Hi all! A quick announcement. I began a very exciting new role with the climate publication Grist in July. If you don’t read Grist already, you definitely should. It’s an independent, nonprofit newsroom doing phenomenal climate reporting and storytelling.

I plan to keep posting essays and Q&As while I’m working there, though my tempo will be a bit slower! Here’s my latest.

In the last month, I have written two articles for Grist describing China’s and the United States’ efforts to master their economic forces for political gain. In one, the Chinese state has successfully created enormous productive capacity in strategic industries, but now wants to prevent that capacity from generating destructive price competition and financial weakness; in the other, the Trump administration wants abundant, cheap oil and gas while simultaneously encouraging producers to invest and expand, despite market incentives pushing oil companies to focus more on financial returns than expansion.

In both cases, it seemed the power these governments were hoping to harness, price, is the same factor that made these industries so difficult to control. I immediately thought of climate change and the effort to leverage cheap renewable energy prices for an energy transition. In all these instances, the reward for successfully utilizing price can be enormous. At the same time, price’s power is in its self-determination, a fact that makes it exceedingly difficult to harness. The great political challenge of the next industrial era may not be controlling productive forces, but developing institutions capable of steering systems whose power depends on their partial autonomy from political control.

In a recent Liferock post, I described French historian Fernand Braudel’s question, “Which civilizations will tame, and domesticate, and humanize the machine?” With that question, Braudel was asking which global civilization or country will succeed in mastering and humanizing industry. Braudel’s “machine” can be understood not as technology itself, but as the vast productive systems humans have constructed and which subsequently acquire dynamics difficult for their creators to control.

Karl Polanyi, the Austro-Hungarian economic historian, was preoccupied with a similar question, only he wasn’t describing physical machines like nuclear weapons or blast furnaces. Instead, he was describing the modern market economy.

Polanyi recognizes that humans — namely governments — invented the machine of exchange-based economies; he also recognized that they spawned a need to constrain their de-humanizing impacts, a process some

might call domestication. The self-regulating market was institutionally constructed, rather than naturally emerging, and states played a critical role in constructing and maintaining the legal and political realities necessary for it, which then came to be regarded as “natural”: individual, self-interested actors operating with price as their primary factor in decision-making. That intentionally planned system — so different from previous economies that were embedded in non-economic social structures — became dehumanizing, Polanyi argued. In that sense, governments inserted the inhuman wildness into the machine, making a man-made object alien to man.

Polanyi emphasized price as a defining characteristic of the modern economy. Polanyi aligned with classical economists in emphasizing “exchange” value based on supply and demand. But unlike classical economists, he asserted that this value was not something natural to humans. Polanyi asserted that this price-based system was not natural—it was the product of state-led institutional reforms to society, and it could be socially harmful. Where pre-capitalist economies emphasized “reciprocity” and “redistribution” along with exchange, price-based capitalism is excessively obsessed with exchange.

For Xi and Trump, both attempting to wield exchange-based economies for political ends, this emphasis on price is the key challenge. The Chinese government has induced price wars, trade wars, and overinvestment in many of its key sectors, while US presidents have found it almost impossible to compete with prices as the primary determinant in oil production. Price makes markets powerful, but it also makes them unruly and autonomous.

But if a government can pull it off, and if the goals are worthwhile, the endeavor can yield remarkable results. China’s dominance of manufacturing and 21st-century technologies could be the key in launching it to superpower status. Mastering oil production to lower gasoline prices without bankrupting oil companies could help ensure a political party’s re-election. And in the case of climate change, successfully redirecting productive forces toward a successful energy transition could save millions of lives.

Is there a difference between Trump’s and Xi’s efforts to use markets for geopolitical gain and climate-conscious leaders’ efforts to redirect industries to mitigate climate change? Weaponizing an economy, like Xi and Trump seem to want to do, is surely not what Braudel had in mind when he asked his question about domesticating the machine, but perhaps Braudel’s use of language went further than he intended. Domestication is a broad process with many potential end goals. Domesticated animals can be trained to fight or to love.

Polanyi himself thought more about ways to constrain industrial impulses than to harness them for geopolitical aims. He described modern economic relations as being trapped in a dialectical tension called “double movement,” in which capitalists’ desire for “improvement” (wealth accretion and development) competed with regular people’s desire for “habitation” (dignified and livable conditions). But exchange-based markets don’t just create social and environmental challenges that policy must mitigate—they also make using market economies as a source of power difficult and sometimes self-defeating. This difficulty has different implications depending on what a leader wants to use an industry to accomplish: economies could theoretically be instrumentalized toward political influence, war, geopolitical stability, or environmental goals.

The climate movement is entering an era in which the strategic use of industrial capacity, which has always been an important geopolitical tool, is gaining even greater centrality. Finally, the broader environmental movement will have to contend with the idea that the dynamic of unfettered industry vs. firm-handed regulation no longer captures the entire picture of environmental politics. Global geopolitics are leaning toward a multipolar world in which market-based economies have become tools of influence. Environmentalists, who are well used to combating industrial greed for the sake of a habitable earth, are entering a world where channeling, rather than simply checking, industry is coming into style.

After years of working against the energy transition, price is finally its friend. Renewable energy has become cheap, and that is revolutionizing the discussion around climate change. But cheapness comes with consequences. Cheap energy is a public benefit that can be at odds with the financial interests of the companies producing it. The success of the energy transition could create political problems precisely because it makes energy less valuable as a commodity.

Arizona is notorious in the U.S. West for its groundwater problems — in many rural areas, there is virtually no regulation on pumping the state’s limited aquifers. Mining, dairy farming, and housing development all compete for the last drops of rain and snow that fell in Arizona hundreds of thousands of years ago, when its climate was wetter.

Oldfield told me these discussions open space for productive conversation about this tough issue. They also make science accessible so communities can learn about the latest research regarding their groundwater.

If they can soothe discussions about rural groundwater, could these discussions also be a model for other environmental debates? Communities are navigating a new age in which government institutions have lost trust, industrialization has returned to the United States, and climate change has made resource planning harder. I wondered whether the right response to this polycrisis might be a simple one: sitting down and talking it out.

But this tool is a specialized one, Oldfield seemed to believe. They are context-specific, and they require a human touch. Governments and AI models might struggle to replicate them in their decision-making processes because they lack the trustworthiness of a neutral mediator. And Oldfield was unsure whether they could be used in large communities, such as cities, or across entire states.

The following interview transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Starting off with a broad question — how do these workshops translate into action?

The action that comes after a workshop is all at the hands of the local community, the residents, and the leaders in town who have decided to take up this charge. We host these workshops as neutral conveners. We’re not trying to convince anybody of any particular policy stances. There’s no prescribed outcome at the end of the workshops. I think that’s the secret sauce that helps with the action afterwards, because every workshop has a different outcome. The path each community wants to take is different because the water issues in every community are so different. It’s getting folks in the same room with very diverse perspectives, different types of water users — heavy water users, domestic water users, industry, agriculture, nonprofit, education — all in one place so we can dig through values. There are a lot of differences between different types of water users, but in the end, folks want their town to be vibrant, want their kids and their grandkids living there to have a good quality of life. When you start with those basics, it brings everybody closer on their vision for the future, and once people agree on that, it’s a lot easier than it was beforehand.

Are there any examples where these workshops have inspired concrete action?

Oh, yes. A great example of a concrete action would be in the Patagonia, Sonoita, Elgin region. They had a workshop in October 2025, and the folks who attended have been meeting regularly since then. There are several conservation and watershed groups involved in protecting these beautiful landscapes down there. It’s an important area for bird migration. Bringing everybody together for this one workshop has helped them to collaborate a little bit more. Since the workshop, they’ve been inventorying the data that they have available and trying to streamline methods of collection, so that if something comes up, like a water quality issue or whatever, they’re able to mobilize really quickly to put alerts out to the right people, and to make sure they can kind of jump on the problem before it becomes bigger and unmanageable. They have a Bureau of Reclamation grant for a Watershed Management Plan.

And then, in the Douglas and Willcox basins in Sulphur Springs Valley, where we had the first workshop, an active management area has been established on both basins. And in each active management area, there’s a Groundwater User Advisory Council, and several participants who went to the workshops are serving on those councils. I think they’re appointed by the governor to join, partly because of coming to the workshop, demonstrating leadership in the community.

The sun sets on Saudi-owned agriculture company Fondomonte’s alfalfa and dairy operation in Arizona’s Butler Valley, an area with practically no regulation on groundwater use. The facility has ceased pumping since Arizona chose not to renew its lease of state land, and the state is moving toward imposing groundwater regulations in the region.

Who participates in these workshops?

The workshops really start with one person who reaches out to our office and says, ‘Hey, I think my community would be a good fit for this.’ Then, as we go through a few exploratory meetings, find out what’s going on, and do a little research, we start forming what we call the local steering committee — hand-picking folks who are deeply embedded in the community, are seen as leaders in different ways, and have diverse perspectives. We don’t, you know, like the same thing coming from Phoenix, or coming from the universities, and dictate what folks want to talk about. Then the committee puts together an invitation list with the industries that make sense in town — who’s active in the area, like the largest employers, or you know, the heavier water users, but it’s not always just heavy water users — and then there are a lot of relevant industries experiencing economic growth like tourism, recreation, nature-based restorative economy activities, which are not actually huge water users. And then typically we have county and municipal government, whether it’s staff or elected, and then we’ve had success with tribal leaders as well, not elected, but tribal staff members, like water resource department staff members, at two of our workshops.

What is typically the end product? Is there a document or a plan that comes out of them usually?

We publish a workshop report, and we stay engaged with the community, with continued meetings linking more resources. We keep our ear to the wind for other opportunities, grants. Grant funding and resources are tricky at the moment, but when we hear of things, we share it out with the groups, too.

We’ve launched this peer-to-peer exchange group called the Rural Groundwater Resilience Exchange, and these are groups of folks working on rural groundwater across the state, in different communities. The goal is to create a framework so that these folks can meet regularly and exchange resources. It’s a good place to come to if someone needs advice or needs ideas from others who are working on similar challenges in another location. We’ve called this program the legacy of the workshop program, which enables action that has come from the workshops to continue on for many years, with these groups being able to support each other and to exchange ideas and remain active.

Do you think these workshops are part of a growing trend or something that is becoming more seriously considered in water management circles, maybe something that might even become more institutionalized?

It’s tough to say, at least with the at least with any scientific certainty — we haven’t had a survey go out across the state that confirms that perspectives are changing on this. But it feels anecdotally like there’s a momentum shift taking place, and folks are more interested in understanding the unregulated rural groundwater situation and wanting to quantify how much water there is, how long it’s going to last, how we should be using it, if we should be controlling it or not. I think people are asking those questions, and they’re really big questions, and they’re hard to answer. There isn’t a way for hydrologists to just look underground and calculate how many gallons or how many acre-feet are stored underground.

Do you think this program is uniquely well-suited to groundwater issues, particularly in Arizona, or are there other resources and community decisions where you think this process could also prove useful?

I hesitate to point to any particular issue, but I think bringing people together in an open-ended, neutral way to talk through challenges makes sense. When we do this process, it’s very deliberate and very intentional. We start local, we co-develop the materials, and the local participants have ownership over exactly what it looks like and how it all comes together. I think that’s a great place to start on any given community issue. It builds trust, and it makes it easier to identify points of agreement before getting to the divisive topics.

Do these programs work best in relatively small or intimate communities where people may already know and speak to each other, or are they also applicable in larger communities?

We haven’t done one in a really big city. When you’re doing them in smaller communities, folks in the room sometimes already at least know of each other, but there are people meeting each other for the first time. It’s a little of both, depending on the size of the community. In the workshops we did in Wenden and Salome, people generally knew each other. Those are smaller, more tight-knit communities. People wear a lot of hats, too. But then, in the Patagonia, Elgin, Sonoita workshops, some folks were meeting for the first time, or had heard of each other, heard of each other’s work, but hadn’t met in real life. I think it just depends on the size of the community, like how rural we’re really talking.

When people are reaching out to initiate these workshops, do they fall under a pattern? Is there any consistency in who these folks are who initiate that connection, and what they’re hoping to gain out of them?

There’s not really a pattern for how it gets started. But I think across the board, the goal is to bring people together in the community to talk about these issues; there isn’t a specific action in mind before the workshop happens. I think there’s usually some confusion around the hydrology in the area and what’s going on underground. You could read through hundreds of pages of USGS reports and turn yourself around twice over trying to figure it out yourself, but … I think generally folks would love for a scientist from ASU or U of A to come and give a really specific regional overview on the hydrology. I think that’s probably what excites people most, is the regionally specific presentations, and making sure their friends, partners, and other participants are in the room also hear that same stuff and get on the same page. From there, the strategies they look at just depend on what’s going on in the community.

My next question is about the chatbot. It seems like regional specificity is so important, but it also seems like people are craving the chance to have someone to help them figure it out without having to just pore over hundreds of pages of research and figure it out themselves. Is that one place where something like a chatbot, or AI, is useful?

The chatbot is really great for specific questions that folks have about their address and their water provider… specific things like that. But when I have played with AI and asked it bigger water questions, I do tend to feel like it gets things a little out of context at times. ChatGPT confuses some of the terminology: for instance, there are these two regulatory concepts in Arizona, “assured water supply” and “adequate water supply,” and if you don’t know what these things mean, they sound about the same, and ChatGPT will interchange them sometimes, but they’re very different when it comes to the actual policy. The chatbot has some parameters around what sources it uses, like verified scientific sources rather than any article or any blog or any comments on the internet, so that helps keep it a little more accurate.

Residents of Bouse, Arizona, gather to celebrate the installation of a new groundwater purification system. This meeting was not part of a discussion facilitated by Oldfield, but Oldfield has run discussions in the nearby community of Salome, which faces groundwater depletion from large alfalfa operations.

It sounds like these workshops’ fundamental function is to give people a forum for learning and discussion that feels clear, accurate, and open, as opposed to a forum that is designed specifically to achieve or create some policy outcome, or a space where people are arriving to announce their specific grievances. Imagining you have a very accurate AI, could that be an interesting sort of neutral mediator or source for facilitating these kinds of events? Does it feel like a tool that meets those needs well?

I hate to sound like an AI critic overall, but I do think there’s a lot of nuance and a lot of context and a lot of humanity involved in putting together workshops like this, and I would hesitate to give too big an emphasis on AI, just for that reason. It can be helpful, especially when it comes to research, but I think we definitely need human beings involved to work through some of the stuff, especially when emotions are running high. We need calm, confident, grounded, educated facilitators in the room that can help keep these conversations productive and healthy, because there’s just so much context.

I see this on social media sometimes, the expression that someone has ‘said the quiet out loud,’ and I think AI doesn’t do that.

Let’s say the state of Arizona wanted to incorporate this kind of workshop into the way it does public engagement or an agency wanted to incorporate it into its decision-making processes. Do you think it would be difficult to incorporate such a fluid, co-developed process into government decision-making, which often seems much more formulaic and standardized?

I do. I think one of the best elements of the workshop is that we have these neutral experts. They present data from ADWR, USGS, and other university research, but it’s being presented and synthesized by a neutral faculty member. That just lands really differently from when it comes from the state or federal government. Having a third party as this neutral convener brings the tension down a little bit. There are some community perceptions around state and federal agencies having an agenda or having a goal that’s already predetermined. I think having this third-party neutral convener helps.

If you had infinite resources, is there a dream project you would love to put together related to these workshops?

I would love to keep the workshops going and do them all over the state, in any community that wants to have one. It does take a lot of time and effort and energy and relationship building. It’s a slow-moving process. To scale these up would take a small but dedicated army, but it’s kind of contagious. It’s fun. We do keep finding more people who are interested along the way. Something about it, I think, just feels good to be a part of, and I would love to see them keep going.

Saudi-owned agriculture company Fondomonte irrigated vast fields of alfalfa at its facility in Arizona’s Butler Valley, an area with practically no regulation on groundwater use. The facility has ceased pumping since Arizona chose not to renew its lease of state land, and the state is moving toward imposing groundwater regulations in the region.

