Audacious Water: The Podcast with Guest John Fleck
Episode #3: Fleck on why doom-and-gloom narratives about water aren’t accurate
John Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program and author of the book Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West, on why our narratives about water are so gloomy, why water isn’t inevitably for fighting over (or destined to be scarce), and what it would mean for the environment to have a seat at the table in the Colorado River Basin.
Listen to the full episode here or on your favorite podcast platform.
Show Notes
- John Fleck’s University of New Mexico bio page, his blog (“Inkstain”) and his Twitter account.
- The University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, which John directs.
- Here is where you can find Fleck’s most recent pieces for the Albuquerque Journal.
- Here’s John Sabo’s PNAS paper (“Reclaiming freshwater sustainability in the Cadillac Desert”) that John Fleck wrote about.
- Fleck’s 2011 story for the Albuquerque Journal on the Albuquerque aquifer “bouncing back.”
- His book Water is For Fighting Over: And Other Myths About Water in the West.
- His most recently published book, Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado.
- Emily Turner — Fleck’s editor from Island Press.
- The rather recent history of the quote “Whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting over,” apocryphally ascribed to Mark Twain.
- How Senate Bill 3 in TX gives the environment a seat at the water allocation table.
- John’s 2013 blog post on Elinor Ostrom and California groundwater.
Transcript
JOHN SABO: Welcome to Audacious Water, the podcast about how to create a world of water abundance for everyone. I’m John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University.
[MUSIC]
JOHN SABO: On today’s episode, are doom-and-gloom narratives about water accurate, and if not how do we change them? My guest is John Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources program, and author of the book Water is for Fighting Over, and Other Myths about Water in the West. Before he joined the University of New Mexico he covered science and the environment for 25 years for the Albuquerque Journal Newspaper. Coming up I talk with John about why our narratives about water are so gloomy, why water isn’t inevitably for fighting over or destined to be scarce, and what would it mean for the environment to have a seat at the table in the Colorado River Basin?
JOHN SABO: John was a journalist for the Albuquerque Journal for over 25 years and has written broadly about water for much longer than that. He is the author of a blog called Ink Stain, which has a bajillion followers. And in fact, the first place that I met John was when he covered my Cadillac Desert paper, which was published in 2010, and John covered that paper in his blog. And now he’s a professor of practice in the Department of Economics at the University of New Mexico where he directs the Water Resources program. And today we’re going to talk about narratives in journalism about water, crisis narratives, and abundance narratives. John, welcome to the show.
JOHN FLECK: It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me and talking about this really — this topic that’s very much near and dear to my heart.
JOHN SABO: So tell me about it — tell me why do journalists always write about doom, and crisis, and failure when it comes to water?
JOHN FLECK: So there’s this really interesting process within all the newsrooms I’ve worked in where reporters at the beginning of working on a story will put together what we call in the business a “budget (inaudible),” a couple of sentences for an editor explaining what the story’s about. And then the editor goes in — you know, your sub-editor goes into the meeting of all the department editors and tries to sell that to the main editors of the newspaper. And so you want something that has some drama and that’s kind of sexy, and has a chance to get on the front page. Because that’s sort of the norms of the community. Like, you want to be on the front page, you want to lead the newscast. And drama, and crisis, and conflict sell, they work. Audiences love them. There is a reason why “if it bleeds it leads” is a cliché in television news, right? Audiences are drawn to that. And so if you want to succeed in the business you get good at that, you get good at finding the darkness in any situation, finding the bad news, finding the villain, finding the impending doom and crisis. That’s the lingua franca of the business. And, you know, it’s not that the people in the newsroom are bad people and the lost worst things, it’s that our readers do, right? That’s what readers want.
JOHN SABO: So blame the audience, not the journalists?
