| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
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Politicized activists never have a clue what they are talking about. They read some stuff written by bureaucrats and other activists - or by researchers who apparently gain their knowledge from the moon's rays while sitting atop their towers - and engage in an essentially content free discourse.
. . . inefficient irrigation wastes more water than all the people of the world use (efficiently or inefficiently) for all their drinking, bathing, manufacturing, and industry. By a long shot. Worldwide, 70% of all water use is agricultural irrigation, according to the UN World Water Development Report. (22-23% is used for industry, and the remaining 7-8% is domestic use.) In the US, irrigation uses 80%, and in the dry western states 90%, according to the USDA. What's more, the UN's World Water Assessment Program says that almost 60% of irrigation water is wasted. (These and many other impressive statistics at International Water Management Institute and Earth Policy Institute.) Usage and efficiency differs from country to country, but to give you an idea of scale, the unit of measure for irrigation in the US is an acre-foot: the amount of water required to fill an acre of land one foot deep. (That's about 1.2 million liters.)There is no such thing as inefficient irrigation. This is a bureaucrat's mindless confusion about the reality of water. Water is never wasted, it is always used. The issue is only whether the use is on the books or off.Why does all this irrigation water get squandered, and how can it be fixed?
For poor farmers, irrigation water is usually squandered by lack of infrastructure--bringing water from river or dam to field using canals without linings or covers, which would prevent water soaking into unfarmed soil or evaporating into the air.
Bureaucrats and activists, having no contact with reality, are only concerned with the books. There is nothing outside the text, or numbers. But the living planet is the big book, the true book, where all accounts are balanced and settled.
Start with the watershed - an area of land that drains from mountains and plains into some sink. There are tributaries, aquifers, rivers and maybe lakes and seas. The time it takes for the water to travel from the top to the bottom of the watershed matters. If it is impeded - either by natural obstructions such as beaver dams or dead fall snags, or by human built dams and tanks - it soaks in, replenishes aquifers, and flows underground in the same general way as surface waters flow, ending up in the same places.
Ecosystems become established wherever there is water. Over the eons and centuries humans have "improved" these natural watersheds by straightening and deepening sloughs into canals to direct water to places it would not naturally flow, or direct more water to places it went to in its own lazy way.
The amount of water that arrives at a destination point is not a useful measure. The whole watershed must be considered including aquifers that got recharged and ecosystems that were supported by "loss" such as seepage from unlined canals or evaporation from open canals. Paving canals or putting the water in pipes destroys ecosystems. It kills the surface systems along the route first, but by depriving the aquifers of recharge water it eventually kills everything.
This principle - that water is always used and all we can do is choose how it is used - applies at every level. On each farm the same sorts of choices are made. If you indulge in plasti-culture and weave a web of poly pipes and emitters over your land to slake the thirst of only a few chosen plants then everything else dies. Whole ecosystems shrivel.
If more water is taken from watersheds for use in cities and industries this isn't "saving" water. The water wasn't "wasted" in the first place. It has a use already. All the efficiency talk does is mask a desire and intent to extract more resources from the environment. It's strip mining water. It may be that people will choose to do this in full knowledge, but give them the full knowledge rather than trying to pretty it up with efficiency talk. Let them know that this may dry up aquifers and make wells go dry or toxic since there is less ground water recharge. Let them know that ecosystems will dry up in the areas where the water is sealed into pipes or in lined, covered canals. Let them know that the creatures that got their drinking water from these open sources will move away or die. Let them know that the alkalai salts accumulated on the bottom of these now dry tanks and sloughs will blow on the wind and make the air caustic. Let them know the costs of the water they take from the land.
The research noted in the previous post revealed the difficulty even bright and well educated people have in understanding natural systems, the "limitation of people’s mental models: weak intuitive understanding of stocks and flows—the concept of accumulation in general, including principles of mass and energy balance". Such understanding is essential to making useful water policies. There is no free water, no wasted water, no unused water. All we can do is make choices about its use and bear the costs of those decisions. Each water user has this task, at every level.
