Native News
Executive Order Drying Up Solutions
Still true: Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.
On Monday, we drove through two major news stories on our route from Southern Idaho to Scottsdale, Arizona.
To read more articles by Mark Trahant, go to: Marktrahant.substack.com
The first was Kanab, Utah, just outside of the lands that President Trump stripped federal protection from (again).
Revisiting actions from his first term that were reversed, President Donald Trump announced Monday that he will scale back the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah.
The Republican’s actions undo proclamations from his predecessors who deemed the sites worthy of preservation under the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that gives presidents power to protect areas of cultural, historic or scientific interest.
Trump made similar moves during his first term, but many were reversed by his successor, President Joe Biden.
The back-and-forth underscores how national monuments have become a flashpoint over the management of public lands. Trump is not the first president to reduce the size of monuments.
I was struck by the comments from Utah officials about how this action restores balance, protecting mining, ranching and fossil fuel projects. Missing was any statement about tourism, money that’s building hotels, cafes and services in Kanab. Even if the extraction industry provided as many jobs as in the past (it does not) there would not be the corollary jobs.
The back and forth is interesting, too. Every opposition politician (that would be Democrats) as well as tribal leaders in Utah and Arizona are thinking about the what’s next, the day after Trump. Will that mean a dfferent configuration? A larger national monument? Something else? This is not the end of the story.
Then even supporters of extraction and development know this. There is no way to invest millions of dollars and get operations underway when the clock is ticking this fast; we are almost half-way through the Trump administration. And just more than a hundred days until the Congress starts its course correction.
The second news story we drove past on Monday was Lake Powell. I should have stopped to take pictures. The lack of water was visible all along the route. (On my route home I plan on driving past Lake Mead. This time I will take pictures.)
Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the U.S., is nearing critically low water elevation levels, the latest data shows.
As of Monday, water levels at Lake Powell measured at 3,524.3 feet above sea level, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation tracker.
Minimum, or “dead,” power pool — in which the water is too low to spin the hydroelectric turbines and can no longer produce hydropower — starts at 3,490 feet of elevation, Peter Soeth, public affairs lead at the Bureau of Reclamation, told ABC News. Elevation at Lake Powell is currently about 34 feet above the minimum power pool.
A very visible 54 feet. We have that much less water. And it’s not just Lake Powell, it’s the West, it’s the Colorado River system.
For the past 20 years, the Colorado River has been operated under a set of guidelines negotiated between the seven states that depend on the river. Those guidelines expire this year, and after five years of grinding negotiations over a new agreement, the upstream states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico remain deadlocked against the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
Some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend on the river’s water. But after the states failed to meet two federal deadlines in three months, the river is in a moment of unprecedented crisis. A dire snowpack has left flows just 15 percent of normal, many farms without water and several cities scrambling to secure water supplies as they gird themselves for shortages.
That has set up a showdown over a legal time bomb that’s been ticking away at the heart of the Colorado River Compact since the river’s guiding document was signed more than 100 years ago. The Lower Basin states believe the Compact promised them a minimum delivery of water sent down the river from the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin states believe the Compact promised them a fixed amount of water that they could rely on to meet future growth. As the river’s flows have dwindled, those two supposed guarantees are proving to be irreconcilable.
And what’s especially irreconcilable are the rights of tribes to access water on the river.
Pro-Publica reported earlier this month.
A deal to bring Colorado River water to Native American communities in northern Arizona, where a third of homes lack running water, is being blocked by neighboring states, caught up in a broader battle over how to divide the dwindling river.
The largest tribal water rights settlement in U.S. history — the product of decades of negotiations to secure water for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe — was on the verge of being realized before Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming stepped in to oppose it being codified by Congress.
“We have significant unresolved concerns with the legislation that may affect each of our states’ rights to and interests in Colorado River water,” negotiators for Utah and Wyoming wrote in March to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in a previously unreported letter. New Mexico and Colorado sent similar letters.
This is the water fight some of us have predicting for years. Another ticking clock (or more likely, a time bomb.) Mark Twain’s most famous line was probably not his .., “whiskey’s for drinking, water is for fighting.” But even if he never said those words, it’s still a chorus for the dry West.
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