JOHN FLECK: Yeah. And, you know, and we see that, you know, and we really can see that now that we have access to all this analytics data and the clicks we get on our websites, right? That’s what people click on. That’s what people want is conflict, and crisis, and problems. And so we have a culture of journalism that’s sort of grown up around and built around young journalists getting rewarded for pursuing those kinds of stories. That’s what audience behavior rewards. And so it’s not that there’s not positive news out there if you look for it in your newspapers, and on your NPR feed, and so on, and your web feeds. You’ll find it; it’s there. But it just doesn’t draw as big an audience. And so it’s a business that caters to that.
JOHN SABO: That’s interesting. So tell me about — I mean, it seems like in the times that we’ve talked in the past you have — that this is a dilemma for you. You write about other things. Tell me how you’ve worked to change that and what — you know, what your success stories are there.
JOHN FLECK: So there’s this great saying from one of the editors that I worked with over many years in the newspaper newsroom, which was, “We don’t write about planes that don’t crash.” And ultimately I came as a journalist to realize that if I want people to understand the world, say for example, the world of planes, then the fact that most of the planes don’t crash is kind of an important thing for readers to understand about planes, right? That if all we tell people are the bad things… And it’s not that there aren’t bad things worth talking about. But if that’s all we tell them, people will come to understand the world as a fundamentally dark and dangerous place.
JOHN SABO: Give me an example of that in water.
JOHN FLECK: Yeah. So Albuquerque has a long and troubled history with its water, very, very water-challenged place. The Rio Grande, our central river, has been declining dramatically in the 21st Century. Our aquifers for a long time were in decline. So water was really a trouble, bad-news crisis story here in Albuquerque. And when I was working on the beat and kind of around 2008 to 2010 on the water beat at the Albuquerque Journal, Albuquerque had embarked on a really aggressive conservation program, one of the most successful conservation programs in terms of water-use reductions of any municipality in the West, arguably the most successful of major cities in the West. We were doing really, really well. We also did some operational shifts to reduce our dependence on groundwater and shift to using important Colorado River surface water. And as a result our groundwater — our aquifer is actually rising, right? And the doom story about aquifers is aquifers are in decline and communities are threatened as a result. And here the opposite was happening — conservation success, aquifer rebounding. And so as a journalist looking for bad news, I looked at that and I would think, that’s not really a story because it’s not bad yet. But I used the tools of investigative journalism, I would get the data routinely, keep an eye on the data. And what I was doing as the journalist was looking for the bad-news stories. So I was waiting for failure to happen. That’s what we do as journalists, like, we look for failure and then we pounce because that’s what gets you on the front page. And for a long time, you know, I got the monthly pumping reports, and there’s a groundwater-monitoring well just, like, right around the corner from my house. So I would just, you know, every few months check on it in the USGS databases. And the aquifer kept rising and our conservation kept improving. And eventually it dawned on me — I’m embarrassed at how long it took — it dawned on me, like, well, maybe actually the success is a story. We’re actually succeeding. But in the culture of the newsroom the story about a not-problem is, like, this was a plane not crashing. So eventually I — because I thought it was an interesting story and wanted to write it. I exploited this trick that I got very good at at the newspaper, which is exploiting the sort of news vacuum around the Christmas season, the time between sort of the Christmas holiday and the New Year’s holiday when there’s nothing going on. I would always squirrel away crazy story ideas that normally would not pass the morning meeting test and pitch them during that time. And editors were desperate for copy and they would say, “Sure, whatever Fleck, write the story.” So that’s when I did it. And the story actually ran on Christmas Day. I didn’t think of it at the time — I went back and found the old story for a talk I was giving. It’s, like, wait, I really worked that one. Because Christmas Day there’s not a lot of news going on, right? And in this case editors want one happy nice story on the front page. So it was, like, you know, I had to exploit the… Now, if I had come in with a story about the aquifer dropping and conservation is failing they would’ve been all over it right away and it would’ve been easy to sell on the front page. But those success stories are harder. And that experience was kind of a turning point for me because I realized that the narrative that I had been pursuing around water, which was doom, crisis, chaos, was not coming to pass because, you know, that was during a time period when I was starting to work on the book that became Water is for Fighting Over, which was published in 2015. I was starting to look around at a lot of cities and I was finding actually a bunch of people are having similar successes — what’s up with that — and realized that there was an importance to offering up this alternative narrative and trying to do what I could to reframe the discussion. Because it’s not that I don’t think we have enormous problems with water, but if we recognize that there’s a bunch of things that we’re doing well and improving that, that’s where we turn to learn the lessons that we’ll need to apply to do more, faster, and in greater detail as sort of climate change depletes the available supply in, you know, places like where I am in Albuquerque.
