The Colorado River is shrinking. Hard choices lie ahead, this scientist warns
By Erik Stokstad
In a spring morning in 1996, then–Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stood at Glen Canyon Dam, a concrete bulwark in Arizona that holds back the Colorado River to form Lake Powell. During a live broadcast on the Today show, a popular national TV program, Babbitt opened valves to unleash an unprecedented experimental flood into the Grand Canyon just downstream. As onlookers applauded, water gushed from gaping outlet pipes. Babbitt called the experiment, which was testing one way of restoring Grand Canyon ecosystems damaged by the dam, the start of “a new era” in environmental management.
Jack Schmidt was underwhelmed by the scene. He had spent years helping design the controversial experiment—which cost electric utilities nearly $3 million in lost revenue—and fighting to launch it. But compared with the natural deluges that raged down the canyon before the dam was completed in 1963, he remarked to a Los Angeles Times reporter, “This is a pretty wimpy flood.”
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As a warming climate reduces the river’s flow, Schmidt, 70, is making what could be his most important push to shape the fate of his beloved waterway. He and his colleagues are working to inject a dose of scientific reality into public debate over water resources that, the team says, is too often clouded by wishful or outdated thinking. The biggest delusion: that there will be enough water in a drier future to satisfy all the demands from cities, farmers, power producers, and others, while still protecting sensitive ecosystems and endangered species. The hard truth, according to long-term scenarios produced by Schmidt and his colleagues, is that some users will have to consume less water, and that policymakers will face agonizing choices sure to produce winners and losers.
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The moment is ripe, as a record-breaking drought provides a taste of what more climate change could bring. Last month, Lake Mead, a second massive reservoir downstream from Lake Powell, dropped to its lowest level ever. At the same time, government officials are beginning a 5-year process of renegotiating several key agreements over use and management of the river’s water. They have sought Schmidt’s views. “We had Jack and his team present to our leadership because of the high regard we hold for their research,” says Katrina Grantz, assistant regional director of the Upper Colorado Basin for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which operates many major dams.
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