The Week in Brief

Environmental & Energy News Digest · May 6, 2026

⚡ Energy

• Malaysia could be nine years ahead of schedule on its renewable energy goals, report claims (The Asian Business Review)

• Does energy efficiency really reduce emissions? The answer is super complicated and, of course, fascinating (Anthropocene)

• Global investment in oil exploration and drilling has remained steady despite war in the Middle East (Middle East Economic Survey)

• Virginia is pushing for more community solar arrays—basically shared rooftop solar for people who don’t have space on their rooftops (Canary Media)

• A new, safer nuclear fuel is hampered by costs (Canary Media)

• Parked EVs will power the grid in Massachusetts (Canary Media)

💧 Water

• States finally have a court-approved agreement on the trickling Rio Grande (AP)

• Some western Colorado streams are seeing record high water temperatures this summer (Roaring Fork Conservancy)

• Colorado has declared a drought emergency (Colorado Public Radio)

🏛️ Politics

• Voters are picking electricity regulators in six states this year. Republicans hold the vast majority of elected seats on state public utility boards nationwide. (Canary Media)

• The primary election for California governor is decidedly ‘weird’ (The Washington Post)

• Geothermal gets a bipartisan boost in the House (Canary Media)

✦ Other

• Beneath its nasty thorns, this plant is full of medicine (High Country News)

• Anti-tariff Noah Smith supports European tariffs on China (Noahpinion)

• A majority of Americans support a data center moratorium, one poll shows (Heatmap News)

• An interesting, if overwritten, essay on AI and consciousness: “If instead of that, our cultural takeaway from LLMs is to throw out the concept of ‘consciousness’ or minimize its importance, to dethrone the phenomenon, the consequences would be dire—it would sap the human spirit. It would be the ultimate metaphysical version of Chief Seattle’s famous words of warning to the United States as his way of life was being destroyed, in that dethroning consciousness would mark ‘The end of living, and the beginning of survival.’” (The Intrinsic Perspective)

I took a gap year in 2016, and I taught English for a semester at a primary school in Cochabamba, Bolivia. While I was there, then-President Evo Morales vocally supported education reforms that would have required Bolivian students not only to take English, but also indigenous languages (Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani) that predated Spanish colonization. The political significance of that proposal was immediately clear and well stated: Morales wanted to preserve a Bolivian-ness he thought was threatened, even if it meant a forceful, somewhat unpragmatic policy choice. I had not left the Western-influenced modernity to experience the land of the Inca. Rather, I was watching the land of the Inca (and others) struggle to redefine itself in a Westernized, modern world.

I may have been witnessing part of what Pace University English professor Grant Crawford called “end of elsewhere” in an early May essay. There is no more escape from modernity, as my generation (I was born in 1997) and those younger than me have now watched modernity fully arrive everywhere. And there is no escaping its ethical implications—my “voluntourism” teaching experience may have been more self-serving than selfless.

But Morales’s indigenous languages initiative indicates that modernity does not entail uniformity or even mundane, cynical pragmatism. Civilizational narratives, the struggle to retain individual cultures, and pushback on Western norms are as much a part of this era as their opposites. As French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out in his 1980 book “On History”, “The world is being violently propelled toward unity while at the same time it remains fundamentally diverse.”

Fernand Braudel was a French historian who emphasized the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors and material developments in the making of history.

This poses what could be a concerning mixture for the environment: a vast increase in destructive and planet-altering behaviors combined with a degrading capacity for global cooperation and shared standards.

But hidden in Braudel’s and Crawford’s writings is another implication—that civilizational diversity may create fertile ground, producing tools needed to manage and survive humanity’s modern inventions.

Crawford’s “end of elsewhere” is not simply a cultural or media phenomenon. He also describes a material phenomenon (“The villages at the end of the dusty roads have WiFi”). A lecturer on travel culture and media, Crawford says his students “have grown up watching the planet finish modernizing in real time.” Even the most remote locations now seem to be part of the global machine, now populated with data terminals that connect them through orbital relays to global information streams (Starlink).

Braudel saw a vision of the same process through the 1970s, though it fit the more industrial time he inhabited. Blast furnaces and skyscrapers were the material indicators of modernity for him. They weren’t everywhere, but they were spreading.

Both Braudel and Crawford identify a common theme—the world hasn’t become swallowed by the West, but the world has been swallowed by something the West produced, and which is now proceeding on its own terms. Global travel, in Crawford’s description, was seen by Westerners as a way to go outside that thing, to escape it and “find oneself,” a task that is no longer possible. Even at the end of the 1970s, a late heyday for the hippie backpacker trail, the specter of global integration loomed in travelers’ minds, Braudel says. “All observers, all travelers, tell us, whether enthusiastically or gloomily, of the increasing uniformity of the world.”

But here Braudel diverges from the travelers. The “elsewhere” of self-discovery and escape from modernity may be doomed, he seems to agree, but a different kind of elsewhere still exists within modern confines. Blast furnaces and data downlinks may have touched the globe, but they are unevenly distributed, and their operators move to different political and social rhythms. Modernity has taken unique shapes in every country and among every cultural group: “No civilization says no to all the new goods, but each one gives them a particular individual significance … There is a whole human, social, political, and even mystical context to be taken into account.”

Braudel defines civilizations loosely and intentionally avoids enumerating a list of the groups that qualify for the “civilization” title. Broadly, he sees them as geographic “cultural areas” which form the discernible boundaries of a “totality” of common attributes or “cultural goods” (material, technological, behavioral). These can manifest politically in states, sub-national cultural regions, or multi-state civilizational blocks.

The world’s civilizations are not being flattened and erased by modernity, but given new frontiers for adaptation, he argues. Civilizations have “some of the greatest longevities of any collective reality,” and they are capable of surviving modernity. What distinguishes a civilization from another is the unique blend of practices and technologies it chooses and refuses to borrow from others, he says. Civilizations (and states acting on civilizational motives) all over the globe have very explicitly refused to borrow some elements of boilerplate modernity, each for their own reasons, and sometimes even to their apparent detriment. Morales resisted submission to a world where only European languages would be taught in the high Andes, even if Andean languages were not as useful to Bolivia’s pupils. And yet, Bolivia is a democratic country with a modern state bureaucracy, satellite data terminals, and a modern alternative to blast furnaces. Modernity may now be inescapable, but modernity is certainly not a monolith. Populist, nationalist movements across the globe seem to confirm that civilizations are negotiating their own places in a new world.

Braudel writes that all civilizations are now caught up in what he describes as a “fierce, blind struggle … between civilizations and (modernity).” “Which civilizations will tame, and domesticate, and humanize the machine?” he asks. And here Crawford seems to agree, if indirectly. Modern Westerners have lost the ability to escape the machines of their making, and so now they have no choice but to face them, even if they do so in a deluded way. Unable to escape modernity through travel, Westerners are now “traveling” into their phones, toward a new pseudo-elsewhere, seeking community or humanity in a space “with screens, parasocial connections, algorithmically curated attention.”

If modernity is now universal and inescapable, Braudel and Crawford imply, then humanity’s central political challenge may no longer be whether to modernize, or how to meaningfully escape modernization, but how to live with its consequences. Braudel saw the threat of nuclear holocaust while writing during the Cold War, and Crawford sees the threat of artificial intelligence and the digital takeover of culture in the 2020s, and both seem troubled with the question of how humanity can literally and/or spiritually survive the industrialization, globalization, and technological progress that made both things possible.

Environmentalism is one attempt to “domesticate” the machine. While environmentalism contains many strands and foci, a major element is the ability to domesticate our own destructive behaviors and train them toward better impulse control and goal-oriented discipline—to deter our economies and technologies from destroying something precious, or from destroying us. If the whole world is now trapped in this battle, and yet remains fractured along civilizational lines, then one could argue the planet now stands divided against a universal challenge.

But even if civilizational competition and cultural fracture lines make it more difficult, diversity may yield some benefits in the struggle to survive modernity.

Braudel implies this benefit of diversity by asking which civilization will succeed in this struggle. He does not illustrate the West, or the United States, as a vanguard, pulling the rest of the world along in a game of catch-up. He describes a vast diversity of countries and cultures stepping together toward an unprecedented challenge. In absorbing modernity through pre-existing power structures and inherited civilizational values, countries will inevitably find unexpected strengths and weaknesses in the 21st century.

China, for instance, has forged an almost unique blend of market capitalism and economic planning that resulted in an oversupply of cheap solar panels, now enabling one of the central pillars of current decarbonization efforts. It wasn’t a moral commitment to climate change that drove that evolution—it was a factor of China’s particular history with modernization, in which its successive governments chose very explicitly to borrow some modern Western practices and reject others.

These social and political diversities could also align with geographic diversity to give humanity more tools for survival. Though it seems foolish and often ends in failure, attempts to impose modern standards on societies in marginal environments—deserts, polar regions, remote islands—spur innovation. Desalination tech for the Middle East and island communities, geothermal technology from Norway, and solar technology used on remote buoys and oil rigs have all contributed toward humanity’s toolbox for managing and surviving climate change.

Crawford points to an “end of elsewhere,” which Braudel seems to agree with if “elsewhere” means somewhere outside modernity. But new elsewheres are proliferating within modernity, he argues. Climate change, AI, and the prospects of nuclear war make global unity appear more and more pressing. Regardless of whether that’s true, unique arrangements produced by civilizations’ confrontation with globalization may lead to policies, technologies, and governance models that more successfully domesticate and manage humanity’s most powerful creations.

Liferock News

Environmental & Energy News Digest · May 18, 2026

⚡ Energy

• In Texas, solar is now bigger than coal (Canary Media)

• Swamped by data center demands, Dominion Energy just opted for a megamerger (The Washington Post)

• The US is not joining a wave of global EV adoption even as war boosts gas prices (Canary Media)

• Chinese solar exports jumped 60% from same time last year (Reuters)

• Hormuz closure, summer heat are pushing Iraq’s electrical grid toward crisis (Middle East Economic Survey)

• Aramco’s profits surge as oil prices offset wartime output losses (Middle East Economic Survey)

• Batteries are booming on the world’s power grids (Canary Media)

💧 Water

• Colorado’s Arkansas Valley water confronts contamination, climate change and political drama (High Country News)

🏛️ Politics

• China’s Ministry of Commerce summarizes the potential trade outcomes from the Trump-Xi meeting (Inside China)

• The DOE disbursed just 2% of its budgeted funding in fiscal year 2025, reportedly due to staff reductions (Heatmap News)

🔬 Science

• Climate scientists discuss the impact of renewables growth on emissions scenarios (The Climate Brink)

✦ Other

• Start-ups are attempting to mine hydrogen (The New York Times)

• Tariffs could make the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada up to $120 million more expensive to build (Mining)

I was driving through green, rain-fed fields in Wisconsin in 2023, trying to explain the Colorado River crisis to a friend from that part of the country.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Just raise the price of water. Demand will adjust to available supply.” I found it almost impossible to answer. I remember saying, simply, “Well, it doesn’t really work that way.”

The reasons why “it doesn’t really work that way” are vast and often case-specific. But my friend’s statement has stuck with me since then. It drove many of my questions in my recent interview with Arizona State University water law professor Rhett Larson. And it resurfaced this week after the Lower Basin states announced their short-term proposal to help save the river system from collapse.

Water leaders in the Colorado River basin are limited by, and motivated to protect, all the systems that make “raising the price of water” an unworkable solution to the modern shortage.

These systems make “demand destruction,” or the process of reducing demand to meet supply, a particularly difficult task. Because impersonal markets, or other similar mechanisms, cannot automatically reduce the system’s uses, political representatives must volunteer to slash their own constituents’ water use to meet the challenge of a shortage. This week’s proposal demonstrates why such a system struggles with an unprecedented shortage.

The Lower Basin states on the Colorado River (Arizona, California, and Nevada) have asked the federal government to help pay for water that would be used to support Lake Mead through 2028, with the long-term goal of creating a “conservation pool” in Mead—essentially a bank account of water, that the federal government will use to protect the reservoir in the future and avoid sharp cuts to Lower Basin users. The proposal echoes another short-term arrangement the Lower Basin states reached in 2023, in which the federal government used Inflation Reduction Act money to pay farmers to keep water in Lake Mead and save the reservoir. The long-term conservation pool idea also resembles efforts by the Upper Basin states to pay farmers to conserve water, which they would then store in a pool in Lake Powell.

The conservation pools idea is a rare point of potential progress in otherwise stalemated negotiations over the river’s dwindling supplies.

“The subjects of the existing negotiations won’t yield success because they just keep exacerbating the other basin’s risks … In our view, (conservation pools) offer really the only path forward,” Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis said during a February meeting outside Phoenix. Arizona’s Colorado River negotiator, Tom Buschatzke, agreed that the idea had “merit.” And three months later, it appeared in the Lower Basin’s proposal.

(There is also a “tribal pool” in the Lower Basin proposal, though this pool has more to do with the federal government’s obligation to furnish tribes with necessary water supplies, a factor of tribes’ unique position in US legal structures.)

The “conservation pool” idea’s appeal reveals the central tension in Colorado River governance: shortage management depends on negotiated legitimacy among the very constituencies being asked to absorb scarcity. The Colorado River system is structured around negotiated sovereignty and political legitimacy, not automatic demand adjustment.

Negotiators from the seven Colorado River states gathered in Las Vegas in December 2025 for the annual Colorado River Water Users’ Association conference.

Many people believe, or have heard, that the legal doctrine of “prior appropriation” (oldest water rights get first priority during shortage) is the guiding principle in Western water law. This is somewhat true, but as Larson pointed out in our discussion, the more powerful force in Colorado River management is actually negotiated deals meant to counteract prior appropriation and preserve resource sovereignty for younger states (everyone other than California).

“I would say that the majority of the law of the river runs against prior appropriation … Had we just applied pure prior appropriation in the basin, my guess is that California would have a lot more water rights than the other states would, and the other states would really struggle to use market mechanisms to redistribute that water,” Larson said in that interview.

That means the status quo for the river is not an internally coherent system that automatically destroys demand when supply is low, but a treadmill of negotiated agreements and court cases between sovereign political blocs and their representatives. This system puts the squeeze on state representatives, like Buschatzke, who are tasked with literally negotiating their states’ existential futures. In that system, demand destruction occurs through the voluntary decisions of negotiators, who are constantly facing a barrage of angry phone calls from large water users in their states. It makes demand destruction much more politically fraught than simply “raising the price of water.”

“We’ve got to provide some sort of armor to our state principles to get momentum moving in a cooperative direction … if every whisper of what we are working on results in every person who’s worried about how it might affect them running and saying, ‘This isn’t the deal for us,’ we’re never going to get there,” said Colby Pellegrino, Deputy General Manager of Resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, at a conference in June 2025.

The pools idea works in that system because it keeps negotiators from making politically controversial or harsh decisions—it socializes the cost of shortage (somewhat), destroys demand through consensual processes, and avoids open conflict between different sectors of the economy that compete for water.

The pools concept will suffer from its limitations (are taxpayers willing to support these pools as long as it takes, and will voluntary contributions be enough?), but it is a rare concept for addressing shortages that negotiators can sell to the folks back home.

So far, the political barriers to more creative changes (such as the Lower Basin’s supply-driven concept, or a more radical form of market-based or democratically controlled shortage distribution), or even to necessary negotiated cuts in water use, have made them unreachable. If negotiators do reach a deal for adequate long-term management of the river that doesn’t require the taxpayer to simply pay for the shortage, it will be despite, not because of, the nature of the Colorado River system’s management scheme.

But even without a groundbreaking agreement between the states, this shortage could force the system toward some interesting adaptations. One example is the possibility of interstate water transfers, particularly within the Lower Basin (Arizona and Nevada are pursuing a deal to receive surplus water from San Diego). Though the idea might frighten some water managers (it risks commodifying and marketizing water in a way that threatens state control), states might agree to limited, managed transfers that pave the way for more in the future. Even in a micromanaged, highly regulated format, these transfers could help relieve some of the tensions between the Colorado River’s relatively cumbersome legal frameworks and its fast-moving socio-economic shifts, and free up available supply to more adequately meet changing demands.

Regardless of what long-term arrangement the seven states agree to, if they agree on anything, these two concepts—the pools concept and limited interstate water transfers—show where the system seems to be maintaining its existing structure and where it could make some sacrifices.

The Colorado River’s political management system is negotiating its own terms of engagement, straining to bend without breaking.

Liferock News

Environmental & Energy News Digest · May 10, 2026

⚡ Energy

• Trump is getting away with murdering the American wind industry, according to Jael Holzman (Heatmap News)

• Emily Pontecorvo asks whether Microsoft’s clean energy pullback actually matters (Heatmap News)

• The nation’s largest grid, PJM, is in for major regulatory reform (Heatmap News)

• Chevron sells its first US LNG cargo in Europe (Argus Media)

• Tax incentives for data centers fail to pass Colorado legislature (The Colorado Sun)

• China and the EU partner to create a global carbon-pricing collaborative (Bloomberg)

• China’s overland trade routes are propping up Iran (Al-Monitor)

💧 Water

• Dam removals reconnected more US river sections in 2025 than at any other time in history (The New York Times)

• Lower Basin states offer a short-term bridge deal for the Colorado River (The Salt Lake Tribune)

• Shannon Mullane dives into the hype and critiques around conservation pools for the Colorado River (The Colorado Sun)

🌍 Climate

• A strong El Niño may be brewing, though it has a climate change-y flavor (The New York Times)

🏛️ Politics

• Europe moves to soften rules for fighting climate superpollutant, thanks to US pressure (The New York Times)

• New York Gov. Hochul announced a draft budget deal that includes rollbacks to the state’s climate law (Gothamist)

• Environmentalists are joining the MAHA movement (The New York Times)

• The White House wants FEMA to speed up aid and respond to fewer disasters (The New York Times)

✦ Other

• A Hundred Years of David Attenborough (The New Yorker)

• The improbable resilience of the most endangered marine mammal (High Country News)

• What India’s diet coke shortage means for the U.S. (The Atlantic)

• Appalachian lithium deposit could replace 328 years of imports: USGS (Society for Environmental Journalists)

Passing through the straits, again

The world is experiencing yet another conflict-driven fossil fuels crisis in the Middle East. For more than half a century, crises like this one spurred wealthy countries to invest in renewable energy sources. But this time, those alternative energy sources aren’t a moonshot solution; they’re an expanding reality. And analysts seem to believe the global system is less structurally dependent on Middle Eastern oil than it was in the 1970s.