JOHN SABO: Yeah, I like that. One thing that I always get pushback on when advancing the positive narrative of abundance — I mean, we live on the blue planet, right — is, well, that optimism could lead people to not worry as much as they need to. What do you think about that and how do you stave that off?
JOHN FLECK: I get that pushback all the time, and it raises an interesting problem. But I think we need — if we’re going to actually be able to deal with these problems we need to be able to walk and chew gum, right, same time. We need to be able to recognize both that the problems are really extreme, are really serious, but also that we have some enormously successful tools at our disposal to deploy. And if you don’t get both of those, if you just see the crisis and presume, as many people do, that the crisis is happening in the absence of positive action by the people who are trying to think really hard on this and act, then we don’t get to the right answer. So you have to have both of them or we’re going to make no progress.
JOHN SABO: I agree completely. Tell me about what you do with your blog. You have a certain mission with your blog I think.
JOHN FLECK: Yeah. So the blog is something that started in parallel and actually has always been — it’s been a hobby project for, God, almost twenty years, and partly just — I wrote about whatever I wanted. It wasn’t always a water blog. It’s still sometimes not a water blog — I write about my bike rides, and my garden, and [CROSSTALK] my bird-watching, and all kinds of things. So it partly is just a personal vanity project; there’s no money involved in it, right, I don’t get paid for it. It’s just… But I’m a writer — as a writer, because I learned how to write as a — writing in real-time in newspapers, which is to say writing directly and immediately to audience, I don’t know how to write without an immediate audience. It’s very difficult for me to write and have it just sit on a computer hard drive or a piece of paper. So writing for audience matters to me. So partly it’s just my writing process and exercise. But as I came to write a lot about water it became really useful to have an outlet where I could explore and experiment with all these ideas that were interesting to me, that might not have fit into the traditional publication formants and frameworks. And once the blog developed a significant audience in the water community — and so these are some interested general public members — members of the general public, some academics, and a lot of practitioners, people who work in water agencies, especially in the Colorado River Basin, you know, water policy management and governance. I came to realize that there was an important niche to be filled for a basic ongoing information source that provided a kind of shared understanding or exploited the shared understandings and became a kind of broad communication platform where we can all be discussing Colorado River systems and issues and governance. And I really, especially as I left newspapers and was working on the book Water is for Fighting Over, I needed a place to continue to write in public about that stuff and engage in conversation with the audience so that I have the feedback loops to explore my own ideas, but also to get some ideas out in front of people who I think need to be aware of things that I think are important.
JOHN SABO: It’s kind of like having a following that becomes your editor in some ways.
JOHN FLECK: Yeah — yeah. It’s a really interesting feedback loop…
JOHN SABO: That’s interesting.
JOHN FLECK: …in that way, yeah. That’s a good way of putting it.
JOHN SABO: All right, so we talked about myths and debunking them. Tell me what you think — I mean, you wrote a book about one, but tell me what you think the top two or three water myths are.
