“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” It’s a good saying, and one that I’ve found applicable to my life in a different way than the author probably intended.
Fishing didn’t teach me how to feed myself. But as a conservative, it did open my eyes — and my mind — to the importance of water and conservation policy.
My journey to understanding the importance of water in the policy space started on a work trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There, a half-day guided float trip down the Snake River introduced me to the sport of fly fishing. Riding in the back of a drift boat that looked like something you might see in an Ansel Adams picture, battered old loaner rod and reel in hand, I caught my first trout on a fly (after catching the guide, my clothing, my fishing partner, and at least four bushes on the riverbank, naturally). And with that fish, a new passion — obsession might be more accurate — was born.
Something else was born that day, too. I didn’t know it then, but that morning served as the beginning of a years-long Road to Damascus moment for me on the subject of water.
This was more of an awakening than you might realize. Most know me as an education policy guy. I write about school choice, charter schools, collective bargaining, school finance, etc. Most of my life these days is spent on education-related legislative efforts in various states. I rarely write on other policy topics because, until somewhat recently, I rarely thought about them deeply.
That myopic focus meant I was blissfully unaware and largely uninterested in water policy. Water wasn’t going anywhere, I reasoned, and the screeching of the media about historic drought conditions and dwindling reservoirs was nothing more than the next octave in the never-ending battle between the environmental left and the conservative right.
Of course, I heard the arguments around the state capitol and bumped into various actors on both sides of the debate during my professional travels, but it all seemed too distant and esoteric to be relevant.
In one trench, conservation alarmists issued warnings of a day when rivers would dry up and the mighty reservoirs of the West would become nothing more than empty bowls filled with swirling dust and dead memories of prior abundance. In response, conservatives insisted that climate change was overblown and rejected even the possibility that we might one day find ourselves in an environmental emergency.
Fly fishing for me, though, was not about politics or public policy. It was therapy — the thing I came to rely on to get away from the crushing grind of political debates and lobbying and special interests. When my stress levels spiked, I found that fishing was often the only thing that could quiet my mind and bring me some semblance of peace.
In the river, I could stand quietly in the middle of nature’s cadence and watch the great, unending pattern of life carry out its intricate choreography with no regard for whatever crises and gaffes we humans cooked up on Twitter that day. The river didn’t care about me or my problems or what happened in the news. All it demanded was that I throw the right bugs at the right fish the right way. It was an escape, a refuge. Out of cell range in some shaded canyon, I thought I could leave politics behind.
I should have known better. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find that virtually everything is about public policy in some form. Nowhere is that truer than in the realm of water.
As my days on the water added up, the dots began to connect. Unusually warm temperatures caused the state to implement voluntary closures on some of my favorite rivers. Taking my kayak out to certain reservoirs required me to buy a specialized cart so I could drag it across 50 extra feet of dried-up lakebed to launch.
It finally clicked for me when I took my family to Blue Mesa Reservoir. Fed by the Gunnison River, a mighty tributary of the Colorado River, Blue Mesa is the largest body of water in Colorado with a staggering total capacity of 940,700 acre-feet of water and an active capacity of 748,400 acre-feet.
For those unfamiliar with that terminology, an acre-foot equates to the amount of water it would take to cover about an acre of land (think roughly the size of a football field) with a foot of water. Each acre-foot amounts to roughly 326,000 gallons, which means Blue Mesa Reservoir can hold about 306 billion gallons of water at full capacity.
When I visited, many shoreline parking lots at Blue Mesa were no longer useful because the water was too far away. Instead, to access the reservoir, we drove past the parking lot, past an old boat ramp, and down about 100 feet onto the dry lakebed.
Wind whipped across the surface of the water, funneled into a gale by the towering walls ringing the bed of the reservoir. Once covered by melted snow from the peaks above Gunnison and Crested Butte, these walls now stood naked, striated by ever-lower water lines like the sides of an old bathtub after someone pulls the plug. Cows roamed across cracked soil that once played host to aquatic life. My sons were too interested in looking at the fossils, old fences, and various pieces of detritus that once lay hidden at the bottom of this colossal body of water to even pick up a rod.
By the end of September, Blue Mesa was projected to reach a total live storage level of 295,000 acre-feet — only about a third of its capacity. The actual levels as of mid-October are lower: roughly 280,000 acre-feet. That means something in the neighborhood of 200 billion gallons of water — enough to cover about half a million football fields — is missing. Let that sink in for a moment.
Where did the water go? Much of it has been shipped downstream, where it is needed to backfill the vast reservoirs that keep large portions of the western United States alive. Lake Powell stands at just 24 percent full, having lost about 16 feet of water in the last year. The Glen Canyon Dam at the tail of the reservoir generates power for nearly six million households across seven states, including Colorado.