Yet even amid these changed circumstances, this war could have a similar effect on renewable energy deployment to previous shocks, spurring limited short-term acceleration while compounding with previous crises to strengthen long-term trends. Where there may be space for an immediate, short-term response is in household solar deployment in poorer economies where the oil shock is hitting hardest and where power grids are already somewhat unreliable.

Solar development: a history of straits

The history of solar energy’s development is partly a history of straits (physical and diplomatic). The oil embargo in 1973 and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 pushed solar energy’s two earliest pioneers, the United States and Japan, to build out its first real industrial supply chains. These efforts had some support from early climate activists, but their strongest supporters were political and national security interests hoping to shield the two economies from future oil shocks. In the United States, the Carter administration and Congress poured money into alternative energy research, including the creation of NREL (technically its predecessor, SEI). In Japan, fears about dependency on Middle Eastern oil triggered a massive government-led research project into solar energy (“Project Sunshine”), which built a dominant industrial supply chain for solar panels.

The benefits of efficient, high-production solar remained too distant for the tech to completely replace oil in either economy. The United States ultimately armored itself against market shocks by harnessing its own fossil resources, and both countries built up massive oil reserves.

But solar development carried on anyway. Largely driven by climate and environmental interests, Germany picked up the torch, pushing solar energy to a new industrial scale in the 1990s and early 2000s.

And then straits entered the picture again. China took the reins as the globe’s solar manufacturing capital in the 2010s, having learned from and outcompeted its German peers. That process stemmed partly from China’s general manufacturing boom, but also from geostrategic concerns. The Straits of Hormuz were still an irritant and soft spot for East Asian industrial economies, but more important to China was the Strait of Malacca, between Singapore and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, through which roughly 60% of its entire oil supply travels. Investing in alternative energy sources was one among several strategies deployed by Chinese President Hu Jintao to reduce reliance on the Strait in the 2000s.

Sixty percent of China’s oil supply traveled through the Strait of Malacca in 2023, according to the Institute for Supply Management.

And thanks to a Chinese manufacturing boom, solar energy is now the single largest source for meeting new energy demand worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency.

Solar energy activists, whether environmentalists or not, bemoaned the Reagan Administration’s pullback from the technology in the 1980s. Solar and other renewables did not immediately rise as the wealthy world’s vaccine against wars in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. But in the long run, Carter’s early investments in solar triggered a chain reaction of national solar projects that culminated in today’s growing reliance on sun power.

Why this crisis is different, but could end up being the same

Roughly the same percentage of global oil supplies passes through the Straits of Hormuz today as did in the 1970s. But analysts seem to see a world structurally more insulated against straits shocks than it once was.

Some commonly cited reasons in analysis and writing this week are:

• A more diversified and fragmented oil market: Aside from the war itself, the United Arab Emirates’ departure from OPEC this week points to a real turning point for global oil markets, according to experts. It likely means a less centrally coordinated market, and one where ambitious bids for market share rule the day. Meanwhile, comparatively new market entrants in the Americas (Brazil, Guyana, Canada, etc, and potentially Argentina) are broadening the base of non-OPEC suppliers. The United States, the most powerful belligerent in the ongoing war in Iran, is now far less dependent on foreign oil and gas than it once was—it is a net exporter, not importer of oil, and its economy requires proportionately less oil to function now than it once did.

• The end of the petrodollar recycling scheme: The global financial system is also less dependent now than it once was on oil revenues in the Middle East, at least in one important respect: petrodollars. After the 1974 Nixon-Faisal agreement, which set the standard that international oil sales would be priced in dollars, Middle East oil exporters built up huge dollar surpluses, which they then invested in Treasury Bills. That money was then invested around the world, making the dollar-flush petrostates into the “world’s bankers” for a time (the importance and extent of this dynamic is debated). That relationship meant the liquidity of the globe’s financial system was theoretically vulnerable to interruptions in Middle Eastern oil sales. But later analysis, including by Brad Setser at the Council on Foreign Relations, has shown this dynamic began to erode before the turn of the millennium and generally no longer holds true. Today, the dollar-rich countries recycling money into global money supplies are East Asian manufacturing economies, which run high trade surpluses with the United States, filling their coffers with dollars while they sell goods to US consumers. Those economies can suffer a shock in oil prices without wiping out their accounts. More critical for this article, these economies need reliable, affordable energy, but unlike petrostates, the movement of oil and gas is not absolutely necessary to grow their dollar reserves. They can, and do, electrify their economies to keep their manufacturing prowess operational with alternative energy sources. Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern petrostates do still invest their heavy dollar inflows in the United States, but more so as equity in US companies, not as bonds. This is still significant, but it doesn’t create the same level of systemic dependency that bond investment did.

• The ‘age of electricity’: External to oil markets, electrification is proceeding at a rapid and unprecedented pace. In 2025, new power generation from carbon-free sources grew faster than overall electricity demand, meaning renewables began to displace fossil fuel sources, according to the IEA and Ember. Renewables also produced more energy than coal for the first time in 2025, according to the IEA. This progress was fueled by China and India, the world’s two most populous countries that together comprise 42% of global fossil power generation. The nations both saw electricity generated by fossil fuels fall in the same year for the first time since 2000.

Middle Eastern oil is still vital to the normal functioning of the global economy, and other products that pass through the Straits, like fertilizer inputs, are also essential in the short term. But, partly for the reasons listed above, this war has not turned into the same frantic discussion about alternative energy sources that crises in the 1970s did. If national security interests stemming from this war are going to accelerate adoption of renewable energy sources like they ultimately did in the past, it will occur in a different set of circumstances—in a world with access to cheap, scalable renewables and less structural dependency on Middle Eastern oil.

As with previous straits-related oil shocks, the immediate impact on renewables deployment will still run into large, heavy market forces well beyond the short-term price of oil. But unlike previous shocks, this one is occurring in a world where renewable energy technology is mature, cheap, and already deployed.

One place where the war could cause an immediate reflexive adoption is in distributed solar applications in poorer South Asian countries. Poorer “frontier” economies have the weakest positions in dealing with a contested, competitive oil market with constant shocks and volatility, with the lowest funds for competing with other buyers, and also the lowest oil reserves to buffer shocks. But these countries also have the least capital to invest in grid-scale improvements and economy-wide electrification. When fuel rationing and comparatively dysfunctional power grids collide, distributed rooftop and balcony solar power can emerge as a natural choice for consumers, though the degree to which this materializes will depend on local regulations and enforcement—some countries, like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, are already dealing with grid saturation as rooftop solar explodes there.

Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Pakistan all have very distinct stories in how they have explored, expanded, or perhaps underinvested in renewable energy. They are all dealing with their own unique electricity politics and financial constraints. But what they all share is a financial burden and vulnerability related to reliance on Middle Eastern oil and gas, and access to cheap Chinese solar panels. This war should only add to the pressures already making distributed renewables and electrification appealing for individual consumers.

The planet will likely see short-term spikes in coal usage as natural gas prices climb, meaning a short-term spike in emissions (US coal use spurred by high natural gas prices in 2025 marked the first time emissions did not rise at a slower rate than US GDP in two years).

But in the long run, it seems possible that the war will accelerate decarbonization in at least a few places, particularly poorer countries now facing a more competitive, volatile oil and gas market, and which have already suffered the effects of the current war in Iran.

This war could become another in a long chain of Middle East oil and gas crises whose immediate impact on decarbonization wasn’t clear, but whose long-term effects compounded into the rapidly changing global energy mix we see today.

In this interview, ecoanthropologist Erle Ellis pushes back. Life doesn’t fit easily in scientific models, Ellis says, regardless of how much data one collects. Computers can model rocks, wind, and oceans, but life is something else entirely.

This interview dives into the tricky relationship between modern Earth science and human social behavior. How should science approach humanity’s wild-card trajectory, or the inherently chaotic course of evolution? Ellis argues that though life is a central component of how the Earth works, cannot be modeled like the atmosphere and oceans.

This discussion, Ellis says, is “vitally important … The way that social change is shaping planetary change is the number-one challenge of our time.”

But first, an important announcement!

Water Conversations is evolving. The Substack will always honor its roots in Western water politics. But I am excited to explore some of the deeper motivations behind my work in water, which permeate a broader set of subjects.

After this post, Water Conversations will become Liferock: Climate news for the curious. It will offer newsletters and analytical essays on climate and environmental news, with an emphasis on Interesting, optimistic climate stories that contextualize humans’ time on earth and our relationship to the planet.

This interview with Ellis embodies the Substack’s overarching motivation: a fascination with the intersection of the cultural and the natural. How do our politics and social developments change the Earth, and how does the Earth shape our culture? More importantly, how is that relationship changing, and where is it going?

This newsletter is for people who enjoy a deeper, more inquisitive angle on climate news. It will highlight the way our regular politics bleed into our environmental politics and vice versa. At its core, it is an exploration of the existential questions inherent to our relationship with the Earth.

Along with its new thematic angle, the Substack will change its cadence and content. Beginning next week, you’ll automatically receive:

• Weekly essays with analysis of the news

• Monthly Q&A’s like this one

Starting May 11, you can also sign up for:

• Biweekly: curated servings of climate and environmental news with an emphasis on resource politics, Earth science, technology, and social sciences.

A sample of the news sources to be cited includes:

• Canary Media

• Heatmap News

• Latitude Media

• Nautilus

• The Paleontological Research Institution

• High Country News

• Grist

• Inside Climate News

• Trends in Ecology and Evolution

• Anthropocene

• The New York Times’s biodiversity reporting

• Circle of Blue

Because I am a water nerd, water will remain a critical element of the Substack. And if you like the approach I’ve taken to covering water issues, you’ll like the approach I’m taking to climate and the environment. What inspired my water coverage—translating human systems through the flow of natural substances—will inspire everything else I cover.

I’m excited to launch this platform and grow it. I’m even more excited to share that process with you.

Now, on to the good stuff. Here’s the interview with Ellis:

We’re talking about how life is kind of an indelible aspect of planetary change, whether you’re talking about oceans, the atmosphere, or geology. How would you describe the way that evolution in living organisms interacts with those systems? Is there any distinction between life and the rest of the planet, or does it all seem to be part of the same process?

The term that I like to use now, and it’s something I’m following from both the science of archaeology, is this term ‘entanglement.’ And it’s actually very easy to understand in the way it’s used in quantum physics. Entanglement produces forms of interaction between particles that are almost impossible to understand. And it’s not just a matter of having enough data or enough computation—that is the classic, I would say ‘Enlightenment model’ of understanding how the Earth works: the idea that if we just had enough data and enough computation, we could simulate and understand what will happen. In fact, we’re never going to be able to do that. And it’s not because we don’t have enough data or enough computation, but because processes are operating beyond understanding. They don’t have simple rules. They are not fully understood. They never will be.

So, entanglement is the concept. Systems theory is very much built on this classic Enlightenment view that every action can be added up and simulated, whereas entanglement is a little bit beyond that. It’s saying that maybe some of these things are not fully predictable, ever, under any conditions. Things can happen that you can’t even imagine.

Imagine if you were around, watching the Earth when the first photosynthesis occurred. You could argue it was inevitable that some organisms would evolve a chemical pathway that allowed them to harvest energy from the sun. All life before that could only harvest chemical energy, and it was very finite. Then, all of a sudden, solar energy became available to life, and that enabled everything. Life as we know it could not exist without that. We wouldn’t have an oxygen atmosphere, which allowed us to have higher organisms composed of many cells. So, it created these new pathways … Trees didn’t exist. There was no life on land. When these things emerged, they created unpredictable outcomes. With life, new possibilities come up, whole new forms of organisms. There are some elements to it that are somewhat predictable, but for the most part, these capabilities create unpredictable futures.

A modern analogy has just happened with human societies. We can now harvest much more energy than we ever could to power our societies. We have capabilities emerging from this ability to use different forms of energy, more and more different kinds of energy. But where is it ultimately going to end up? It’s unpredictable what we’ll do. We don’t know. You really can’t say. And when you unleash these kinds of unpredictable forces, it really does change the trajectory of things. On one level, you can say that human social capabilities—our ability to act in coordinated ways—will produce transformative effects. But you don’t know what they will do, exactly. Just like with life.

So, evolution is not the same as systems theory, which is what Earth system scientists use to understand the Earth. They can integrate life into their models, but nobody really knows when this or that is going to take off and why. Like, why did photosynthesis happen? When? It’s not really understandable by Earth systems theory. Even evolutionary theory and entanglement theory don’t tell you when or why—it just says that the possibilities are there.

When I interviewed Simon Darroch, he advocated the idea that by examining past instances of life-generated planetary change, you may be able to find some patterns you could use to predict the effects of human-caused climate change. I imagine, given what you were just describing with entanglement theory, that concept sounds suspect to you?

I mean, what should we expect? A good recent example of an entanglement is AI. That new capability emerged because someone discovered it, and that’s evolution in a sense, because evolution is just trying out lots of things, and then things that reproduce well become common. So AI is the latest version of that. Where’s it going? How is it going to affect human societies? I mean, if you think you know, you’re wrong. You do not know. You really do not know. And that is kind of the track we’ve been on for a long time.

Now, if we didn’t have life, if there was no evolutionary process like what we have with life on Earth, I think it’s fair to say that things are actually pretty predictable. Geophysics and geochemistry would pretty much explain what happens over time to the Earth. It wouldn’t be super hard to figure out. But that’s not where we’re at. We are on a living planet, and now we have a living planet where whole new kinds of information are evolving, not just genes.

In 2008, Ellis produced the first global map of anthropogenic biomes (and coined the term “anthrome”) together with Navin Ramankutty. Anthrome maps now appear in numerous textbooks and in the National Geographic World Atlas

So it’s the concept that life is sort of a class of its own, in the sense that it is more unpredictable. It has more of these phenomena that are experimental.

Evolution by natural selection is the most important theory in all of biology. It’s not the same kind of theory as E=MC^2. It’s a different thing entirely. It doesn’t produce predictable results. Evolution doesn’t predict anything about the future. The only thing you can say is that future organisms are related to today’s organisms. That’s true. There’s a tree, and it’ll continue. Some of that tree will get pruned back, but all future life is probably going to be related to the life of the past. We’re all related, everything that’s alive.

But exactly where it’s going, it’s hard to say. People have used the concept of evolution and equated it to a form of progress, but it does not have progress in the classic sense. Like, are cockroaches old and obsolete? Because there are cockroaches that were walking around under the dinosaurs. Are they going extinct because they’re going to get replaced by really smart humans? No. They’ll probably be walking around under the next thing after us.

Do you think that humans are especially difficult to predict?

Yes. Because of culture. Cultural information, the information we share through social learning, has produced a new form of information that can evolve. And think of it this way: human beings are not interesting as individuals. You don’t have a language as an individual. You only have a language and the ability to use math because you are part of a society that has these capabilities. Our capabilities are social. We are relatively unique among organisms in that we really aren’t good at anything biologically. We’re okay, but we can’t even survive without a huge amount of learning. We have to learn how to live. We don’t have that baked into our genes. The only thing we know is that we have to live with other people and we have to learn from them. We’re really good at learning from and imitating other people, and that’s our superpower. It creates the possibility of these larger scales of learning and interacting and doing things together.

Social insects also have some of these things, but the difference is that their social capabilities are genetic. They are limited to the processes of gene evolution and genetics, whereas our processes are not. Like, how big can a human society be? There’s no answer. Nobody knows. With ants, it depends on the species, because they have certain capabilities genetically that enable them to build certain levels of interaction. You can pretty much tell how many social insects are in their society and their colony based on their genetics. Not with humans. We can live in very small groups, or we can live in the societies we live in today, which are essentially global for most people.

Do you think there is one component of Darroch and his team’s process that might align better with the ideas that you’re exploring, which is the idea of bringing folks from different disciplines together to discuss where some common observations can be found? I know that part of their paper involved bringing urbanization experts together with coral reef ecologists to see what kind of colonization patterns humans and coral reefs share, for instance. Is that concept of cross-disciplinary collaboration broadly intriguing to you?

Oh, it’s the core of what I just described, right? So much of what we learn and what we know is just emergent stuff from the pool of knowledge and information that we have in common with other people. We’re truly not individually intelligent. We are socially intelligent.

It’s a big part of the theory I’ve worked with. Cultural evolution and social learning, these concepts are based on that idea. All knowledge creation is social. It’s never really an individual. You’re a product of your times, you’re a product of your peers, you’re a product of the way you’re interacting with the people around you. You’re not really producing things yourself. We should be a little bit humble about what human beings actually do. We’re not actually that smart. Even some of the geniuses, like Einstein, he was only able to do what he did because of all the people around him doing what they were doing. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right mindset.

Do you think that when we’re speaking of humans, who have their own sort of geography of how they organize themselves socially, do you see different tiers of what our impacts on ecosystems or planetary systems look like? Is there a way to classify different sizes of human impact, or do you think that entire conceit is troubled from the start?