JOHN FLECK: So let me go back and talk about why I ended up writing a book about myths, because I didn’t set out to do that. You know, the title of the book is “Water is for Fighting Over, and Other Myths about Water in the West.” And there is an important approach to writing informational content for audience that involves trying to conceptualize what your audience knows already, what you think they might know, and then what you think they need to know. And sometimes the thing that you think they know is wrong and you need to convince them that something different is correct. And sometimes you just need to start with the thing they might already know and lead them to (the) new knowledge. But it’s important to kind of start with where you think your reader is. And as I was writing the chapters for the book that became Water is for Fighting Over, and Other Myths I was doing that a lot. I was starting with things that I expected my readers would know, and then in some cases explaining why it’s not actually that way, it’s different. And here’s the difference. And trying to lead them from the thing they thought they knew to an understanding that it was wrong and what’s correct. And I was just doing this — that’s my approach to writing always is to think about my audience in that way. And my editor Emily Turner, who is just brilliant, really one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with, emailed — or actually it was a phone conversation about four chapters in. I would write a chapter and send it to her, and we’d have these sort of — she’d respond in bulk and we’d talk four or five chapters at a time. And she said, “You know what you’re doing, John, is in every one of these chapters so far you’re debunking a myth. Do you realize you were doing that?” And I didn’t even realize I was doing that. She’s the one who noticed what I was doing — best editors notice what you’re doing; you may not see it yourself. She said, “That’s really what this book is about, isn’t it?” I said, “Yeah, I guess so.” And so that became a more explicit structure for the book. And the most obvious myth, and one that we started with in the title is, you know, the old cliché that “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over,” which is falsely attributed to Mark Twain. Twain seems never to have said it.
JOHN SABO: Oh wow.
JOHN FLECK: And it was a lot of fun chasing that down. That was a real fun journalistic exercise in chasing the fact that he never said it down.
JOHN SABO: What about, “The coldest winter that I ever felt was in San Francisco?”
JOHN FLECK: I don’t know, man, yeah. There’s a lot attributed to Twain that he didn’t say, but I think that may be one true… So yeah, so “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.” And, you know, it’s wrong that Twain said it, but it also is really wrong if you look at the scholarship on collaboration and conflict around water. What you find far more frequently is people successfully solve their shared water boundary problems. And conflict is always involved in it, but collaborative solutions are far more likely than conflict-based solutions. And, you know, actual fighting, physical violence, almost never happens. And again, this goes back to the sort of narratives that draw people’s attention. We know about the examples where it happened; we don’t notice the ones that didn’t happen. You know, there’s a bunch of planes not crashing in this field, and we just are paying attention to a handful…
JOHN SABO: So, like, the (serious) we hear a lot about, but then…
JOHN FLECK: Yeah — yeah.
JOHN SABO: …other trans-boundary situations (we don’t)?
JOHN FLECK: Yeah — yeah, most trans-boundary situations aren’t that, right? And so — and it’s not that, again, there aren’t problems in those areas where there are conflicts, but it’s more likely that it’s not. And so this was a myth to be debunked. And so it did. And so I have long thought that the old cliché that “water flows uphill toward money” is another one. Because in fact there are ways that it is true. It certainly was very expensive to build the Central Arizona Project to pump water uphill to Phoenix and Tucson. And so in a sense in that case water did flow uphill toward money. But there’s a sense in which it’s commonly used which is to imply that rich communities will inevitably get the water. And in the western United States where I work that simply is not the case. These old agricultural communities are — have far less resources and yet still control the vast majority of the water, right? And the rich communities, generally speaking, aren’t trying to use their money and political muscle to take all the water away. And so this notion that water flowing uphill toward money implies that rich communities will take it from poor communities is another one of the myths. And then…
JOHN SABO: Do you think there’s — just something to push on a little bit — do you think that there’s a difference between… So when you say — when you made this contrast between farms and cities, I mean, that was a core of (inaudible) book, right, like the conflict between those two. And do you think there’s a difference between water for beneficial uses other than drinking water? Like, do you think that expression is more about drinking water than it is about water writ large?
JOHN FLECK: I guess I see it as a piece of a broader narrative that I think is false where poor rural communities often feel constantly threatened that the rich communities are going to take their water away. And so that’s what I mean when I’m challenging it as a myth. I don’t see poor communities tending to think rich communities will simply take the water away, when in fact, you know, we see time and time again there are some really interesting collaborative relationships where a little bit of water close to the city and (so money) flows to the farm community, and the farm community stays intact. The cliché implies water flowing from a poor place to a rich place.
