employees working at Grand Canyon National Park in a wide variety of disciplines, Martin says.

He worries about providing housing, benefits and a safe environment for all employees — just another bullet to add to the list of much-needed changes and upgrades he has planned for the canyon.

“The tremendous problem that we have is getting people to understand and getting Congress to understand that parks are like managing a whole city,” Martin explains. “They tend to think of, ‘well, if the scenery’s good, then everything must be fine’, and, in fact, it takes many millions of dollars a year to manage a park like this and we don’t have those funds available to us.”

Grand Canyon’s new role

While juggling all of this, Martin has stepped up plans to use the canyon for more educational purposes. In June 2007, the NPS rededicated the Yavapai Observation Station, having incorporated exhibits to reveal the geology, history and culture of the Grand Canyon and its people.

Martin says that there are plans over the next couple of years to do the same at Canyon View Information Plaza.

“One of the very interesting things that the park has been working on for a couple of years is something called ‘The Trail of Time’,” he says. “It’s going to be little benchmarks along the rim that will give people an idea, if time were distance, what a million years would look like. It will take you through the age of rocks in the canyon all the way to the 1.7 billion year old rocks at the very bottom.”

A very important cog in the park’s education campaign is the Grand Canyon Association, a non-profit organization with 75 years of experience in bringing published knowledge to the public forefront.

“What the association allows us to do is to have a business partner that can help sell the books,” Martin explains. “So, it’s a link between public service and private enterprise, but also the same goals—the goals of managing the park, doing research influencing education.”

This remains a steadfast ambition of Martin’s – to “teach people who are more and more coming out of urban environments about, not only parks and the Park Service, but also about their place on Earth and what they can do to make it a better place.”

Another benefit of education at the Grand Canyon is that it can save lives. Death at the park is so shocking that it inspired the canyon’s current bestseller, Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon . The book is divided into 8 chapters, each focusing on different manners of death at the canyon including falls from the rim, drowning on the Colorado River, aviation accidents, murders and suicides.

Surprisingly, copies of the book are available at the canyon’s grocery and bookstore, which is run by an outside company under a contract approved by the National Park Service.

Bookstore staff and members of the association – whose Grand Canyon literature sales help fund park operations – say it’s a best seller.

“When you consider that we have 4.5 million visitors to the park and we might have anywhere from 3 to 7 fatalities that are accidental, it’s a pretty small amount, but our goal is to have zero,” Martin says. “We work really hard to tell people what precautions they should take…so that people don’t expose themselves to that risk.”

Martin has ambitious plans for the park. In July 2007, he hired Martha Hahn to become its science center director and proposed making the canyon home to a major study on climate change.

Hahn will study the vegetation, water sources, animal behavior and more in this area in order to map out the climate change.

“The more science we do and the more we study the park and evaluate things like climate change and animal implant distribution and water resources and the ecological mix that’s out there, the more we realize how little we really know about the planet we live on,” Martin says.

“In a very short geographic area – from the top of the San Francisco peaks to the bottom of Grand Canyon – what a great place to study and talk about the changes happening in climate right now.”

In August 2007, Martin entered into a “sister park” relationship with Chinese officials. They are interested in studying the Grand Canyon and its conservation methods and applying that knowledge to Yuntaishan World Geopark, which is in central China’s Henan province.

“They came to us to learn about how we teach people about the environment,” Martin says. “So, we’ve been helping them with that and, in exchange, we have gotten a great education in being part of this international community. We always feel like we learn twice as much as we’re able to teach, but I think they feel the same way, too. So, it’s just a great relationship.”

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.