Classification—and I’m guilty of doing classification—is always a problematic thing. There are always things in between categories, and it can create some misunderstandings. For instance, something mentioned in (Darroch et al.’s) paper is a classification of urban people and non-urban people and their environmental impacts. But, of course, the interactions among all the people are what really produce planetary change. So it is a little bit dangerous to talk about, say, urban impact, because urban impacts are planetary—they affect tropical rainforests and things like that. They’re not just city-related. So it’s very important to have that entanglement perspective, where even something that appears to be quite localized, like going out to dinner in the city, could actually be a process that affects the entire planet. Distinguishing these things is a little bit challenging. And again, the idea that we are individuals is not really true. We are practicing things that we’ve learned from others, and that process of learning from others is always broader than a small group these days. There are times in history when groups of people were completely isolated and didn’t know of any other people, didn’t interact with them in any known way. But it’s kind of unusual. Even hunter-gatherer societies were connected through trade in their own limited ways. And social learning is the most important one of these—like how to make stone tools or how to use fire to shape the landscape. That kind of information could be traveling across a continent, even across people who didn’t know each other or had never met. That’s what social learning can do. But yeah, to boil it down, I think it’s very important to always put any kind of human activity into a social context, to understand that it’s never really isolated.

Another example is the internet. The internet is just moving information around. By itself, yeah, it has some impacts on the planet because you have to build the infrastructure to move that information around. But think of what else it’s done. It sets the stage for coordinated activities at scales that were never possible. That has spurred massive indirect effects on the planet through human social channels, not directly through material impacts. Thinking of things in isolation doesn’t necessarily improve your understanding of them.

Do you think that even if some elements of their argument don’t function well for you, the debate or dialogue can still be interesting and produce new ways of thinking? Do you think this is a debate that the scientific community should be having?

I don’t think it should be a debate. But I think it should be a discussion, very much so. The efforts to understand these processes are vitally important. The way that social change is shaping planetary change is the number one challenge of our time. Because that’s the amazing thing about it—the social changes are all human. It’s all the human world. So why is it that we don’t have any control over most of them? It’s a little disturbing, right? The whole planet is glowing at night because of human activity. Nobody decided to do that. It’s an emergent thing, it just happens, it’s a side effect, just like global climate change. Nobody’s trying to heat up the planet. It’s just this emergent property of trying to get energy for really cheap, and then finding out you can do almost anything with all this energy. And then there are all these secondary effects, and we don’t have control over that. But we can do a lot better at mitigating the negative consequences of things that we do if we’re able to coordinate better. Because again, these are processes unfolding as a result of people’s individual and local social activities, yet they have all these planetary consequences.

So for me, that’s the ultimate challenge of the Anthropocene: can people actually work together to get what they want at the planetary scale? So far, we haven’t been so good at that. We’ve done some things that have been remarkable along those lines, like, we stopped the ozone hole from getting worse. So, we can do this. But we’re not doing so well with other things that are really making a big difference and are going to have severe negative consequences that everyone’s going to have to pay for. And we haven’t been able to address them. Global climate change is the case in point here. And that’s not the only case. There are other cases like it.

And yet, these developments have also been catastrophic for species that weren’t designed for the new worlds they created. Oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans led to the emergence of animal life, but it may also have caused a mass extinction of prokaryotic lifeforms. In fact, some research suggests that many, if not most, mass extinction events have been caused by life, not by geological or climatic forces.

A diverse team of scientists—ecologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and more—released a paper in November proposing a system for categorizing and comparing these Earth-changing behaviors, hoping to gain insights into the future of human impacts on the biosphere.

The paper proposed a new term, “Earth system engineers,” for species whose behavior alters nutrient flows on a planetary scale. By comparing humans with other Earth system engineers, the authors hope to discern whether we are like an asteroid or a coral reef—a completely destructive and annihilating force, or the builders of a new world that will be populated with new lifeforms.

I called Simon Darroch, one of the paper’s lead authors, to ask about the new idea and the history of life’s planetary changes. In my next post, I’ll publish an interview with Erle Ellis, an ecoanthropologist who disagrees with Darroch’s approach.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What was the process of coming to this idea? What inspired you to write this paper?

The basis for this whole proposal was that we were a bunch of paleontologists, biologists, and geologists who were just a bit sick of the narrative that it’s always changes in the geosphere that tend to push the biosphere around, or that, as living organisms, we’re just passive passengers in this 4.5 billion-year history of our planet. I think a much more interesting and more useful way to look at things is that life is actually a geological force. Everything from the composition of our atmosphere to the chemistry of our oceans to the way sediment moves around on the Earth’s surface—almost all of that is controlled, in large part, by organisms.

This is an idea that is not particularly new. In ecology, this idea was formalized in the early 90s by a guy called Doug Clive Jones, and he coined the term “ecosystem engineers.” Clive was obsessed with beavers. They build these dams, and in doing so, they alter resource nutrient flows, they create new environments, and all sorts of other species thrive because of that. It drives some species extinct, but it creates these unique new ecosystems. Organisms that do this are a really powerful influence on patterns and diversity.

When you look at this from a deep time perspective—all these ecosystem engineering processes for a range of organisms have evolved over millions of years, in stepwise fashion—you can start to sort of pinpoint the intervals in Earth history where it’s become gradually more bioengineered. We are a bioengineered planet. Anyone looking at our planet from space will instantly recognize the signatures of life just from the way things are moving around and the composition of the atmosphere.

To us, it just seemed really important that we find a way to conceptualize and study this in a common framework. And there is this distinction, we think, between beavers, which do things on a local scale, and organisms producing effects that last millions, hundreds of millions, billions of years, and which fundamentally alter how habitable our planet is. They create ecological niches, but they also control evolutionary opportunity. Again, we’re not the first people to have said this, but if we did anything new, it was to try to force this conceptual framework that puts paleontologists and ecologists in the same room. The way you go about that is you literally put 20-odd people with different backgrounds and very different ideas about the way the world works in a room. And I guess we just argued for three years. Eventually, there was some consensus.

The next step, now that we have this framework, is we’re going through the fossil record and trying to put together every example we can find where a new evolutionary innovation starts to impact ecosystems, either locally or globally, in an interesting or important way. So we’re trying to put together the history of planetary bioengineering. And what’s cool about this group is that we included anthropologists, human ecologists, and behaviorologists. We’re all desperate to know: What is the long-term impact of what humans are having on the planet? Are we unique? To answer that question sensibly, you need a conceptual framework, and you need the fossil record.

What were some of the major points of contention that you had to resolve to create this concept?

The first one generally was, ‘Are humans different?’ I remember this quite vividly. Someone asked, ‘Are we an asteroid, or are we a sort of coral reef?’ Because there is some tantalizing evidence, if you look back at the fossil record, that mass extinctions, or biotic turnover events, have been driven not necessarily by volcanoes or by asteroids, but by the emergence of new life behaviors that start to fundamentally change the way the planet works. There have been a number of papers in the last 20 years pointing out that humans are ecosystem engineers. We’re altering nutrient flows and physically modifying the landscape in a way that many other species hate, and we’re driving extinctions, but also, there’s evidence that a lot of species are adapting to live with us. How do we get our heads around what is going to be the net effect of human ecosystem engineering on patterns and biodiversity? Are we creating new ecological opportunity, new evolutionary opportunity, or are we changing Earth systems and the way things work in such a quick and sort of deleterious way that we’re driving a mass extinction? And I think that the fossil record’s such an interesting resource because some variation of this will have happened before. So are we an asteroid or a coral reef?

(this paragraph is inserted from a response to a separate, related question) One interval that we would love to know more about, which is hard to study because there’s not really a fossil record of it, is the Great Oxygenation Event. This is a period from about 2.46-2.06 billion years ago, where oxygenic photosynthesis first emerged, and microbes started producing tons of oxygen (this event is what turned the sky blue). This oxygen ends up being the fuel for animals. If you want to be active and have a proper metabolism, you need oxygen. But oxygen, of course, is also like a metabolic poison. It’s why food goes bad. And there is a sense out there, and I don’t know what the most recent research is, that when oxygen was first being produced by cyanobacteria, this probably would have wiped out a whole bunch of other prokaryotes that themselves were ecosystem engineering and Earth system engineering in an interesting way.

Some other arguments were connected to the historical literature. Like, when this concept of ecosystem engineering was first published in 1994, it started a bit of a firestorm in ecology because all species impact other species, right? So surely, all species are ecosystem engineers or none are. Clive and other people then refuted that argument because some organisms have this outsized effect. So the debate came down to, where is the cut-off point that defines that outsized effect? That occupied us for a solid year, I think.

This all reminds me of a recent book called ‘Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life’ by Ferris Jabr, which is about both the scientific and non-scientific narratives about the planet as more integrated and alive, something in line with Gaia Theory. Do you think this paper is part of a larger movement in how people are conceptualizing life as a participatory, integrated feature of the planet?

(Note: The Gaia hypothesis, formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.)

I think you’re absolutely right—definitely inspired by Gaia, Lovelockian-type ideas. And I guess it depends on what field you’re in, right? If you studied geology in the 90s, Gaia and Lovelock and the Earth as an integrated system wasn’t really taught. I did my undergrad between 2002 and 2005, so it’s not that long ago, and it was very much taught from the perspective that the Earth changes and the biosphere suffers, or the biosphere responds. It was only when I was a master’s student in Tokyo, and trying to read more broadly, that I came across this whole other sort of hippie side of Earth science and Earth system science. So many of my generation have doubtless been inspired by that, increasingly, in the last 10 years. I’ve lost count of the number of Earth Systems textbooks that are now being written.

The paper includes a few really interesting graphics—interesting ways of visualizing what seem like very different phenomena, like reef-building and transpiration of water from plants. How have you thought about creating common points of comparison between the diverse phenomena involved in Earth system engineering as you make this framework?

This is something I’m actually trying to do in Germany right now. We need to find interesting ways to quantify ecosystem engineering to make comparisons. And that’s kind of a cool and interesting exercise. For example, I have a couple of postdocs focused on trace fossils. These are organisms that burrow into the sediment in marine environments. And burrowing is one of these really important ecosystem engineering behaviors that emerged half a billion years ago. Ever since, it’s become deeper and more intense, and it’s created more and more ecological opportunity on either side of the sediment-water interface in the oceans. And so these students have been thinking about how to quantify ecosystem engineering through this example. Like, can we build 3D models of these burrows and see how efficient they are at flushing oxygenated water into the sediment surface? Can we look at trace fossils and measure the chemical residues by the side of the burrow? Another example—there are a lot of modelers who are very interested in the spread and contraction of different types of vegetation, because different vegetation types have really important impacts, not just on the composition of the atmosphere, but on things like humidity, precipitation, and transpiration. I think that if the paper has done anything, it has made people think that there are cool ways to not just recognize that Earth system engineering exists, but to quantify life’s impact on other Earth systems.

…

And there’s an awful lot of characters in there, because what we want to do in the next phase is reconstruct this history of planetary bioengineering. And the next step in the future is going to be quantifying this. If you plotted out the scale of how bioengineered our planet has been through time, what does that curve look like? Is it smooth, or does it progress by step changes? Like, are there revolutions in the history of life where the Earth just fundamentally changes over a very short period of time? We are also quite keen on understanding what happens after mass extinction events—we know that you lose 80, 85% of species, but do ecosystem engineering and Earth system engineering processes go away, or do they persist? Do they help structure the way life recovers afterward?

From Darroch et al.: ‘Case studies illustrating the application of our new framework for studying ecosystem engineering/Earth system engineering (‘EE’/’ESE’) processes and consequences in deep time.’

How do humans fit into this picture?

We do a lot of Earth Systems Engineering. I think the really interesting aspect of human behavior is the sheer amount of different things we’re doing and how quickly they’ve all emerged. I mean, we spent 200,000 years as hominids, hunting and gathering and so on. We were ecosystem engineers for sure. We deforested, we did all sorts of things to the landscape. But then there’s agriculture, and that’s huge. Agriculture has a huge effect on nutrient flows, and other things respond to that. And then shortly after that, it’s permanent settlements. You’re building villages. You need trash heaps. You need irrigation. You need all these other things, and that’s ecosystem engineering. And then, in a geological eye-blink after that, you have cities. You have fossil fuel use, you have exploitation, you have ocean acidification, and you have mass pollution. And so I think the interesting comparison is, how many things do we do that have equivalents in the fossil record, and then how quickly have we put these things in place compared to what’s happened in the past?

Can you describe the next steps a little more? How do you see the trajectory of what to do next with this concept?

So, we’re putting together the planetary history. And the early results of that work are answering one of our big questions, which is about the shape of that bioengineering curve. It does very much look like step changes. So there are intervals in Earth history where lots of new Earth systems engineering and ecosystem engineering behaviors have emerged at roughly the same time. And the way the world works has changed very suddenly and very rapidly, and in most cases, permanently. And so groups of us are now splintering off to look at those intervals individually, and the one that I’m particularly interested in is the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary. This is when animals first appeared. Animals are very powerful ecosystem engineers, and a lot of very important processes emerged at this one point about 550 million years ago. Animals started colonizing reefs. They started building calcified skeletons—that’s really important because it changes the chemistry of the oceans by removing calcium from the water. You also have the emergence of animals burrowing into the sediment. They change the chemistry of the sediment and the chemistry of the water. I could go on and on. So, it seems that the Earth changes not overnight, but very, very rapidly, with a sudden burst of evolutionary innovation. And if we are going to find potential analogs of ways of contextualizing the present, it’s going to be by looking at these intervals that have these profound step changes. And the fossil record not only allows us to look at the links between engineering processes and consequences, but also long-term evolutionary outcomes. You get to see when a behavior first emerges. But then you can wind the clock forward a few million years and see how it changed the evolutionary landscape. Did that prompt extinction? Or did it prompt greater diversity? One of the great intervals we look at a lot is the Cambrian explosion (a famous explosion of evolutionary activity in which almost all existing animal phyla appeared roughly 538 million years ago). Historically, people have always looked for environmental drivers like a pulse of oxygen or something. But what if it was ecosystem engineering? What if a lot of the Cambrian explosion was driven by the emergence of new behaviors, and as a consequence of that, new evolutionary opportunity?

The Cambrian Explosion saw the rise of an extinct class of arthropods called radiodonts. In this depiction by Prehistorica CM, a radiodont (Shucaris ankylosskelos) hunts a small arthropod (Erratus sperare).

From what you know, is there a pattern of large spurts in Earth system engineering leading to the demise of the engineers themselves?

That is an argument we’ve had. In terms of things that may have engineered themselves out of existence, I don’t think we’ve come up with one. I don’t know that humans would necessarily be the first… but one thing we do think is unique about humans is we can’t think of another Earth systems engineering process that was caused by a single species. Oxygenic photosynthesis is done by zillions of different organisms that are more or less related, but humans are solely responsible as a species for a whole bunch of Earth systems engineering impacts. Everything else is distributed across broader groups.

Is there anything else that I didn’t ask about that you think is important to mention?

This is one in a line of attempts to synthesize what ecologists are thinking and observing in the rock record. There’s nothing in there where we’re going to say we’re right, we’re definitely correct. What we’re doing is just saying we think this is important. We think this is an important area of research. We feel that this is a much better way of looking at Earth’s history and contextualizing the Anthropocene. There may be some genuinely new insights in there, but a lot of it is just cobbling together ideas that have emerged in other fields. And I think that’s the major benefit of pulling together people who work in very different areas and literally locking them in a room until they come to some sort of agreement. It’s so hard because so many of our fields are so entrenched, and finding a common language is so powerful. Even if this framework doesn’t end up being useful, it has made us think about things in a very, very different way. And I think that process is important.

Lake Mead, photographed in December 2024. The Bureau of Reclamation proposes cutting normal releases from Mead by up to 1.48 million acre-feet under dry conditions. Reclamation’s analysis shows that those cuts won’t save the reservoir from reaching critical levels if low flows continue, but further action may be impossible legally without a deal between the states or authorization from Congress.

The Colorado River made more headlines than usual on Valentine’s Day, when basin states failed to meet the federal government’s deadline for an interstate agreement to manage the declining river.

Without the deal, the Bureau of Reclamation has said it will move forward with its own river management options, which it released in a draft environmental impact statement in January. The feds will likely go with their “basic coordination” option, which they say is the only alternative that falls within their existing legal authority. Experts say that option won’t be enough to prevent reservoirs from reaching critical elevations in the next few years, assuming bad hydrology continues.

I called Arizona State University law professor Rhett Larson on Jan. 28, more than two weeks before the deadline passed. I asked Larson about the body of legislation, court decrees, and interstate compacts that make up the so-called “law of the river,” the legal framework that may not have created the crisis on the Colorado River, but certainly structured the way it has played out. The conversation seems more relevant now than it did before Valentine’s Day.

Larson has been steeped in water politics since he was a child. Growing up in Yuma, Arizona, one of the Colorado River’s most productive agricultural communities, Larson says he always saw water as a symbol of power and sovereignty, more than just a resource for making money.

“I grew up in a community where real power was vested in your irrigation district, not in the White House or Congress,” Larson said. “The only real power, the only real wealth on Earth, is controlling water. Everything else is built on that bigger question.”

Larson went into water law because it was one of the few professions that presented itself to him in Yuma.

“Everybody I knew was either a farmer or a soldier, because there was a military base in Yuma as well, and the only grown-up I knew who wasn’t a farmer or a soldier was our irrigation district water lawyer. So I thought, well, that’s the only non-scary job grown-ups can have, so I’d better get that one,” Larson said.