JOHN SABO: Oh, right, uh-huh.
JOHN FLECK: That’s (inaudible) often used. It certainly is the case — and I would never argue that it’s not — that rich communities have a far easier time solving the adaptation resilience problem than poor communities, definitely.
JOHN SABO: [CROSSTALK] yeah, that’s a good distinction.
JOHN FLECK: And this is I think one of the most important ones, which is that growing populations mean inexorable growth in use of water. And in fact we’re seeing the opposite happen. And this is just one that I bang away on all the time, every talk I give I throw three, four, five graphs showing a population going up and water use going down in a myriad of, you know, rich nation — first-world nation situations. You know, it’s commonly the case across the world, mostly in the western United States where I work, and is where most of my data is, but you can see it everywhere. And that’s incredibly important because this is one of the ways of fighting back against the crisis narrative. It’s, like, look, actually we’re already doing a lot to use less water. What are those things we’re doing? And that’s a really important one.
JOHN SABO: All right. Well, let’s move from myths to when-pigs-will-fly scenarios. This is — and this scenario is one we’ve talked about before but, you know, it’s almost taboo to bring it up, and I want to discuss the taboo and why the taboo prevents us from innovating. And the taboo is the Colorado River System is broken, there’s less water in the river than the allocations; that’s not going to change anytime in the near future. Why don’t we just start over? And everybody — you know, I can hear 100,000 people cringing when I say that. And the reason why I’m asking the question is not because I think we should, but I think we should talk about it. Because I think if we talked about it we would be more likely to innovate on what we have. Tell me about this and tell me how that fits into your approach to writing about water.
JOHN FLECK: Yeah, so this is a really interesting example because it highlights attention among a group of people that I’m in the midst of writing a book chapter with, some of us who are on the — we’re never going to do that, meaning tear apart the allocation distribution system and start from scratch, and therefore don’t try and have the discussion, and others within the author group who are more interested in tearing it apart and having the discussion. And so in our case it’s been really useful to have the discussion, right, for us all to put the questions on the table. One of the (reasons don’t) like the discussion is — and so one of the reasons that I’m someone who doesn’t pursue that discussion is that in our problem-solving arenas we have relatively little capacity for broad institutional problem-solving. Our capacity is not unlimited. And insofar as we’re spending time having what I think is likely to be an unproductive conversation in that arena, we’re taking time away from what I think may be the productive conversations that we can have that actually lead to some actually tractable problem-solving. So that’s my argument for not sort of pursuing it. But I think there’s a really good argument that the critics of my view, including my co-authors on this chapter, make that I’m finding intriguingly persuasive, is that there are some fundamental equity issues in terms of parties, and values, and interests that are kind of left out of our current water allocation regime, that are going to stay left out if we aren’t more broadly innovative and thinking about what the solutions might be. And in particular we’re talking about the indigenous communities of the western United States and the tribes, and water for the environment, both of which are interests that don’t have powerful institutions behind them with resources to engage in this more incremental discussion that we’ve had, and both of which have been sort of left out of the whole thing for a long time as a result. So I think I successfully dodged your question, but you may want to push harder than that.
JOHN SABO: Oh, that’s the standard approach. But I’ll just — I’ll follow your dodge and go to the (E-flows) piece, which I think is interesting. Because you said, you know, the two groups that are missing out in the current allocation system are indigenous groups, tribes, and I would probably add in there rural communities to some extent, and then the environment. And it’s interesting to me, we have quite a few segments on equity, so we’ll follow up on that, because (E-flows)’ suggestion is interesting. In Texas there’s a Senate bill, Senate Bill 3, which provides some context for new water rights and how they’re allocated in terms of the environment and the impact on the environment. So it’s almost like the environment has a seat at the table under SB3 in Texas. How would that play out in a Colorado River kind of situation?