The dam only works so long as the water keeps flowing. Power production at Glen Canyon is already down by nearly half thanks to falling water levels. Many predict that the lake will never fill again, and some are actively calling for it to sit empty so limited water can instead be used to fill the vitally important Lake Mead.
These dwindling reservoirs have important ramifications for energy policy—particularly in Colorado, where Gov. Jared Polis has committed to moving the state to 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2040 and state lawmakers have passed legislation designed to force the adoption of ever more stringent energy conservation codes that will take us closer to the elimination of natural gas and the full electrification of newly constructed homes and other buildings.
While Glen Canyon Dam and other hydrogeneration facilities provide an important direct source of energy, they further act as a critical backup system for days when solar and wind power can’t meet the demands of an ever-growing energy grid—a grid set to be increasingly strained by the political push toward full electrification.
These problems are not theoretical. California has, somewhat ironically, become more reliant on natural gas as hydrogeneration capacity falls. Likewise, Colorado lawmakers will soon have to wrestle with the tension between their ambitious green policy goals and the reality of an unsustainable electrical grid. Unless Colorado is prepared to adopt new forms of zero-emission production, such as nuclear generation, the state will be forced to continue relying on so-called “dirty” energy sources or suffer the consequences of unreliable energy availability as hydroelectric generation becomes increasingly unable to fill the gaps left by wind and solar.
While things are particularly bad at Blue Mesa and across the interconnected Colorado River system, this is not an isolated phenomenon. Reservoirs statewide are at 78 percent of capacity. That level may not be the worst things have ever been, but it’s still startlingly noticeable to those of us who spend a lot of time on the water. Monsoon conditions have helped in terms of overall precipitation, but much of this additional water is simply absorbed by sun-parched soil before it can make it into the reservoirs and the rivers that feed them.
Meanwhile, the entire southwestern United States remains in the throes of a 22-year “megadrought” that is, by some estimates, the worst in 1,200 years. Parts of some rivers are running dry for the first time in decades, and some towns are already facing the unimaginable scenario of literally running out of water. In Utah, officials are starting to talk about the health effects of toxic dust released from the drying bed of the Great Salt Lake.
The drought has strained a century-old agreement divvying up the Colorado River’s water between seven southwestern states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the Upper Basin and Arizona, California, and Nevada in the Lower Basin—to the political breaking point, rippling across agriculture, energy, and manufacturing sectors across the West.
The federal government stands on the periphery of this contentious debate, and with it, the looming threat of federal intervention if the members of the Colorado River Compact do not reduce their water usage. On the home front, localities like Aurora are already enacting additional water restrictions, and we should expect those restrictions to become more widespread and severe as the drought persists.
Somewhere in the middle of this slow-motion crisis are the trout and the anglers who, like me, have grown to love chasing them. I still stand in the rivers every chance I get, drawing comfort from the steady babble of water washing over rocks worn smooth by eons of current. I now carry a thermometer so I can check water temperatures throughout the day and ensure that I am not releasing trout into water too warm to hold the proper amount of dissolved oxygen.
I can no longer enjoy my favorite streams in blissful, isolated ignorance. Now, as I watch setting sun sparkle across the riffles and cast to rising fish chasing the latest mayfly hatch, I am keenly aware that I may be looking at something temporary—an image of a rapidly fading past. I no longer believe the rivers are immortal, and I fear that the day may come that they are weakened to a point that they cannot provide for us physically or mentally. And, if I’m honest, I find that prospect terrifying.
I’m not an expert on water policy but resolving this crisis to the benefit of everyone requires a nationwide effort to think outside the box. We cannot ration our way out of this with policies that merely reallocate diminishing water in streams, rivers, reservoirs and lakes. Any real solution must increase the supply of freshwater downstream, likely in part through desalination advancements. More desalination along the coasts, where rising water levels pose a set of concerns, could conceivably make large coastal cities less reliant on upstream water, thus facilitating the potential trading of water rights. A meaningful solution will probably include a combination of water recycling, desalination, “snow storage,” and any number of other innovative approaches that move us away from merely allocating and rationing a commodity that should not be so scarce.
I cannot be the only one who feels the urgent need to resolve the dilemma of freshwater scarcity. Skiers, snowboarders, boaters, paddlers, tubers — Coloradans across the outdoor spectrum must see the same writing on the same wall. Certainly, those affected by drought-fueled disasters like wildfires and mudslides understand the issue. But my experience has been that, like the proverbial boiling frog, most people seem unwilling or unable to process the crisis slowly playing out around them.
I no longer count myself among these unwitting witnesses to an unfolding ecological disaster. For me, fly fishing has become the window through which I can interpret the far-reaching consequences of water and conservation policy. The time I’ve spent on the water has laid bare the distinction between reality and rhetoric, between politics and practicality. I’ve learned how to catch trout, sure. But I’ve also learned that water policy is not a left issue or a right issue — it’s a human issue.
And now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I doubt I can ever look away.
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