Few grasp the consequences of their choices, even after the effects become apparent. In the west we drink whisky and fight about water. There isn't a drop of water anywhere that has not been adjudicated. Nobody gets away with anything since their neighbors will sue over every infraction. They'll even make things up to see if they can get some of your water for the price of a lawyer. One consequence of this is that many old ditch systems have been replaced by pipes. Folks "down ditch" would sue those above trying to get more water, and putting it in a pipe helps more water get down to them. The government even paid for a lot of it.
The old ditches are lined with dead trees now. Side sloughs where ditch water seeped and escaped are lined with dead trees too. Even savannah trees such as Blue Oaks that thrive away from the ditch line die since they had adapted to water, lost their fungal water connections in the soil. People stand and stare, wondering aloud why those trees died, never noticing the pattern of death, not undersatnding that it may take five years for the trees to die after a ditch is sealed. They have a "weak intuitive understanding of stocks and flows".
Activists, politicians and their lawyers continue to make a mess of things. They have no idea what they are talking about and don't seem to care. They use environmental issues such as water as wedges to get what they want, but are no different than the old fashioned "venture lawyers" who would sue just to see what they could shake loose. I sure wish some good hearted fellow travelers would beat these folks with a clue stick. You can't usefully intervene in a system that you don't understand. All you do is make a mess. It's not a matter of political will, not something that needs lawyers, demos and fists in the air. It needs more mature mental models more in tune with natural systems, capable of understanding stocks, flows and delayed effects.
Update:
This paper in Ecology & Society discusses a relevant issue. From the abstract:
The appropriate scales for science, management, and decision making cannot be unambiguously derived from physical characteristics of water resources. Scales are a joint product of social and biophysical processes. The politics-of-scale metaphor has been helpful in drawing attention to the ways in which scale choices are constrained overtly by politics, and more subtly by choices of technologies, institutional designs, and measurements. In doing so, however, the scale metaphor has been stretched to cover a lot of different spatial relationships. In this paper, we argue that there are benefits to understanding—and actions to distinguish—issues of scale from those of place and position.That is abstract, but this is a bit less so.
In a process aptly labeled “state simplification” (Scott 1998), states first appeal to wider interests as they go about simplifying diverse local systems, and then use the newly unified systems to rationalize development planning and environmental management. People, institutions, and landscapes are made to fit levels and scales in the states’ systems of accounting and monitoring. Local-level knowledge and institutions are seen as local in scope, relevance, and power, whereas the rules and knowledge of the state have much bigger scope and significance. The capacity of states to circumscribe how scale is represented—whether through policies, laws, or media campaigns, and, if necessary, reinforced through threats and exercise of force—has most of the time far exceeded those of other actors working at more local levels. This capacity is further reinforced by state control of data gathering, analysis, and dissemination. Higher levels win, and winning shifts values more and more in the direction of the higher, state-like levels (Morrill 1999). The greater power of larger places and higher levels has several underlying reasons, including: the dependence of local areas on other places; the greater mobilization capacity of interest groups at higher levels; the heterogeneity of interests and attitudes across local areas; and the dominance of national mass media by higher levels (Morrill 1999). . .Power and politics. Scale, position and place. Water. Worth a read.The politics-of-scale metaphor has been stretched to cover a lot of different relationships. In this paper, we use this metaphor to refer to the situations where different actors contest the spatial extent and resolution of information and decisions, and contrast this with the politics of place and position (see Fig. 1). The “politics of position” refers to politics among locations that depend on their relative physical position, for example, between upstream and downstream water users or those on different banks of a river. The “politics of place” refers to the unfolding of power relations among stakeholders that arise because of the special characteristics of the places interacting above and beyond those arising from levels or position.
In this paper, we illustrate these three kinds of politics—and how they are inter-related—with examples from the governance of water resources in the Mekong region.
Hi Gary
I think your analysis of water ‘wastage’ has some oversimplification that hides the issue.
What isn’t addressed is that leaky canals allow areas that historically didn’t have water to take on riparian characteristics. Many water projects channel water out of the historic floodplain and across upland areas; in dry country, these areas didn’t support riparian vegetation before canalization.
Because evapotranspiration (ET) can account for 20-40% of the water lost in a riparian system, this is one unaddressed source of loss in the water budget of a leaky irrigation system, essentially expanding the area of ET loss.