JOHN FLECK: That’s an interesting question. I mean, I think one of the things we need is new institutional rulesets. It’s interesting to think about how that might work in a Colorado River context, simply because one of the challenges in this subject, and in fact with tribal water, too, is that the Colorado River Basin governance structure delegates to individual states the responsibility for stuff like that. So an individual state has its water, and it gets to decide within state institutions who gets what. And so individual states can, and have in many cases, had that discussion. So you see, for example, you know, some really interesting innovative examples in Arizona where you have cultures and communities that care in ways that have created some neat novel institutional arrangements to allow (inaudible), but especially in the State of Colorado, which has both, you know, a strong sort of environmental political culture combined with the advantage of being upstream and having some obligations under the Colorado River Compact to move a bunch of water downstream anyway. So you’ve got more water to work with in a place like Colorado. And so you have sort of some enablement for — and the creation of some institutional structures around environmental flows that have enabled more of this. I mean, New Mexico is really an interesting example for this because we’re just trying to come up with tools for how to incorporate an example of what — sort of when you’re talking about in Texas’ case, and we just haven’t quite done that. And it’s in part because traditional water institutions view that as a threat, traditional water-using constituencies view that as a threat and have tended to dominate the political institutions. So I don’t know — I don’t know. It’s a hard nut to crack.
JOHN SABO: Yeah. No, those are good thoughts. And I think, you know, my mind was drifting towards the Delta and Minute 319 kind of stuff. And I think the observation of how you would do it systemwide and how you might exploit current policy and current allocation requirements (inaudible) delivery (flows) is a good one.
JOHN FLECK: Yeah. I mean, there was this great idea that some of the environmentalists proposed back in the early 2000s, which the idea was one percent for the Delta. Like, if everybody across the Basin just kicked in one percent — we could all easily do this… And I loved this. I was, like, intuitively this is super-attractive. I’m happy to give up one percent of my water in my house for this, right? But the institutional mechanisms to sort of do it — to have every individual party across the Basin give up one percent and then move the accounting through the system, it just was — the transaction costs were staggering. The political, and institutional, and water accounting transaction costs were just staggering. And it sort of illustrates the decentral- the problem associated with the decentralized nature of the water management.
JOHN SABO: That’s interesting, yeah.
JOHN FLECK: I wrote a very naïve newspaper column early on about what a great idea that was. And I look back on it (inaudible) just, like, really? Did I think that?
JOHN SABO: All right, we’re going to end with a question or two on groundwater, and we’ll see where we go. So — and crisis. So I’ve written a lot about this, and in this — this is going to delve into science a little bit. And I think, you know, when I asked you about why do journalists do this, scientists do this, too, you know, this crisis-focus. You know, there are many papers out there that say, you know, this is — you know, water is going to be gone by this date. And that includes the focus in groundwater I think, especially satellite-based measurement of groundwater on, “Well, here are the hotspots of crisis, big red maps of where aquifers are overdrawn.” And I’m not arguing that those aquifers aren’t overdrawn and that it isn’t a problem that we need to address. But how do we turn that around? How do we turn — how would you suggest scientists — we turn scientists around to start thinking about how to propose a solution and do science on that?
