What if aridity is normal?
Drought is a word with huge underlying implications and connotations, and although the last six years are the driest on record in Idaho, the record doesn't go back very far on a geologic scale.
For that reason, Wood River Valley hydrologist Lee Brown was a little disturbed when participants at a two-day conference in Boise earlier this week used the word at least 50 times. He kept score on the corner of a folded newspaper.
"My real worry about that word, drought, is that hidden under it are two value-laden assumptions," Brown said. "One is that drought is bad. The other is that it's abnormal. You heard it over and over again at this conference: 'When this thing is over.' It may well be that aridity is normal.
"It's a huge disservice to people to tell them this is temporary when you really don't know."
But if you ask Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Karl Dreher, one of the conference participants, the current dry spell is a once-every-500-years occurrence, and it is stressing the people and economies of the Northwest.
"We've had drought periods (in the last 100 years), but they were interspersed with normal years," Dreher said. "This is the first year that drought has crept into the Boise and Payette basins ...What we're going through is bad, but it could get worse."
For Brown, the hypothesis that drought is normal in the West is not solely based on historic data. As people continue to crowd the planet, they are forging new impacts to the earth and its weather patterns. Even if drought was not normal 10 years ago, it might be in another 10 years.
"What we really don't know is if global warming is causing a new wrinkle and causing these things," he said.
The two-day conference, called Troubled Water, brought together water gurus, historians, economists and politicians from throughout the country. Among conference attendees, the Wood River Valley was well represented. Brown, Blaine County Planner Tom Bergin, House Minority Leader Wendy Jaquet, D-Ketchum, Ketchum businesswoman Nicola Potts, and Picabo rancher John Peavey said the conference gave them some thoughts they could chew on.
The conference was an exercise in deduction, as speakers first addressed water quality and quantity on a global scale before moving on to the West, Idaho and the Snake River Plain. This year's woeful water year in the Northwest was high on the minds of many.
Idaho is sitting on a "volatile" situation, Dreher said.
Jaquet, a member of the state's interim legislative committee seeking solutions to the state's water conundrums, admitted that recent dry years have forced people to take a closer look at Idaho's natural and man-made water systems.
"We know that we're at least 20 years behind the eight ball, and the drought has forced people to look at it," she said, qualifying that she believes Idaho was innovative with its approaches to sorting out water rights, a process called adjudication.
Brown put it a little more bluntly.
"Idaho is retarded," he said. "It's behind these other states in the level of conflict and rancor over water. If you go into Utah or California or Nevada, they've been beating themselves up for years."
Brown theorized that Idaho has enjoyed years of relative calm with comparison to its Western neighbors because it has not yet experienced the population booms they have. Idaho does not yet have a Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver or Los Angeles. But it probably will.
"Other states have high levels of urbanization. As they move from agriculture to urban, a real fight occurs, and to keep from making the fight so terrible, they look for ways that everyone can win," Brown said. "We're still not in a real urban-rural fist fight yet."
Brown's theory appeared to hold with one of the key conference findings: namely that consensus and cooperation are keys to resolving water conflicts in the West and around the world.
"There is no single part of the water industry that can do it by itself," said Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner John Keys in a summary of the conference.
But if Brown is correct, then the conference revealed that Idaho has not yet faced its toughest times.
"My guess is that we're just starting in Idaho to have fights that have already been fought in other states," he said, adding that agriculture usually seems to lose when the dust from those fights settles.
"Scarcity's a given fact, so where are you going to get it from?" he asked. "Well, agriculture's the fattest cow."
Conference participants confirmed that agriculture is the most consumptive use of water in the West. Even in California, with 35.4 million people, 75 percent of the water goes to agriculture, said John Leshy, a University of California law professor.
"That's good news in a way," Leshy said. "You only need to dry up a little bit of agriculture to feed a lot of urban population."
Before Idaho comes to grips with that reality, Brown thinks it will have to bottom out a little more. Either the dry years will have to continue or the population will have to continually increase, or both.
"You've got to get both eyes black, lose your teeth, lose your wife," he said. "I don't think this state's been beat up enough yet."
As Idaho enters its sixth consecutive year with below-average water supplies, the state's thinkers are butting heads to seek solutions and plan for the future. The privately managed Magic Reservoir has not been full for at least six years. Photo by David N. Seelig