You’re correct in saying that water lost to irrigation inefficiencies returns to the watershed to recharge acquifers within the basin, but that water is lost to users downstream of the intake, until that point that the channel intersects the acquifer discharge. This can be miles of stream or river in some environments.
Say a user needs 10gpm, and is 5miles from the intake, drawing from an unlined canal. Assume the canal leaks 20% of its volume per mile (a low estimate in some systems), then 20gpm is needed to be pulled from the river to meet that users needs.
If a lined canal can reduce this to 5% (mostly evaporation, theft, and minor leaks), then only 12.5gpm are needed to be pulled from the river, allowing the remaining 7.5gpm to remain instream for wildlife or downstream users
(note that my math is somewhat simplified, but I hope the point is made)
Finally,
“The amount of water that arrives at a destination point is not a useful measure”
I’d disagree with this statement…while it may hold true on a watershed-scale, it doesn’t do the farmer with water rights at the end of the line much good when the tap goes dry. In a freshwater-limited world, we should be certain that when we invest in large capital projects (irrigation and water systems), they use the resource in the most efficient way possible, and don’t use it up for downstream / downtime users.
More than 2 cents, for sure.
Rich
Hi Rich,
We can have a productive disagreement.
Your last point is the one I find most important.
"while it may hold true on a watershed-scale, it doesn’t do the farmer with water rights at the end of the line much good when the tap goes dry."
My focus on the watershed scale is part of the series of posts about stocks, flows and delayed effects. When we look at immediate issues, as you point out, we get a different perspective than when we look at larger areas and longer time frames.
A classic example of this distinction (and a post I had researched a bit, intending to follow this one up) is the massive alteration of the traditional water systems in India by the British. They undid all of the small scale, local cachement irrigation systems that reduced instream flows of rivers so that more water would flow downstream. Part of the motive for this was to assert control over the water, and so the population, but I suspect that they honestly thought they were modernizing and improving things as well.
It was a disaster. Not only do the upland farmers no longer have surface waters for irrigation, they no longer have the shallow wells they used for other purposes. The aquifers have dropped both because they aren't recharged and because entrepreneurs drill deep wells, pump water and sell it to the farmers. Worse perhaps, the instream flows are too high during storms and flooding has increased downstream. Now they need flood control dams. It inverts the desired water management strategy, providing less water in the dry season and more water in the wet season. It's a death spiral that grows ever worse. Impeding the flows evens things out a bit, extends the wet season in a sense.
In a natural system water is impeded. In N. America for example, especially in the west, beaver dams blocked almost every tributary, and snags did the same on larger flows. There was a continual evolution. The dam ponds silted up and became meadows, the streams meandered, and the cycle repeated. There was a lot of soggy ground. People did the same sorts of things but more so. Even when all they had was horse power they created stock tanks on every permanent stream and seasonal slough.
"What isn’t addressed is that leaky canals allow areas that historically didn’t have water to take on riparian characteristics. Many water projects channel water out of the historic floodplain and across upland areas; in dry country, these areas didn’t support riparian vegetation before canalization.
Because evapotranspiration (ET) can account for 20-40% of the water lost in a riparian system, this is one unaddressed source of loss in the water budget of a leaky irrigation system, essentially expanding the area of ET loss."
This is true but not a reason to dry them up again. It's been over 100 years, even in the western US. Ecosystems have established and are of value. What can be done is to manage those riparian areas. When they are overgrown with dense stands of small weedy trees they do ET lots and lots of water. Thinning those areas is good for the health of the trees and uses less water. Too dense a stand makes for sickly trees too. Fire suppression and lack of beavers and such prevents natural thinning.
In my neighborhood this is a problem even on rivers. So much water is transpired that the summer air is hazy, and instream flows can be reduced to a trickle. Conscientious land owners pay major money to do controlled burns to reduce that loss and improve forest health. It's not only expensive, it's dangerous and difficult to organize. The fire fighters run the show and have to be prepared to fight a pitched battle if something goes awry. Not that many decades ago, after the beavers had been taken but before fire suppression and logging bans, people thinned them. Some went for lumber and some went for charcoal. It worked. If you cut them right suckers will regrow from the roots and you'll soon have another crop of trees. The old timers called that leaving something for the grand kids.