What started as a “non-scary” job opportunity turned into a life-spanning adventure. Larson went on to explore water’s relationship with political power around the world, living and studying in the Middle East, Latin America, and Australia.

His research now focuses on dispute resolution and improved processes in water rights adjudications in Arizona and the Colorado River Basin.

I asked Larson, is there something internal to the Colorado River’s legal system that has made it so brittle? Shouldn’t growing pains in a rapidly developing region, and droughts in a desert, be part of the DNA of our water management system?

The drought that has defined the last two decades on the Colorado River has cast its legal system into uncharted territory. That drought has exacerbated already-existing growing pains in Western economies that have moved from the frontier days to the age of artificial intelligence.

Those are external shocks to the law of the river. But why wasn’t a water system implemented in a rapidly developing desert built for drought and demographic change? The two-year-long dealmaking process that seemed to sputter out on Valentine’s Day was one of at least three similar negotiation periods on the river in the last 20 years. Periodic adjustments are inherent to any adaptive system, Larson points out, but so many adjustments in so little time create massive strain on water users.

“We have 19th-century laws, we have 20th-century infrastructure, and we have a 21st-century climate and population,” Larson said.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: As the Colorado River states have been negotiating over the river, they haven’t only been fighting over a fixed amount of water molecules, like a standing body of water. It’s not just an engineering problem. So, what else are they really struggling over?

A: Well, there is certainly a struggle over actually getting a particular, specified amount of water. A big question right now is whether the Upper Basin is going to deliver 8.25 million acre-feet per year (or 82.5 million acre-feet over a 10-year period) to Lee Ferry. So there is a fight over just a sheer quantity of water. There’s also the fight over the share of the available resource; even if the resource is so small that you can’t deliver that quantified jug, is everybody getting their share? And are the shares we’ve created fair? Are they reasonable? And then some things are even more deeply embedded than just fighting over the water. Water is a symbol. It’s a symbol of sovereignty. It’s a symbol of respect. And sometimes when we’re fighting over water, we’re not just fighting over the water molecule itself, we’re fighting over what the molecule means. It means economic development. It means political independence. It means political power and authority. It means respect, respect for rural communities, respect for tribal communities, respect for border communities, respect for the Mexican nation. So a lot of times, they’re just fighting to be seen. I have four kids. Water law is sometimes like having four kids; let’s say I’ve put dinner out on the table, and my four kids start fighting. One says, ‘I should get the most because I’m the biggest;’ one says, ‘I should get the most because I’m the oldest;’ one says, ‘I should get the most because I got here first;’ and one says, ‘I should get the most because I’m the smallest and I need to grow.’ Those are the kinds of arguments that people make in water law. And they are technically about an amount of food, but they’re also about your place in the family and being seen and respected, and that’s sometimes what water law is about as well.

Q: Do you feel like lawyers or engineers are more commonly tasked with splashing the cold water of practical reality on proposals for fixing this system?

A: I’m probably biased because I’m a lawyer, but I think it’s probably lawyers who do the splashing, and I mean that as a compliment to engineers. Engineers tend to be very problem-solving-oriented people. They tend to have the attitude of, well, you know, with this amount of money and these pipes and pumps, we can move the water here or there. But with all due respect to engineers, they often overlook a lot of the political, cultural, and legal obstacles. For example, it’s really easy for people to ask why we can’t just build a giant pipeline from the Mississippi River, or the Great Lakes, or Canada? That’s understandable. They’re relatively water-rich. We’re relatively water-poor. We build big pipelines to move, you know, oil long distances. Why can’t we do that with water? And the answer is that we can definitely build it, but the obstacle is really economic. Is it worth it? Are people going to be willing to pay that much money for water, given what it takes to move it that far? And then there are big legal and political issues as well.

Q: What does the legal perspective on the Colorado River reveal that may not be apparent to regular observers?

A: Water law functions a little bit like bankruptcy. In a bankruptcy case, there’s someone who owes money to many different people but can’t possibly pay all of them. So bankruptcy decides who does get paid in what amount and when, and who gets cut off and never gets paid back. That’s kind of what water law is like. The river owes people who have legal rights to the water, but during a drought, the river can’t pay out to everyone, so the law is really about determining who gets paid how much and when, and who gets cut off.

Q: What are some dynamics in that bankruptcy proceeding on the Colorado River that you think are notable, given your eye for political and legal constraints?

A: Here’s a big one. The laws in the Western United States are governed by prior appropriation, meaning the first person to get to the water and put it to a beneficial use has a superior claim to that water over anybody who comes after them. That’s a really smart law to get people to move to the desert and to build and invest. It’s not a very good law for managing a desert that’s already been built up. So, people can be really critical of this legal structure, but it did what it was designed to do. It got a lot of people to move to the desert, and a lot of them came to farm and to mine. But as the desert grows and as its economy diversifies, a lot of water rights, a lot of those water rights kind of get tied up in these uses ike mining and agriculture, because those people got here first. So, being able to shift that water into other uses is an important and complex part of water law. Put simply, we have 19th-century laws, we have 20th-century infrastructure, and we have a 21st-century climate and population. That’s pretty much why we’re in the problems we’re in.

Q: So, prior appropriation, where the oldest rights are the strongest, governs a lot of water law in the West. But at the same time, the Colorado River Compact was signed to intentionally contradict prior appropriation. It gave younger states with less economic activity a pre-allocated amount of water that they could grow into with time. So, states like Colorado and Utah were using prior appropriation inside their borders, but pushing against prior appropriation on an interstate basis. From a historical perspective, why did they do that?

A: One of the reasons they signed that compact in 1922 is that the Supreme Court issued a couple of decisions right before then, stating that if states sue each other over rivers that they share, and all of those states share the same basic water rights regime, like prior appropriation, then the Supreme Court will just apply the water law that all those states share, prior appropriation. Well, that terrified every Colorado River Basin state that wasn’t California, because California was growing so fast and gobbling up so much of the river. If the river was all going to be governed by prior appropriation, then California would have been first in time, first and right for most of the water in the river. So people wanted some federal law to keep California from legally being able to claim the entire river. So, the compact came from a fear of prior appropriation being implemented across the basin.

Scott Cameron, acting director of the Bureau of Reclamation, speaks at a June 2025 conference at the University of Colorado Boulder. “If the needs of society change, we should have a conversation about changing existing law,” Cameron told attendees.

Q: Layered on top of that compact, the law of the river now includes a number of more recent legislative acts and court decrees. As an abstract exercise, could you put a number on what percentage of the law of the river actually adheres to prior appropriation, and what portion is designed to actually prevent the consequences of prior appropriation?

A: Oh, that’s hard, but I would say that the majority of the law of the river runs against prior appropriation. So you know, the compact effectively gives 7.5 million acre-feet per year to the Upper Basin states, cutting off ostensibly half of the river from prior appropriation. So that alone means at least 50% of the law of the river is not driven by prior appropriation. Add on top of that, the treaty with Mexico and the provisions related to Mexico under the compact were really about protecting Mexico’s rights, and that definitely flies in the face of prior appropriation. So while prior appropriation still plays a big role, I would say the law of the river is 60% against prior appropriation.

Q: If we had gone the other way, and the entire basin were operated under a purist’s conception of prior appropriation, how different do you think the basin would look today?

A: It would look quite a bit different. California would certainly have a right to more than 4.4 million acre-feet of water, which is its current right. We know that because California was using considerably more than its rights for decades and decades, because the Upper Basin and Arizona hadn’t grown into their allocations. Now, of course, I think what you’re trying to ask is, well, even if California had rights to a bunch of water, wouldn’t people eventually buy some of those rights from California and redistribute them across the basin? I’m not sure that would be true. First of all, California showed they know how to use that amount of water if they have the right to it, so they know how to use it and make money off of it. So, it’s not obvious to me that they would have sold out, or that any of these other states would have had the money to outbid other California users for that water. Secondly, selling your prior appropriation right requires a process called ‘sever and transfer,’ which means you have to sever the water right from its diversion point and then transfer it. And that usually means that any other water user has the potential to object to the transfer. So, it’s so expensive and takes so much time to sell a surface water right that it makes the water market really inefficient. So, even if California wanted to sell a bunch of water to Colorado or Arizona, a lot of the legal obstacles would get in the way, and the market would still have been really inefficient. So, had we just applied pure prior appropriation in the basin, my guess is, is that California would have a lot more water rights than the other states would, and the other states would really struggle to use market mechanisms to redistribute that water.

Q: You mentioned those legal obstacles that hamper the market mechanisms under prior appropriation. I’m also wondering if those issues you discussed about sovereignty and culture and all these other important symbolic issues can make a prior appropriation system less efficient as well? How do you view prior appropriation in terms of its general economic efficiency?

A: Again, its ability to create incentives for the settlement of an arid region is great. But when the economy starts to diversify, and now, all of a sudden, you have semiconductor producers and power plants and data centers that want to get their hands on that water. You would expect them to just go to these earlier water users with high-priority water rights and buy their rights for a lot of money. But we don’t actually see that as a really effective way of moving that water around because, first of all, people aren’t rational actors about their water. They aren’t purely economically rational. Sometimes they don’t want to sell it, even above market price, because they value it too much for their way of life, or for their culture, for their sovereignty. And then there are also those transaction costs to moving that water around, for legal and hydrological reasons. Some of the irrigation water a farmer puts on a field might drain back to the river over time and change the river’s flows. So even though it might look economically efficient for the farmer to sell the water to a city, a bunch of other users on the river are going to say, well, it’s not efficient for us, because those return flows will go away. And, added on top of the inefficiencies that are created with water transfers, there are real negative externalities. If farmers sell their land or sell their water rights, they walk away with a big check, but the tractor repairman and the fertilizer salesman and all of the other industries that surrounded that agricultural community didn’t get a check, and they got devastated by the transfer. So that’s another market inefficiency in water markets that is hard for us to address without careful policy development.

Q: So, as we were describing, the law of the river is not a pure, self-regulating mechanism. It evolves through negotiation, legislation, and litigation that all superimpose new arrangements on top of the older legal principles or agreements. And these changes are designed meet the evolving socioeconomic needs of society in the basin. Right now, as negotiations on the river are breaking down, and there is no automatic system for handling the current shortage, someone might argue that this is actually not a very adaptive structure, but an inadequate one. Do you see this system of periodic negotiated updates and overlaid arrangements as an ingrained form of adaptability and compromise through democracy, or as evidence that the baseline system that we set up is unable to accommodate growth and change without constant maintenance and action? Like, are these constant agreements and negotiations and court cases a feature of the system, or are they a bug?

A: Well, it’s easy to say this is an ossified system that we have to constantly tweak with changing conditions. But adaptive systems will inevitably go through trial and error. Plus, the law of the river is not a monolith. There are parts of it that are highly adaptive, and other parts that are grotesquely ossified. So, you know, the Colorado River Compact’s Solomonic splitting of the river between the two basins is probably stupidly ossified. But the 1944 treaty between the United States and Mexico, which simply creates a commissioner for each country and allows them to create new agreements (‘minutes’) that adapt very quickly to conditions in the river, is highly adaptive. It’s also in the very nature of water management that, as Bruce Lee said, water can flow, or it can crash. If you put it into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. If you put it into a cup, it becomes the cup. Bruce Lee’s approach to martial arts is, and should be, our approach to water management, which is, you have to be as adaptable as the resource itself, which means we are going to keep making mistakes. We shouldn’t hold back from innovation out of fear that we’re going to mess up; we should embrace the messing up, because we’re definitely going to do it, and then just have periodic reviews where we need to improve.

The challenge with water, though, is that we can’t have our periodic reviews be every five years, because water planners need to plan on long time horizons. It costs a lot of money to build pipes and pumps and reservoirs; you have to manage those over a time horizon of decades, not years. So, it’s very difficult in water to give water managers enough time that they can make the investments in infrastructure they need to make, but not so much time that we’re not regularly checking in and adapting.

A chart showing the reservoir level effects from a string of negotiated agreements over how to manage ongoing Colorado River shortages since the early 2000s. The agreements include deals between the U.S. and Mexico, shortage-sharing agreements between states, and even a deal in 2001 designed for how to distribute water surpluses (those were different times). Though the dealmaking processes have been intense and frequent, they have not successfully stemmed the declines in reservoir levels.

Q: How do you think we’re doing on that front right now?

A: Badly.

Q: Does that strike you as a result of the conditions we’re facing and how unprecedented and rapid this shortage has been? Or is it something that could have been avoided had systems been built a little differently in the past?

A: Let’s say there are three aspects to the problem that we’re in right now. One is that we did make mistakes. The 1922 compact is problematic. It’s unclear about certain obligations. It’s creating raw water allocations that the river probably couldn’t have made even back then. Those mistakes weren’t made maliciously or even stupidly, but they were mistakes, and we are paying for them now. So, the law is not working. We need to change the law. The second aspect is what you just said, which is that the climate has changed so fast, and we have aridified so quickly, and it has been almost impossible for us to keep up. And so we feel like we’re constantly moving from one crisis to another, and not able to catch our breath and think carefully about long-term planning. These crises force us to the negotiation table with fear, but they also force us into our corners to retrench, because we’re so afraid of how much we might lose, and that kind of panic doesn’t lend itself well to good negotiation, and that panic is being driven by hydrology. The third part, and I think this might be an unspoken part, is that we’re watching a division in our culture begin to bleed into our water politics. Water has always been very political, but it doesn’t tend to be particularly partisan. It tends to have very little to do with culture wars or political parties. But increasingly, this sort of divisiveness about our national politics and our partisan political identities starts to bleed into the way that we talk about water, and the more that it bleeds into the way that we talk about water, the more we see each other with distrust, and the more we question each other’s motives. Then it starts to erode the kind of trust and confidence you need to ultimately make these kinds of water deals.

Q: Can you describe how that’s actually materializing?

A: There’s a small-scale water infrastructure development project in southeastern Colorado that didn’t cost a lot of money and had bipartisan support, and it was vetoed by the president for reasons that appear largely partisan and political. And now everybody in the basin is wondering, well, if that small water infrastructure legislation supported by both political parties can get vetoed, what happens to an even bigger deal that might get struck? Will it get vetoed over political issues? When we are using water as punishment for one party and reward for another party, or when we think about punishing Mexico with water, or if we use it as a political platform to aggrandize ourselves, that is evidence of water becoming a partisan political tool, rather than just a challenging resource to allocate.

Q: I take part of what you’re saying to mean that regardless of how you set up these systems, inevitably they end up requiring some degree of adjustment and negotiation as people work through different realities and form different goals. Is that correct?

A: I think that’s exactly right.

Q: Scott Cameron, acting commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, said at a conference in Boulder last summer, “The federal government doesn’t take all aspects of the law of the river to be fixed in perpetuity. Law is a lagging factor. It lags behind the needs of society. So if the needs of society change, we should have a conversation about changing existing law.” In the context of what we’ve discussed, I’m wondering how you see law, either as a lagging factor that meets the needs of society, or is a structuring factor that actually guides how society works?

A: I think whether law is out in front of society or lagging behind society just depends on particular conditions, and because the river is changing so fast, and because the economies and the populations of the Southwest are changing so fast, water law can’t keep up. If the river were changing slowly and these communities were changing slowly, then maybe water law could get out ahead of it and be the innovator, but right now, the hydrology is changing so fast that the law necessarily lags behind. I think Scott Cameron’s right in a lot of ways, at least in this instance, because things are changing so fast, law is going to lag behind, and someone or something else is going to have to get out ahead of it and lead. And I think in this particular instance, because of the mistakes we made early on in the development of the law of the river, because of the rapidly changing hydrology, and because of the way our politics are sort of creating a certain level of distrust and bellicosity in the way we treat each other, we’re just moving too slowly to keep up with the changing world.

Two decades ago, Allen Best had never really thought muchabout climate change or energy politics. A local journalist in Colorado mountain towns, Best reported his first story about global warming for Ski Area Management Magazine in 2003, after Colorado experienced one of its worst water years on record in 2002. For background research, Best read a year’s worth of New York Times stories about climate, and he describes the experience as enlightening.

“And that really opened my eyes. I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve been asleep here,’” Best told me.

Best immediately pitched a year-long series on climate change to The Vail Daily and then began reporting intensely on energy. Best started Big Pivots, a news site about Colorado’s energy and water politics, in 2020. He also covered Colorado for Canary Media, mostly from 2018 through 2020. Best has seen Colorado’s energy transition develop in conference rooms, hayfields, and community centers. He has several handy anecdotes for almost every energy transition subject in Colorado going back more than a decade.

I asked Best about the last eight years of Colorado’s energy transition journey, the years since the state first announced its ambitious climate goals. Looking back on those “heady days” around the turn of the decade reveals a moment when the energy transition seemed easier, and more exciting, than it does now, Best said. Colorado and its largest power providers have not backed off their climate goals (yet), but Best says the air has a different feel to it now. New load growth from data centers and a more challenging federal political environment have cast some cold water on a white-hot movement.

Nonetheless, Best sees the momentum in Colorado’s transition. Whether moved by climate or not, consumers and power providers are moving forward with a more decentralized, renewable-powered model of electricity provision. Whether that movement is enough to meet the state’s goals is a big question, Best says, but they are probably here to stay.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: You have this great perspective, having covered these issues for a while and seen some evolutions in the state. One of those big evolutions is something you’ve described as a moment in 2023 when Colorado’s energy transition seemed ‘Vaguely quaint.’ You write:

‘We were busily making plans to shut down the last coal plants. Geothermal had entered the conversation as we looked to decarbonize buildings.’