JOHN FLECK: Yeah. So this is an area where it’s not clear to me at this point that we need more science. And the reason I say that is because every one of those big red hotspots on a gray satellite map, for example — which are, you know, the satellites that are measuring the depletion of aquifers — the folks who have wells in the middle of that red thing, they already know that, right? They have a well and they know that their electricity bill is going up because they’re pumping farther, or they’re measuring the depths of the groundwater. So the satellite is not saying anything that the people actually in the position to make the water management decisions don’t already know. And this is one of the — you know, one of the fascinating things to me about the (gray status), it’s been so useful in providing the global picture to people like me who want to know what’s going on in India, or across the Ogallala Aquifer in San Joaquin Valley, for example, the places where we’ve over (inaudible). But folks in those places already knew, right? So — and the actions required don’t depend on having additional satellite data telling them something that they already knew; they depend on other things, right? And they depend on the social and community structures. And so the space here is for — and the need for action is not on the part of the physical scientists, right? There’s not some more physical science that’s going to… I mean, there’s some bits of physical science that are going to be useful going forward in the areas in terms of this groundwater management. But what we need there is the social science, the social scientists who can look at the community structures and the decision-making frameworks that are leading to that overdraft and help us to better understand what the collaborative community structures are that could help us overcome this tragedy, the comments that we’re seeing in those places, right? And this another great example of the planes not crashing. There are a bunch of places that have done quite well in overcoming this problem. Albuquerque, my own city is an example of this, right? But — and, you know, when I (wrote) “water is for fighting over” I spent a bunch of time in the work (inaudible), and she and her colleagues and students spent a lot of time studying the groundwater basins of southern California, where community governance — self-governance structures, public entrepreneurs who led the development of collaborative institutions and communities, came together to understand this is a shared resource and we need to reduce our use of it and change the way we govern it and succeed it. And so what we need is not the physical science; what we need is the social science to help understand how those successful shared resource management structures in these (common-pool) resources can be most used and exploited. And I think we’re really ripe for that. And you’re seeing this grand experiment in California’s Central Valley with — what is it called — the — it’s SGMA, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act? I can never remember what the S is for. SGMA. Right, so you’re seeing, you know, an attempt at building these new institutional governance widgets that maybe can help us overcome these problems.
JOHN SABO: I couldn’t agree more. I think this is — you know, and when I said “science” I meant science writ large. And I think, you know, we’re seeing this kind of science, and especially multidisciplinary science, includes physical scientists, but led by social science to tackle these problems. One last question on that, and we talked about this before, and it’s the idea of, well, if we’re going to… Well, I’ll just put out the topic. It’s aquifers are empty but that makes them a great place to store water if they’re empty, so they could be the reservoirs of the future. Do we know enough to know if that’s a valuable methodology, and is there value and physical science in that spot?
JOHN FLECK: I think there’s definitely really important physical science to be done there. And, you know, you see this actually, for example, in southern California it’s been going on for a long time. People have been just sort of using them that way for more than a century actually. You know, mountain (inaudible) runoff aquifer storage has been going on since the 1890s in southern California. So people have been sort of using this idea for a long time. And I think you really see a bunch of progress being made in this area. You see a lot of the discussion of that, for example, in SGMA-related activities in California’s Central Valley. You see a lot of…
JOHN SABO: Flood-managed aquifer recharge, yeah.
JOHN FLECK: Yeah, you see a lot of good work in southern California on this as well. And there are I think really important technical questions about, among other things, water quality as we recharge, as we use them as reservoirs what are the water-quality implications? We (inaudible) something we have spent time — folks here in New Mexico spent some time thinking about because we’re kind of late to the aquifer recharge — to the aquifers and reservoirs game. And also recovery, right? And there’s some risk — you can just put it all in the ground, and will we be able to get it out again? And what are the issues? And then there’s a bunch of really interesting, you know — (kicking) the — sort of the special (scientists) — sort of institution, cultural, and regulatory issues about how we decide whose water that is and when someone puts it in, who gets to take it out? And when and how do we get to take it out? But we’ve seen this in Albuquerque. I mean, the sort of — the framing, the metaphor that our water utility has been using is in fact just what you’re talking about. This is a reservoir. This is our drought reserve. We’re storing water down there as a hedge against climate change and future drought. And that rising aquifer that we’ve been so successful of is not intrinsically valuable; it’s valuable as a water storage asset.
JOHN SABO: Exactly. Well, great. Well, this has been a fantastic discussion. I always like our conversations. This one went — you know, touched on so many more topics that we — than I even anticipated, which is fun. And I like your blog. And so anyway, thank you for joining and I look forward to talking to you next time.
JOHN FLECK: Thanks for having me. Thanks for doing this. This is great.
JOHN SABO: Cool. Thanks a lot.
JOHN SABO: That’s it for this episode of Audacious Water. If you like the show please rate or review us and tell your colleagues and friends. For more information about Audacious water visit our website at Audaciouswater.org/podcast. Until next time I’m John Sabo.