There are special situations. In S. Africa for example the importation of European trees wreaked havoc. They are invasive in that environment and have spread in the wild. They ET water and dry up permanent rivers, cutting off water to cities that native trees never did. Something similar has happened along the Colorado river and some other western US rivers.
"In a freshwater-limited world, we should be certain that when we invest in large capital projects (irrigation and water systems), they use the resource in the most efficient way possible, and don’t use it up for downstream / downtime users."
The argument I'm making is the same, but it considers longer time frames. When water is locked up in pipes and the environment withers, then over time there is less and less water available, and when it is available it's too much. All over the world we hear of lowland flooding due to rapid upland drainage during heavy rains. It may not even rain in the lowlands but the water speeds downstream. The twin problems of drought and flood are directly related.
It isn't that I don't understand your points. I'm the ditch master for our local water co-op and deal with all of this daily during the season. I wasn't only kidding about fighting over water. It is my task to see that every one in the co-op gets their adjudicated water, and know I'll hear about it if they don't. But I also see the damage that putting our ditch into plastic has done to the environment.
I'm the only one left on the ditch (we still call it a ditch) that flood irrigates. I do it on purpose and get better results. Using a laser level I have cut many small ditches following the contour of the land. They are dead level*, and so narrow and shallow that you might not even notice them, but they catch and spread water evenly, allowing it to soak in rather than run off. It's a benefit both during summer irrigation and during winter rains. Combined with the work I've done to raise soil PH and increase organic matter I now have much, much better results than my plasti-culture neighbors using less water! In fact, in the past month I've taken over management on three other ranches. They want some of that stuff I got. When we climb the mountain and look down at our area you can spot my place in a heart beat. It's so much better you can see it from miles away. I'm infested with wildlife. They think this is a park and they hang here all the time. A reason that this is so is that by retaining the water and letting it soak in I build a water column. The subsoil doesn't dry out. Deep rooted plants are always well watered, and all plants are thus encouraged to grow deeper roots rather than shallower but wider root systems.
This is thinking in terms of stocks, flows and delayed effects. I build that water column when there is abundant water and then maintain it during the dry season. Over time the sward grows increasingly able to drain excess water yet absorb and retain sufficient water. It isn't all due to water management, the PH and organic matter count as well, but it all works together.
I'm not a lone voice in this. There is another type of environmental advocacy, especially in developing countries, saying just what I have, and farmers doing it on their own, sometimes in defiance of authorities. I read about a semi-famous fellow in India once that was urban educated but went native so to speak in a village. He revived the old ways and had just the effects I explained above. It was also crufted up with a bunch of quasi-socialist collective mumbo-jumbo, but the water management part could be done by individuals. The more that do so the better things are in a region but it isn't necessary to force everyone to comply. They will come around eventually just as my neighbors have begun to do. It works better. And there's no folderol with expensive pipes, filters and emitters that need constant maintenance and are a disposal problem. All you need is a shovel. My laser level shtick is just to satisfy my inner geek. The same thing can be done by working in the rain and letting the water tell you what is level. I've done that in the past and still do it from time to time.
Still, it's a choice. Urbans and flat landers may well decide that it's OK to dry up the uplands and live in a semi-desert with what amounts to potted plants - little areas of moisture in otherwise dry fields - and may not care to consider the long term and large scale issues, or have needs so great that they sacrifice that future. My intent is to inform rather than persuade, though it's a little stronger than that to counter the deceptive attempts by others to persuade without informing. And it's probably clear how I would choose though I know that this is partly subjective - I value those environments that are lost. There are costs and benefits either way. You can hoard water, spread it wide and thin, and so get an immediate increase in production at the cost of the loss of other environments and a monotonic decrease is water availability over time. Or, you can be generous with water at its origins and so cover less area to a greater depth and have a montonic increase in water avilability over time (with proper management, ET etc.). Pay me now or pay me more later as the fellow said.