Earlier, in 2022, you wrote an article quoting Colorado PUC Chair Eric Blank saying that Colorado was at a ‘magical place in this energy transition.’ Can you talk about what it felt like in those two years?

A: At that time, we had very good reason to think that Colorado was at the forefront of a change in the United States. Everybody likes to be in the vanguard, and we had pretty good proof. One of the vivid memories I have was being in the Museum of Nature and Science in Denver in December of 2018. Xcel Energy had called this event, and they were announcing these massive decarbonization goals. (Xcel Colorado aims to reduce carbon emissions from 2005 levels more than 80% by 2030 and retire coal operations by the same year, broadly aiming to become a net-zero energy provider by 2050). And I remember very well Jared Polis, who had just been elected governor a month before, saying, ‘elections have consequences.’ He had run on a platform of embracing renewables. Then in 2019, the state legislature adopted the climate goals that we still have—some say that they’ve actually upgraded them a little bit—and there was that magical moment. We had a legislative mandate. We had prices—the prices of wind and solar had really come down. By 2021 and 2022, we had a lot of progress. It was more fulsome. We were broadening the legislative agenda. So what was it like at that time? It was pretty heady. It was like, ‘Wow, we really are moving and, yeah, we can solve this problem. It’s just going to take a lot of work.’

Q: How has the situation changed since then?

A: Since then, I would say that there have been some headwinds. We had supply chain issues affecting solar and wind. We have had the election of a president who very much disputes any need for change. We have data centers and the load growth that they represent. It’s huge. Xcel submitted a filing in October of 2024 saying they need a massive amount of new electricity, with over 60% of it needed for artificial intelligence and data centers (p 29 of the filing). There are lots more wrinkles we’re finding now. Those heady days of three years ago, weren’t they nice? Now we have some real problems to solve. Though I suppose it never was going to be easy.

Q: Are some headwinds stronger than others?

A: I would have to say it’s the question of data centers and artificial intelligence. It just looms so large in so many different places. You see it most prominently with Xcel and its resource plan that it filed again in October of 2024. Xcel said they’re going to need so much more generation, and that means a lot of wind, a lot of solar, and actually quite a lot of natural gas. With the cooperatives serviced by Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the data center question is not uniform. Some cooperatives are seeing interest in siting data centers, and some aren’t. But I am working right now on a story from an area in Colorado where they’re talking about a datacenter with the potential ultimate demand of two gigawatts, and this is an area served by a cooperative with a peak demand of 2.5 gigawatts. So that potential datacenter demand is just absolutely enormous. How real is it? Well, that’s a whole different topic. But there’s no doubt that a lot of it’s real. And I think it’s going to be one of the big issues of the legislative session this winter.

Q: You’ve written that some people were discussing the datacenter issue back in 2023, but the subject really seems to have exploded in the last two years. Have data centers created a lot of whiplash since the magical days of 2023, or was this something that energy providers were thoroughly discussing before it came into the public eye?

A: My first awareness of it came around September of 2023. I don’t recall anyone in 2021 talking about growth from data centers. It’s been a somewhat explosive issue in the last two years. Even in 2024, there was a state legislator who introduced a bill that would have provided incentives for data center development. I honestly don’t think he understood that the conversation had changed so much. The last bill we had for data centers was in 2018, and it was approved. He had somehow been unaware that the whole tenor of the conversation had changed since then. He was kind-of blindsided. His bill didn’t even get into committee.

Q: You’ve mentioned both Xcel and Tri-State, Colorado’s two largest power providers. Have you seen them respond to these headwinds differently?

A: I think they’re moving in similar directions. Xcel has not backed away from its commitments. It could conceivably back away in the next four years. Tri-State could back away. But at this point, neither of them has. They can both talk about new potential demand for data centers and say they haven’t changed their plans about closing coal plants. So far, I haven’t heard any hints of an inability to meet their 2030 goals for greenhouse gas reductions.

Q: A big part of that equation, of course, is natural gas. In 2022, you wrote:

‘Natural gas is where coal was 10 or 15 years ago. We still need it for electrical generation, but the bridge no longer seems endless. But will new natural gas plants end up being, like many coal plants, assets stranded long before the debt is paid?’

Could you describe how the concept of natural gas as a bridge fuel has changed as we’ve moved out of those magical days in Colorado’s energy transition and entered a new reality?

A: I’ve gone to the Colorado Oil and Gas Association conferences, and there used to be a lot of pride in the idea that there was a happy relationship between this segment of the fossil fuel industry and the environmental community. Natural gas generates fewer emissions than burning coal does. It’s just a cleaner fuel. Since then, there’s been a lot of pushback on natural gas because methane has a higher short-term greenhouse gas heating potential, which is problematic if there’s been a lot of leakage in a pipeline. So, there was kind of a happy conversation between the environmental community and the natural gas sector that was very much evident even 10 to 15 years ago. Now, as we’re starting to figure out how to get away from coal, that relationship has disintegrated somewhat. The environmental community is fragmented about whether we should accept natural gas as the bridge to the future. And there’s a big question of how long that bridge should be, or how long we will need natural gas to make sure we can keep the lights on. How soon will natural gas plants become stranded assets if we spend hundreds of millions on new ones? How much will we actually need them?

The answer partly depends on how much transmission and storage we can get on the grid to support renewables. On the local level, there are these efforts to implement dispersed home battery storage, the whole idea being that it’s not just an energy system based upon a big coal-fired power plant 100 miles away. It’s much more variegated, much more dispersed: the battery of your electric car, for instance, can actually be part of the grid, providing electricity for your neighbors. And of course, these financial relationships get fairly complex, but that’s the nature of electricity altogether. Compared with 50 years ago, even 20 years ago, it’s getting much, much more complex, and more bottom-up as well, less reliant on central power plants.

A February 2003 article in The Vail Trail announces a ski industry push for climate change awareness. A year later, Allen Best would publish a series on climate change in the Vail Daily, some of his first Colorado climate reporting.

Q: Let’s talk about politics for a moment. As you mentioned, political leadership was important in making that ‘heady moment’ in Colorado’s energy transition possible. The energy transition is facing political headwinds now, but Democrats are likely going to maintain significant political power in the state. We’re probably starting to look a little more like California than like Virginia or North Carolina. Does that change the importance of the example Colorado sets for other states? Does a transition backed by strong political power teach different lessons from a transition that is built on compromise?

A: I think it does. We are still a purple state if you look at the congressional districts. They’re split pretty evenly. But in terms of statewide offices in Colorado, Democrats have a hold on the state. Still, though, the trick is to have the conversation inclusively. You can’t get so far ahead of everybody that they aren’t willing to come along at some level. Renewable energy generation in Colorado is largely in the eastern plains. That’s where the wind is. It’s also where you have a lot of land where you can have seas of solar panels. So I’m working on a story looking at eastern Colorado and asking, how do they see things? Are they getting a fair shake on this? Are we respecting their values? If you’re living in Boulder or Arvada or the Roaring Fork Valley, you might think that climate change is the single most important thing we need to solve. For somebody out in the 18 eastern Colorado counties, maybe its economic opportunity. There’s a whole lot of issues here that we need to sort through. So yeah, we’re more like California now. But even California has the Central Valley. It’s very important to keep having those conversations, right?

Q: Speaking about those areas out in eastern Colorado, I know those are some of the regions where renewable energy also contributes the most to local tax revenue. Will you be exploring how these energy sources play into community interests, and whether they’re a burden or or a support?

A: That is very definitely on my agenda investigate to understand that picture better. It’s not just the eastern plains. I talked with a county commissioner down in the San Luis Valley on that very topic last week. When a renewable energy project is proposed, there are often lots of statements made about how it will augment the local tax base. And that does occur, without a doubt. But the additions to the tax base have fallen somewhat short of expectations in some places. That county commissioners said something like, ‘Yeah, it’s made a difference, but it’s not huge.’ Then again, I was out in eastern Colorado in Kiowa County. They’re right on the Colorado Power Pathway, which is the 550-mile 345-kilovolt power line that Xcel Energy is completing. Their population has been dropping for basically a century. It’s a lot of dryland agriculture. And they would see it as something that might be good for them. So there’s a lot of variety.

Q: While some of those counties are getting new renewable energy investment, others are losing investment in the coal industry.

Do you see the closure of these coal plants as a friction for Colorado’s energy transition overall? Or is it more of a localized problem that these communities are dealing with on their own?

A: A ‘just transition’ was part of the original climate legislation in 2019. That basically meant making sure we’re not throwing the coal communities under the bus as we make this transition. Those communities did us a good job. They did us a good service. We built our prosperity on the back of coal, no doubt about it. But as I’ve written any number of times, what exactly constitutes just transition? It’s very much in the eye of the beholder. But I don’t think the idea was ever that the relative prosperity of the coal communities would continue apace. I think, implicitly, the idea was that there had to be a mixture of state support and local effort—a willingness to take on responsibility for figuring out their future. It isn’t just a matter of, ‘We’re going to take care of you.’ There has to be local ambition, too, right? And it’s not easy. I was up in Craig in May, and Craig is trying. But it’s not as easy for them to figure out a new future as it would be if you were somewhere along the Front Range. They have a colder climate. They’re far from a metropolitan area, which works well for some people, but the mass of people want to be closer to a city. There are lots of nice things to say about Craig and its proximity to natural areas. It’s nice if you love sagebrush. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s ever going to be a resort community. So the answer is still not figured out in any of these places.

(Note: The Trump administration has moved to keep one of three units at the Craig Generating Station open, though Tri-State planned to close the unit at the end of 2025)

Q: A lot of the conversation about how to handle the closure of coal plants in Pueblo, Hayden, and Craig now revolves around the idea of building new electricity generation in those areas. There are concepts of a natural gas plant up in Hayden or Craig, and then there are ideas for either nuclear or some kind of energy park in Pueblo. Is the focus on building new generation a result of the new projected load growth from data centers, or has building replacing old energy generation with new energy generation always been part of that conversation?

A: I think it’s always been part of the conversation. Going back to around 2021, at Hayden, Xcel was investing in the idea of molten salt storage. That idea didn’t pencil out very well, but it was an example of how people were imagining how to use the existing coal infrastructure for a new use. And there’s a financial argument for that—You’ve got your transmission lines already built and connected. Plus, it gets into the idea of what constitutes a ‘just transition’. How can we retain jobs? How can we help a place like Craig, Hayden or Pueblo after the coal plants close? The conversation is not the same in all three of those places, but I don’t think that the idea of reusing the existing infrastructure has changed.

Q: There is this phenomenon of some smaller electricity co-ops pulling away from Tri-State, their wholesale power provider, saying they want more local, clean generation. Some of them want to take on some data centers or industrial users. Holy Cross wasn’t connected with Tri-State, but it is an example of a co-op that has moved away from its larger power provider, Xcel, so that it can make its own generation arrangements. I was wondering, where is this coming from, this urge toward more localized, often clean generation? How can we explain that phenomenon?

A: Some are more easily understood than others, and tri state altogether is a very complicated story. Ten years ago, Tri-State was very much in the old-school mentality: ‘We’ll just build bigger coal plants.’ In one particular case, Tri-State went out and forged a relationship with Sunflower Electric in Kansas to build a humongous coal-fired power plant along the Arkansas River in southwest Kansas. And that story was quite interesting. The Kansas governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who later served in the Obama administration, vetoed it, and Tri-State was outraged. That was a loud shout that the times had changed. In retrospect, they should build a monument to this governor, because otherwise, Tri-State would have a really big stranded asset. Two of Tri-State’s 44 member co-ops at the time refused to sign contract extensions from 2040 to 2051. They were Delta-Montrose Electric in Colorado and Kit Carson Electric in New Mexico. And then Kit Carson was the first to leave in 2016. They forged a relationship with Guzman Energy, which was a new company that didn’t have any generating assets of its own, and that relationship has worked out pretty well. Kit Carson was able to really get in at the ground floor of adding renewable generation, particularly in its own service territory. It just added an awful lot of solar so that two years ago, they were able say they were delivering 100% locally produced solar power during our daytime hours. With Delta-Montrose, they had been very unhappy with the leadership of Tri-State. They left in 2020, and they also hooked up with Guzman and started taking advantage of local distributed solar generation that Tri-State was very slow to latch onto. Tri-State were still very much in the idea that they would have these big coal-fired power plants, and they would deliver to that power to member co-ops on Tri-State’s terms.

Since then, Tri-State has evolved. I do have to think there was a major shift in 2018. Did they shift rapidly enough? Well, not enough for United Power, which is based in Brighton and serves 113,000 meters. They have big demand, because they have a lot of industrial load northeast of Denver. They left Tri-State in 2024, and that was a huge loss. And then we have Mountain Parks Electric leaving in 2025, and La Plata Electric gave their two-year notice in April 2024. More recently, we have three public power districts in Nebraska (Chimney Rock, Panhandle Rural Electric Membership Association, and Roosevelt Public Power District) that are leaving. So the Tri-State empire is becoming smaller.

Q: Is there a pattern in what they are describing is their motivation for this, or do they each seem to have their own particular story?

A: I think they see opportunity in the marketplace. They believe they can do better for their membership by going alone. Even beyond Tri-State, Grand Valley Electric in the Grand Junction area and Yampa Valley Electric were both supplied by Xcel, and they have left, or will be leaving Xcel (both are now working with Guzman). So there are a lot of opportunities, and co-ops say they don’t need to have a large provider’s expertise. Now, some other places in Colorado do need to have the expertise of a large provider like Tri-State or Xcel. There is value in being able to tap into an organization that big.

In 1975, special contributing editor to Arizona Highways magazine Dan Halacy, a solar energy enthusiast and glider pilot in his free time, convinced his colleagues to dedicate an entire monthly edition to solar energy. Long before the photovoltaic cell became a source of large-scale power production, the magazine bloomed with custom paintings of gleaming solar cities, designs for sun-heated homes, and an ode to “the star that controls our lives.”

I wrote an article (link here) for the Arizona Republic about the fiftieth anniversary of that magazine, which I discovered lying in a box at a Phoenix coffee shop. As I was writing the article, famed climate activist Bill McKibben released his newest book: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.

Like Halacy’s special solar edition, McKibben’s book was an exuberant appeal for the mystical, economic, political, and environmental benefits of a solar-powered world. But a major wedge divides McKibben’s solar enthusiasm from Halacy’s: climate change appears nowhere in Halacy’s 1975 magazine. It wasn’t until 14 years later that climate change really entered the public consciousness, partly due to McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, which introduced many readers to the subject for the first time.

That got me thinking: What were the motivations for pursuing solar power before climate change became a popular debate? And how has solar power’s coalition of supporters changed since then?

The solar edition of the Arizona Highways emerged during a hot period for solar energy in politics and culture. Leading up to 1975, OPEC’s oil embargo on the United States caused panic as gasoline shortages dried pumps and home heating systems. Politicians from both parties saw solar as a way to harden the country against international oil shocks. Congress passed an act to establish a Solar Energy Research Institute (now NREL) in 1974, and solar water heaters appeared on the roof of Jimmy Carter’s White House five years later.

For national security hawks, solar meant energy independence, but environmentalists saw promise in it also. Solar energy’s 1970s golden moment occurred before climate became a popular rallying cry, but not before it could be associated with the environment. Members of the relatively new environmental movement supported solar energy because it reduced resource use generally and because it went against the idea of ever-growing consumption.

Ultimately, the Reagan administration and the end of the oil embargo squashed the pro-solar wave in the 1970s, and it wasn’t until a complex array of forces, including climate change, brought the technology back to the fore in the late 2010s that solar achieved the scale of Halacy’s fantasies. In 2025, the pro-solar coalition looks somewhat different from its 1970s predecessors: National security concerns over a dependency on foreign oil did spur solar development, but mostly in China; In the United States, solar adoption has been driven more by affordability, i.e. cheap growth, than by stemming consumption and living more frugally; and fighting climate change has formed the chief moral narrative for clean energy, whereas it was only a niche environmental hypothesis fifty years ago.

I called McKibben to ask him for some reflections on this evolution—on solar energy’s half-decade slump between the Carter and Biden administrations and the changing coalitions that brought the technology back from the dead.

The cover of August 1975 edition of Arizona Highways magazine features a utopian painting of a solar-powered Arizona city by artist Robert McCall, who was well-known at the time for his paintings promoting U.S. space programs.

Q: You write that you don’t think we will cut our emissions in half by cutting our energy use in half. Rather, we’re going to ”rip out the guts” of the energy system and replace them with renewables. Do you believe that because renewables have become cheaper and it’s suddenly much more possible to deploy them, or did you always think “ripping the guts out” was the answer?

A: Let’s actually talk about it in relation to the 1970s, because that was the first time, before this time, that this future seemed possible. Back then, it was very much expressed as kind of space-age engineering, and some of it was very hippie — ‘small is beautiful’ and so on. Jimmy Carter kind of embodied all those things in his interesting way. Carter’s plan was to spend enough money to drive the price of solar down, and he had money in his last budget in 1980 aimed at enabling America to produce a quarter of its energy from the sun by 2000. We never got to find out whether that would have worked because he lost the election in 1980, and Ronald Reagan wanted nothing to do with solar.