* actually, they aren't dead level at all places. When there is a ridge the contour ditches fall slightly toward the ridge, dumping more water on that spine, which then falls back off until caught by the next contour ditch, which then carries it back to the ridge line, though at a lower elevation than before. repeat until flat again.
Posted by: back40 at August 9, 2006 09:58 PMProductive disagreements are the best kind :)
This one is really mostly about scale and perspective, I think, rather than anything fundamental.
I've read some about the Indian hydrologic fiasco...I look forward to reading what you've put together on it. I'm not sure where it stands now, but at one point the government claimed all of the rainwater that fell, not allowing folks to gather it off of their rooftops. Yikes.
I'm not familiar with your location, but I've done some watershed work in Eastern OR, in the sage-steppe ecoregions. Like most of the west, it's very water limited, and the water budget just doesn't allow for 'extra' upland riparian areas created by leaks in water projects...between fish and wildlife needs and consumptive use, those off-channel areas are a sink that complicates things. A local issue, too, is the fact that most of those areas get invaded by nonnative species unless heavily managed, as opposed to native vegetation. Rarely are the resources spent to manage this. Your mileage may vary, however.
I envy you your ditch water (though perhaps not your job as ditchmaster....must be pretty thankless). Ironically, us wet western oregon landowners have lots of dry weather to put up with this time of year. Travelling up to the adjoining ridges, 3 seasons of the year, our place stands out as green and lush compared to the neighbors...now, though, we're as crispy as the rest of them. After I get all of the cross fencing in, I can start spending more resources on liming and fertilizing....one farm project at a time.
Your levelled ditches sound great, too...I did a little 'keyline ripping' this last fall, to some good effect. At the least, it broke up some compacted soils; hopefully, over time, it will raise the groundwater table to replenish my seasonal pond. Fingers crossed....
Cheers
Rich
Posted by: rich at August 10, 2006 11:14 AMWe are on the western (wetter) slopes of the Sierras above the central valley of California. The water I was talking about above comes from the Middle fork of the Tule river. (I also do management on properties that get it from the North fork of the Tule and Hickman creek. There are some springs too.)
And you're right, it isn't any phun getting hollered at by grumpy fellows just spoiling for a tussle. I got a nasty note from one this morning who is suspicious of another fellow poaching his water. I get it from both sides of the dispute. I wouldn't do the job except that it's the best way to see that I get my propers by keeping the system neat and clean. It's mostly fixing blow outs and purging debris from the line. Nasty, dirty work that you couldn't pay me to do, but I do it for water.
"After I get all of the cross fencing in, I can start spending more resources on liming and fertilizing....one farm project at a time."
Is there a co-gen plant in your area? Wood ashes can adjust PH as well as providing potassium and phosphorous. There's some calcium too as well as other minerals. Often they can be had for the cost of hauling so long as you don't make a dusty mess that they would get blamed for. It doesn't last as long as lime but it works faster. A half'n'half mix can be good. I find that the RNV of wood ashes is about the same as grade B ag lime.
"I did a little 'keyline ripping' "
Keyline is a good system. It sort of collects a lot of ancient wisdom and fits the pieces together into a coherent whole. And it's fitting that we would get some good systems from Oz since they have some of the same sorts of terrain. . . but more so in many cases. I listen to them and the Kiwis a lot.
Posted by: back40 at August 10, 2006 05:04 PMNo co-gen near us...that'd be a great resource, though. I'm always scavenging, though, so I'll keep looking for something along those lines.
Darren Dougherty (www.permaculture.biz) is coming to the US in late winter....we've talked some about a keyline / earthworks class on the west coast. We're still looking for a good, all around site. It sounds like your land is pretty well set up, but if you're interested, drop a line.
Cheers
Rich
Posted by: rich at August 12, 2006 11:34 AMMy eyes may be bigger than my belly. I'm worried that I've over committed my time already with new projects and will drop the ball or do hurried, sloppy work or something. I may talk big and joke but that's bravado. I hope it's not false and that I do as much and as well in the next few months as I imagine I can. Now that what I've already promised to do has set in I'm declining all new commitments until I've cleared these up. . . about next year this time.
Posted by: back40 at August 12, 2006 01:46 PMWise man...... :)
Posted by: rich at August 13, 2006 08:23 AM