The difference between then and now is that solar power is roughly 100 times cheaper now than it was in the 1970s. Now, we’re at this moment when solar’s not only affordable, but it makes no economic sense not to do it because it’s so much cheaper than everything else, plus the added benefit that you don’t destroy the entire planet with climate change, maybe.

So, some part of me has always hoped that human beings would change their ways of life and their desires. I wrote a book years ago called Deep Economy, which was sort of about the fact that growth doesn’t make us as happy as it claims to. And I still think that 100 years from now, humans will have figured out better ways to amuse themselves than buying more stuff. But I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next four or five years, which seems to be the crucial timeframe for doing something about climate change. A hundred million people join the world’s consumer class every year, mostly in Asia, and it seems unlikely to me that we’re going to be restrained any more than we have been in the short run. So I think we better have some way to accommodate all that human desire without destroying the planet. And the only candidate on offer for is sun, wind, and batteries.

Q: You write that the idea of intentionally constraining consumption to live a more sustainable life is incredibly sane. But it also seems sane to bring a sense of realism to that vision, acknowledging that we have limited time to deal with climate change. What was the process like for you to confront an overall preference that you have for society with what you describe as this hard reality? Was that difficult?

A: One thing that made it easier for me was the experience of the pandemic, which was many things, including a really interesting lesson around energy. You’ll recall that in the spring of 2020, we changed our lives more dramatically and radically than any environmentalist could have possibly imagined people would. Nobody flew anywhere, nobody went anywhere, nobody did much of anything. And it did cut emissions some, but actually not very much — like 5% maybe for a little while. To me, that was a pretty good indicator that it really was the guts of the machine that was the problem here, more than a series of individual human choices. The machine that runs our civilization was running almost without regard to what we were doing, and it was running on coal, gas, and oil.

And that happened right around the time when renewable energy was crossing the line and becoming cheaper than combustible energy. That’s one of the things that really pointed me in that direction. But the other thing is my belief that one of the most concrete ways to counter inequality in our society is by replacing fossil energy with energy from the sun. Fossil energy is easy to hoard and to hold in reserves. Renewable energy trends us in the direction of small-d democracy and local control over our lives, simply because it’s available everywhere all the time. It’s not the province of a few people in a few places who happen to control supplies of a relatively rare commodity.

So, it just seems profoundly different in that way, and different in ways that both left and right can understand. I’ve lived most of my life in rural America, half of it in red states, and half of it in kind of purple states, but always on dirt roads. So I know a lot of conservatives. A lot of my friends fit that pattern, and for them, solar power realizes the dream of making one’s home one’s castle. You know, you don’t depend on anyone anyway. You really are your own monarch there and then. For my liberal friends, it’s all about the groovy power of the sun letting us network ourselves together. One can, one can deal with those differences. But I think that as people think about it, they understand that it’s not just a different source of electrons, but that it creates a slightly different world.

Longroad Energy’s Sun Streams complex west of Phoenix is among the country’s largest solar fields, capable of producing roughly 900mw of power (enough to power roughly 250,000 Arizona households). Part of the project will use battery enclosures constructed in Arizona.

Artist Robert McCall depicts a futuristic vision of a massive solar electricity-generating facility in western Arizona, along the Colorado River. The concept of massive solar farms was a new idea at the time, inspiring activists and University of Arizona professors Aden and Marjorie Meinel. When the “solar edition” came out, the Meinels were trying to find cost-effective ways to make electricity with sunlight.

Q: How optimistic are you that this technology really will lead to democratization of energy? There is also an argument to be made that electrification, or the kind of lumping of all of our various energy uses into one very tradable, transferable medium like electricity, could create opportunities for even greater centralized control.

A: I think it tends the other way. It’s obviously not perfect in any way. I have no doubt that there are lots of forces trying to send things in that more centralized direction. I get that no matter what energy source we’re using, there are going to be powerful entities like utilities that are playing a big role. But I think all those things are at least a little closer to home, and we have a little more possibility of controlling them than one does the decision-making in Riyadh or at Exxon headquarters or whatever. And I also think that more and more people are going to be figuring out that they can do an awful lot of this on their own. I’ve had solar panels all over my house for 25 years. I like the idea that I’m controlling my own energy destiny. I haven’t been to a gas station in a decade, you know, because I just plug my car into my roof. I’m American enough to have all those different impulses.

Q: You write that realizing the power of the sun can invigorate our spiritual connection with the natural world and how it provides for us. At the same time, you point out that renewable power relies more on brain power and ingenuity to harness than it does on the limitations of a mineral resource. Do you think there’s a threat that renewable power could allow us to even more easily abstract our relationship from the natural world? It is so based on technological development, and the sources, wind and sun, are in some ways more visible than oil, but in some ways even more invisible, because they’re just what surrounds us every day.

A: If we can figure out a way to be any more abstracted from the natural world than we are now, I’d be surprised. We’re setting every possible human record for abstraction from the natural world, since we spend most of the day staring at a small rectangle of glass in our palms. But I think that energy from Heaven instead of Hell actually stands a chance of reconnecting us a little with the world around us. Our local star already gives us warmth and light and photosynthesis, and now it’s offering us all the power we could ever want, which strikes me as a way to start thinking about the world in a different, more generous form.

One benefit is that solar power in particular is a way of providing us with shade, which is an increasingly valuable commodity in our overheated world. I put in the book some of that data from Arizona showing that the biotic crusts of the deserts were reforming under these solar farms much more easily because there was some shade and some moisture retention.

Q: You write that solar energy helps us appreciate the sun’s incredible regularity and ubiquity. But could that regularity, and the idea of an almost infinite power supply, perpetuate exactly the kind of motif that so much of our most destructive activities have been built on? Seeking out just these reliable, infinite resources?

A: You can definitely make an argument that outfitting human beings with limitless power comes with real dangers, but it’s hard to imagine anything we could do that would be much more dangerous than changing the temperature of the planet by altering the chemistry of the atmosphere. So I think we’ve probably already plumbed the depths of exactly how much damage we can do. But who knows?

The solar edition dedicated two pages to sun symbols in ancient cultures. The magazine emphasized not only the possibilities of solar energy, but the spiritual significance of the sun itself.

Q: The was an important time for solar because there was the oil embargo, and then at the same time, environmentalism was maturing as a political movement. Since then, the arguments for renewable energy, whether environmental, national security-oriented, or economic, have all kind of evolved alongside one another. Now, we have a moment where all these narratives are coming back into line, when the economic and environmental arguments may both be pushing for solar. I’m wondering if you see this as a really ideal alignment for solar, or if it’s ironically highlighting some of the frictions between these groups as solar takes off. There are some folks who would rather keep a transmission line out of an environmentally sensitive area, and some people who are very active in pursuing climate or economic goals. Is this a moment of great agreement or contention?

A: Well, that’s a good question. Let’s say first that the people who most powerfully recognize the threat of all these arguments coming into alignment are in the fossil fuel industry, which now faces a kind of existential crisis and are doing everything they can to defend against it, which generally means giving lots of money to politicians. That’s the really big dynamic at play here.

Within the group of people who call themselves environmentalists, I think there’s a certain amount of tension around land use and other things, but I actually don’t think it’s as big as people sometimes think. I find an extraordinary number of people who think that this is an enormous gift that we’ve been given. There was an excerpt of this book published earlier this summer in The New Yorker, and the overwhelming reaction I got, even from people very much engaged in climate and energy stuff, was, ‘I had no idea. I had no idea this was coming this fast and building this big, and it gives me hope that I have not had in a long time, that we might do something.’ I think that that’s right.

I mean, the reason I got into all of this originally was how much I love the natural world around me. If you go back and read the End of Nature, which was my first book about what we now call the climate crisis, it grew largely out of my sadness over what that meant for the natural world around us, which is what we’re now seeing play out. We have the end of winter as a reliable phenomenon, the burning of our forests, the collapse of the Gulf Stream, and on and on and on. And I think most environmentalists are aware enough to realize that that’s what constitutes the deep, pervasive threat now, and people are going to have to adapt their aesthetic to allow for a windmill on the horizon, or whatever it is. And truthfully, I find a lot of people, most people, easily able, and enthusiastic about doing that.

Q: The climate argument itself has the benefit of borrowing from both economic and environmental arguments. Climate affects everything, from our natural world to our human industries and activities. Do you think that is one strength of approaching renewables from a specifically climate-related angle?

A: I suppose, but I think that probably the best way to go at it is from a ‘future-oriented’ angle. Like, what kind of future do you want? One where the climate’s changing so radically, one where oligarchic control is deepening, one where energy gets ever more expensive? Or do you want one where people are somewhat more in control of their energy destiny? I find a lot of people resonate with the idea that it will be difficult to fight wars over sunshine. I think that unites some of those feelings from the 1970s with the present. “Alternative energy” is the label we’ve used for a long time, and I think it’s now confusing us, because it’s not alternative energy. It’s the obvious, common sense, straightforward way to go. It’s not the Whole Foods of energy. It’s the Costco of energy. It’s cheap. It’s available in bulk. It’s on the shelf, ready to go. We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun, and that’s very much what I’m trying to get across with this book. You know, there’s been lots of dreams over the last 50 years about what we might accomplish with clean energy and so on, but those were always sort of marginal, and at the fringe. Now it’s different. Ninety-three percent of new power generation around the world last year came from sun, wind, and batteries. This is the reality, and it’s the people who want to cling to our current way of doing things, setting stuff on fire to produce our power, that are now on the defensive and having to figure out how to hold off this onset of clean and cheaper energy.

This year, small farmers and farmworkers who have already lost income due to years of drought (and pandemic) have faced continuing struggles after historic floods inundated acres of California farmland. Floods ruined crops and washed out farm roads, leaving farmworkers, many of whom work in the United States without documentation, adrift. Small independent farmers with immigrant backgrounds have also suffered from flood-related damages.

In the future, climate scientists estimate that precipitation patterns in the western United States will only become more dramatic, with droughts and floods becoming more common and more severe.

These events have become one of the many issues de Barraicua deals with while advocating for farmworkers and BIPOC small farmers in California.

De Barraicua has worked with farmworker communities in the United States and Latin America for over 20 years. She first engaged the topic as a student filmmaker at San Francisco State University, working on a documentary about indigenous farming communities in Guatemala seeking to reclaim their ancestral lands.

After graduating, de Barraicua worked as a research assistant at the National Agricultural Workers Survey, where she traveled through agricultural communities around the country and interviewed farmworkers on topics related to health, personal finance, and legal rights. She particularly mentioned one project investigating the way exposure to pesticides caused a rise in autism rates among farm workers’ children.

“That's where I feel like I really got to dive in and understand the whole structure of the agriculture industry — the injustices and exploitation and the way the system is very dependent on a labor force that is not treated so well,” de Barraicua said.

During the pandemic and following this year’s floods, de Barraicua has toured agricultural communities in California to understand how farm workers and small farmers adapt and survive through times of scarcity.

This summer, after historic flooding destroyed so many fields, she said many farm workers relied on as little as $1300 per month to support entire families.

“You see the mental state of folks. People are extremely depressed,” she said.

In dramatic cases, some farmworkers have said floods cost them up to $3,000 in income by eliminating a few days of work during critical harvests. Undocumented workers are ineligible for unemployment benefits in California.

“People who have residency with incomplete immigration status, or no status at all, were getting nothing, and yet they were being deemed essential by the federal government,” de Barraicua said, referencing the “essential worker” status granted to certain workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even for farm workers who have saved up the money and become their own bosses by leasing or purchasing their own farms, floods and droughts proved disastrous. De Barraicua said small farmers who struggle with language and social barriers are often last in line to receive government aid after disasters. Small farmers often don’t have the resources to navigate complicated government farm aid programs. Undocumented farmers, who have built their farms without government support, are also ineligible for agricultural aid altogether, even though de Barraicua said they are often responsible for growing rare and unique crops (like lemongrass) that are absent on most large farms. While government agencies often proactively reach out to large corporate growers after disasters strike, small farmers have to seek out help on their own, de Barraicua said.

Because of their niche crops and mixed growing practices, de Barraicua said it’s also difficult for small U.S. farmers to obtain crop insurance. Crop insurance typically covers large amounts of single, common crops – like corn or soy.

De Barraicua mentioned two farmers featured in an April article from the Guardian about the impact of flooding on small-scale California agriculture. Lideres Campesinas works with both of them. Antonio Palma, a farmer in Ventura, California, saw a flood destroy more than 100 acres of his cropland and ruin more than $1 million worth of equipment. Palma has struggled to communicate effectively with government agencies, de Barraicua said. At one point, he understood that he could use government-provided equipment to repair the flood damage in his fields. But the equipment was never delivered.

“A lot of them really feel disillusioned at times,” de Barraicua said.

Farmers like Palma often continue to struggle with the debt and lease payments on their farms for years in the wake of disasters.

María Inés Catalán, a farmer in Hollister, California, lost her entire spring harvest and her home to flooding. De Barraicua said Catalán is well known for her work as a female immigrant farmer and that government agencies have identified her publicly as a shining example of an immigrant farm worker who worked her way up to becoming a farmer. Nonetheless, she has struggled to obtain aid from government agencies because of her immigration status.

“It's very sad that she can be invited to be a keynote speaker to talk about her expertise, and yet she’s struggling incredibly,” de Barraicua said.

Even when disasters haven’t struck, de Barraicua added, there is still a need to support farmers who struggle to understand legal systems and restrictions because of language barriers and unfamiliarity with the U.S. and California laws. In some cases, immigrant farmers have begun growing crops on land not zoned for agriculture only to face penalties and fines they didn’t expect.

“There are many immigrants who have invested 25 to 30 years in farm work and have now come to a point where they can afford to purchase a home or purchase some land. And oftentimes they encounter all sorts of challenges and make mistakes because they don't speak English,” de Barraicua said.

De Barraicua said this is one issue she will examine in her position on California’s new Agricultural Land Equity Task Force, a state-appointed body meant to increase access to agricultural land and resources for farmers not traditionally included in California’s agricultural community. The task force includes state officials, academic experts, women, and farmers from ethnic and racial minority backgrounds.

De Barraicua attended her first task force meeting on Oct 30. So far, the group is still establishing goals and discussing logistics, but de Barraicua has exciting plans for future meetings.

In recent years, de Barraicua and Lideres Campesinas have worked on various efforts to secure a stronger safety net and greater access to aid for farmworkers and farmers in California during the pandemic and subsequent water-related disasters. Many of those efforts have proved unsuccessful.

A bill to provide state unemployment benefits for undocumented workers passed the California legislature but died on Governor Gavin Newsom’s pen. The governor said he had to veto the measure because of its potential impact on the state budget. Newsom said it would take $200 million simply to put together the staffing and the program infrastructure, not including the unemployment benefits themselves.

In general, de Barraicua said she and her colleagues are up against a system that disincentivizes traditional agricultural practices in favor of large, established growers (often large companies).

“It's like a monopolization of our food system,” she said, “There’s the takeover of small farms. Small farmers (not specifically those with recent immigrant backgrounds) in the Midwest and all over have told me they can't afford to bring in H2A workers, saying the government’s taking their workers away. And these are small farmers that have farmed for a long time. It is very sad to see that because that, to me, coincides with the monopolization of our foods. Our foods aren’t as healthy when you're getting them through mass production.”

De Barraicua said she hopes for a future where large, corporate agriculture has less power and ease of access to resources — where small farmers and people growing healthier food on local levels are incentivized to farm by local and national policies. She said many immigrant farmers, farmers of color, and small farmers generally take on traditional agricultural practices that produce healthier food.

“There's still this time to reverse that monopolization because the traditional ways of tending to the land will hopefully create more opportunities to keep growing food in the way that it should be done,” she said.

In the meantime, she hopes there are some avenues to reduce the burden placed on the agricultural community’s most vulnerable members. As climate change continues to exacerbate floods and droughts throughout the western United States, the issue of that vulnerability is not going to disappear.

And yet, Trujillo said he has no plans to leave city hall. In a time when his community needed it most, he was there to offer leadership and help. He has a year and a half left in his current term, and then he’ll have an opportunity to step down. Instead, he intends to run for a second term.

Trujillo was born in Las Vegas, and he has lived there nearly all his life. Las Vegas is a town of modest means, with roughly a third of the population living in poverty. The average person in Las Vegas makes $21,500 a year (roughly 30% lower than the national average). The town is 80% Hispanic/Latino. 

Las Vegas is home to a Walmart Supercenter, a state university, a community college, a 54-bed hospital, and two high schools. The town’s largest employer is the state government. The Skillet, a local bar known for its half-enchanting, half-terrifying murals, is, as described by one employee there, “the only place that really stays open past 9 p.m.” More than a few downtown storefronts are empty. Western wear shops, art galleries, furniture stores, and an abundance of antique shops fill the rest.

When Trujillo ran for mayor in 2020, he envisioned himself working on social programs and economic development, working to bring new businesses into Las Vegas. He imagined ribbon cuttings and arts festivals. But by the time he was elected, the pandemic had already descended on New Mexico. He had a virtual swearing-in ceremony, as the state had already restricted gatherings of more than five people. In his first speech as mayor, he called for Las Vegans to support and respect their healthcare workers. (Trujillo worked, and still works, at the Las Vegas office of New Mexico’s state-owned psychiatric hospital).

“I am prepared to get right to work and get us through the worst of this,” he said in that speech.

At that time, he couldn’t have known exactly what that meant.

Trujillo was elected only a month before San Miguel County, whose seat is Las Vegas, saw its first COVID case on April 14, 2020. At that time, Trujillo and his colleagues imposed what he says was the first mask mandate in the state. Three days after the mandate went into place, he said he got a call from New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, who told him she had met with the New Mexico Secretary of Health and the whole state was going to follow Las Vegas’s lead, imposing a statewide mandate.

Over the course of the pandemic, Trujillo watched his community fight the virus. The county saw two COVID waves. During the first one, in November, 2020, the county experienced an average of 51 hospitalizations and roughly two deaths per week (the county is home to around 27,000 people). During the second wave, in January, 2022, the county saw an average of 50 hospitalizations and roughly four deaths per week. 

Then things seemed to settle down. Two years after the COVID first arrived in San Miguel County, New Mexico lifted its mask mandate, and life seemed like it might have returned to normal.

That was two months before the fires started.

On April 6th, 2022, the US Forest Service announced it was conducting a controlled burn 12 miles northwest of Las Vegas in the Pecos Wilderness (despite numerous comments by community members that it was too windy that day for a burn). By afternoon, strong winds had swept the burn out of control, and the blaze, at first labeled the “Las Dispensas Controlled Burn”, was officially declared a wildfire, later named the “the Hermits Peak Fire” after the hood-like peak whose summit can be seen from almost everywhere in the surrounding area, including Las Vegas. 

At the same time, five miles away from the Hermits Peak Fire, in Calf Canyon, the same winds began blowing life into the still-burning embers of another controlled burn, thought to be extinguished in January, and started a so-called “zombie fire” (also called a “holdover fire” or “sleeper fire”). The embers from that January burn had survived three winter snow events, smoldering underground, before they emerged as the “Calf Canyon Fire”.

On April 19th, the two fires merged. Officials announced that the two blazes would be managed as one fire, now called the “Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire”. The unified blaze went on to devour an area roughly 25 times the size of Manhattan. It was the largest recorded fire in New Mexico’s history. 

That spring and summer, Trujillo and his staff watched from the windows of city hall as the flames crested a ridge just above town.

“Town was smoky-smoky. You looked up and the planes were flying over you like it was a warzone. It took all they had to keep the fire from crossing the ridge,” Trujillo said.

Luckily, the fire never reached Las Vegas, but it did touch everyone there. Local businesses closed for a week so employees could evacuate their relatives who lived in the foothills above town. Locals lost farms and cabins that had been in their families for more than four generations. At least one Las Vegas middle school became a shelter for evacuees from foothill communities.  

All told, the fire destroyed more than 900 structures, including two that were special to Trujillo. In one May night, amidst 85-mile-an-hour winds, the fire erased the 51 log-cabin-style homes and 16 commercial buildings at the Pendaries Village golf resort, including a house that Trujillo owned, and then crossed a hill to the town of Gallinas, where it incinerated a family cabin where he had spent summer days with his cousins since he was a child.  

“It was just the weirdest night,” Trujillo said. “And of course, you don't sleep. I mean, you can hear the wind at night, and you go to these fire briefings every night and they’re telling you that we're in for a rough night and you know, it just gets very exhausting. And then you go home and try and relax, and you keep the phone with you in case you have to open the evacuation sites.”

Mayor Louie Trujillo at his City Council seat in Las Vegas City Hall. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

When evacuees returned to the hills, they found their homes and their ranches charred. If their houses and barns had not been destroyed, they were often ruined with smoke damage. They found stocks of once-frozen venison rotting in refrigerators and freezers that no longer received power. They cut themselves on rusty nails trying to haul away the rubble. They found their animals, some dead, some barely alive.

Photos of black carcasses – cows, horses, even a bear – circulated on social media. A herd of cows in the town of Rociada had survived by huddling in the local school parking lot as the blaze raged around them. Fire crews used electrofishing gear to stun and net 183 Rio Grande cutthroat trout from local waterways, which they saved from the effects of the fire. Ash killed all the remaining cutthroats in at least one stream. In May, a fire crew discovered and rescued what they assume to be the lone survivor of an elk herd near Hermits Peak: a calf, “lying quietly in a six-inch-deep layer of white ash.” They named the calf “Cinder”. 

Finally, in August, partially a result of “robust monsoonal moisture”, fire managers declared the Hermits Creek/Calf Canyon Fire 100% contained. 

And yet, the next crisis had already begun. Another effect of that “robust monsoonal moisture” was flooding, which was particularly nasty when it loosened charred soils in the burn scar. Torrents of debris and ash ripped across roads and flipped cars. Three members of a West Texas family, staying at a cabin they had owned for more than sixty years, lost their lives when floodwaters swept them from their property and down a local creek. One local man was killed when floodwaters rushed across a highway in the mid-afternoon, dragging his pickup truck off the road and drowning him. Another local man was charged with DWI homicide after his truck was flipped by floodwaters and his passenger (and friend) was drowned in the cab. The driver was allegedly drunk at the time. 

In August, as swollen rivers and creeks were singing in green valleys and yellow daisies were speckling hayfields, people in the villages of Holman and Mora were stacking sandbags around their houses and yards. As prairie sunflowers bloomed on the sides of country roads, black debris was coating farm equipment and children’s play structures like wattle. Hulking National Guard trucks rumbled down tiny farm roads. On the hillsides, the fire had blackened vast patches of forest, which were ringed by thin layers of golden-brown (trees that died but did not burn). Snow-white groves of dead aspens haunted their centers.

And Trujillo and his staff were scrambling to deal with flooding in downtown Las Vegas. In June, a torrent traveling the path of the Gallinas River ran only a few feet from people’s doorsteps in core of town. Federal crews then set up flood-mitigation structures known as Gabion baskets – cube-shaped wire baskets filled with football-sized rocks – around the channel where the Gallinas River runs through Las Vegas. Between the ranks of baskets, a braided vein of black sludge began running where the river should have been, raging with occasional floods. Nearby businesses, including a dog groomer and a maternity store, fortified their doorways with sandbags. 

Trujillo and his staff spent that time staying up late, listening to walkie talkies and watching rain gauges, praying the gullies above town wouldn’t overflow and send more debris down towards town. They also began having meetings about how the fire would affect the city’s drinking water.

In the beginning, City Manager Leo Maestas said the fire “played with everyone’s emotions,” sometimes veering towards the Gallinas watershed, sometimes away. But ultimately, the fire came right down to the banks of the river. By August, the city’s diversion dam was surrounded by the burn scar, and the river was running black and brown with ash. Maestas called it “Willy Wonka’s chocolate river”. 

Las Vegas relies on the Gallinas River for 90% of its drinking water. With the river water polluted, the city could only rely on what they had already stored in their reservoirs. And even that was ultimately compromised.

In May, a clot of debris became congested against the six bulwarks of an overpassing bridge on a canal near Pederson reservoir, forcing contaminated water to jump the canal and spill into the reservoir’s previously untainted water supply. Around the same time, floodwaters passed through gaps in hundred-year-old diversion gates that bring water into Storrie Lake, where the city of Las Vegas has a storage right for drinking water. That meant two of the city’s three drinking water sources were rendered unusable.

By July 29, the city’s only remaining bank of drinking water was Bradner Reservoir, a small artificial lake which, at the time, had been mostly drained for maintenance operations. As a result, the city of Las Vegas was faced with a critical deadline. Unless urgent action was taken, the town would run out of water in 50 days. 

⁙⁙⁙

Now, a year later, the city has installed a new filter at Storrie Lake, enabling them to use its water for drinking. The city is also now building a whole new water treatment plant that can handle higher levels of turbidity. And they’re investing in a greywater treatment plant as well, which will allow them to maximize the use of their limited water resources.

The city is using federal aid money to complete the projects. In all, the federal government has designated a total of nearly $4 billion for relief and recovery efforts addressing the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. 

City staff expect the new water treatment plant will take five or six years to plan and build. FEMA says it will probably keep its compensation office in Las Vegas open for about the same time. And even after that, experts have told Trujillo it could be ten years before water quality in the Gallinas River returns to normal. 

If he wins his next election, Trujillo will be in office for nearly all of that process. And if he wins again after that, he will likely oversee its completion. If it were up to him, parts of that process would be happening a lot faster.

“I just think FEMA is acting like this is their first emergency they've ever dealt with, you know? They’re not ready for primetime. I'm sorry,” he laughed.

Trujillo himself has had to put in requests for FEMA compensation for his Pendaries house and the family cabin he lost in Gallinas. 

“The claims process is just atrocious … you fill out this form, then you have to come back and fill that form, and then they request this form, and then they mail you this. And so you fill this out, and then you take it back … etc,” Trujillo said. He said he can’t imagine what it’s like for people who lost their main homes and need that compensation to rebuild.

In the meantime, he says he is continuing to take turns with his family caring for his 94-year-old father, and he continues to work an administrative job at the psychiatric hospital, which he says is his retirement plan. The mayor’s salary is only $600 per month. 

He also has to tend to the other, non-disaster-related aspects of running a town. Trujillo said the city has over $20 million in non-disaster-related projects going on, from paving streets to building a new children’s park. 

With all these responsibilities, Trujillo says there has been no time for vacations, and little time to relax. At the time the fire started, Trujillo’s nephew invited him up for a visit at his lake house in Oregon, but Trujillo couldn’t do it. He mentioned how bad it looked when Ted Cruz took a vacation to Cancún during widespread blackouts in Texas. Even a year later, amidst all the stress of dealing with nonstop crisis, Trujillo has not taken that vacation. Instead, he drives 65 miles to the town of Santa Rosa every weekend, where he submerges himself in a sapphire blue cenote called the “Blue Hole”. 

“That's my little refuge … I'll go down there on a Sunday and just jump in there and stay in there for a while,” he said. “I jump in rivers and in lakes. I always have a towel and a little kit in my truck. I’ve never said no to a river, you know. Head-first in the river, it's always just been me. And I don't know where that comes from.”

Trujillo used to relax in a swimming hole he built on a creek by his family cabin, but the fire contaminated it. 

“I wouldn’t swim in there. I think they're concerned about not only the ash, the debris from the fire, but also the chemicals. You know, there was fire retardant on everything that they used. There were homes that burned that may have had asbestos or some kind of plastic and chemicals,” Trujillo said. 

Business owners put up signs thanking fire crews in downtown Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Charred forests in the Pecos Wilderness west of Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Charred forests in the Pecos Wilderness west of Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Evidence of a debris flow that crossed a road near the town of Mora, New Mexico. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Mud piles up around a mobile home and a car in Holman, New Mexico. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Sandbags left in front of a business in downtown Las Vegas, by the Gallinas River. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Human and raccoon tracks in ashy sludge that now coats the path of the Gallinas River in downtown Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Storrie Lake, where the City of Las Vegas has a storage right for drinking water. The lake was contaminated by floods in June of 2022. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Las Vegas City Manager Leo Maestas (right) meets with contractors at the site where Las Vegas installed a new water filtration system for drinking water from Storrie Lake. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

The City of Las Vegas’s diversion dam on the Gallinas River. A mass of ash and mud rises out of the river above the dam. Charred trees on the hillside show how the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire came right down to the water’s edge. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Nonetheless, Trujillo says there have been some thrilling aspects to being a mayor in crisis time. He said it’s “pretty cool” to be the mayor of a small town, but it’s something else when you get to appear on all the national news networks while doing it. Trujillo has appeared in coverage from CNN, ABC, Reuters and the New York Times, not to mention local and state outlets. And he has also talked with political bigwigs. He shook President Biden’s hand when he made the first presidential visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in twenty years. Biden later circled over Hermits Peak on Air Force One to see the fire damage. Trujillo also sat at a table with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as she visited with fire victims during a trip through the state. And Governor Lujan Grisham and her entire cabinet traveled to Las Vegas in the spring of 2022. Trujillo said he believes it was the first time an entire gubernatorial cabinet had visited any town in New Mexico. 

More important than the photo ops, though, have been the opportunities for Trujillo to serve his community in a time of need: “I think this is a weird thing to say, but I'm glad I was here at the worst time. Yeah, I think I was able to help the community a lot more in a different way because of these crises. It feels good that I was able to be here at a very difficult time” Trujillo said.

This is a community Trujillo knows – it is his community. Before he was mayor, he worked decades in his compliance and accreditation job with the psychiatric hospital. He got his bachelor’s degree in political science and his master’s degree in social work both from New Mexico Highlands University, located in Las Vegas. He earned his high school diploma from West Las Vegas High School. He grew up in a family with ten brothers and sisters in an old adobe house on South Pacific Street (Las Vegas). And he now lives only two houses down. All told, Trujillo has spent his entire life in Las Vegas. 

“My parents were really generous, so we all had friends over,” Trujillo said. “Sometimes there would be, you know, 18 people or 20 people around the table. It was no big deal. The community, you know?” 

Trujillo’s mother served as a county treasurer. One of his brothers was on the local school board. Another is a county commissioner. Another is the municipal judge who swore him in at the beginning of his term.

There are six businesses with “Trujillo” in their title in the Las Vegas area, and the name appears over a hundred times in the local White Pages phonebook (these folks are not all necessarily related).

And Trujillo says that the community has stood with him through all the mayhem. 

“I'm sure there are critics out there who don’t like the way we handled things, but for the most part, people have been very kind to me and very respectful to me,” Trujillo said.

It is worth mentioning that this largely Catholic community elected an openly gay man as their mayor. Trujillo commonly carries a water bottle with a pride sticker on it through City Hall. 

“I have two aunts that were Catholic nuns, so that Catholic thing is really strong. I was told I was gonna go to hell since sixth grade. And here I am, it’s literally raining ash. Dealing with all this. This might be hell, who knows? But you know, I got married about two years ago, and my dad was totally cool. You know, like, no big deal. He was choking up,” Trujillo said. “I haven't had any negative remarks. I mean, not to my face. I'm sure there are remarks, but not to my face. I've never been approached. But I think it's in the way that I conduct myself too. I don't make a point of it.”

Hermits Peak, as seen from a hill in West Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

A western wear shop on Bridge Street in Las Vegas. Scenes for the Coen Brothers’ 2007 film ‘No Country for Old Men’ were shot in front of, and inside, this shop. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

A mural next to Las Vegas’s Gallinas River Park, which runs along the now muddy trail of the Gallinas River in downtown. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

“Welcome Friends,” written in the entryway of Charlie’s Spic and Span Cafe in downtown Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

Bridge Street, Las Vegas, New Mexico. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

A billboard on highway 518 north of Las Vegas. Austin Corona (July, 2022)

In the future, Trujillo said the community will endure because its people are tough. When it came to the water shortage, he said the community’s toughness was an asset. Las Vegas residents are accustomed to some degree of water restrictions. In the last two decades, with historic drought and aridification plaguing the southwest, Trujillo said the community has lived consistently under some stage of water conservation measures. 

“So our citizens know how to save water. Man, this extra push was big. It was a big ask. But we did it. We got through that crisis because our citizens really get it,” Trujillo said. 

Ironically, the silver lining of this disaster may be the funding for a new greywater plant, which will ultimately provide more water supply for the city. 

“We'll always have a fresh supply of water for the city. So that's fixing a huge problem that has plagued this community for centuries,” Trujillo said.

Nonetheless, Trujillo knows the community will continue to live with trauma from this crisis. A year ago, in the midst of the water crisis, he said he was worried about the lasting psychological effects the fire would have on community members. 

“I've seen it as a social worker, where grief is stored and how it's stored, and what it does to people. And what happens is that other social problems pop up, like chemical dependency, and poverty and everything else that goes with it. So it's just, it's a huge impact and a huge ripple effect on the entire community,” Trujillo said.

This year, when a small fire started in nearby Mora County, Trujillo said the community’s reaction was intense.

“There was a fire recently, in Mora, and the residents just went completely crazy, you know, calling people and… I mean it was huge. So, people are very, very traumatized from this. And it's still very fresh. It's just a year ago … They're not in a better place, you know, the people who lost everything. So, yeah, so it's very fresh, people are still traumatized. People are still injured by this whole thing,” Trujillo said.

I cannot help but mention the daughter of City Manager Leo Maestas, a seven-year-old girl who recovered from cancer only months before her school shut down due to COVID. That was three years she went without being able to attend school with her friends. And when the pandemic happened, she lost time with her father too. Maestas led San Miguel County’s pandemic response for a year before joining the City of Las Vegas, and then began the long nights of watching for flooding in the canyons above town. 

Trujillo says Maestas has continued working hard hours since the floods: “He's one of the hardest working people I know.”

For Trujillo himself, there hasn’t really been time to deal with all the emotions and grief after losing the site of beloved childhood memories and leading the city through so much destruction and fear. During the fire, Trujillo said he relied on support from a men’s group he attended every week. At one of those meetings, he said he told the other group members he hadn’t had any time to grieve after losing that special place. 

“It’s just boom, boom, boom, one crisis after another,” he said at that time.

Ever since they burned, Trujillo said he has been emotionally unable to visit the sites of his old family cabin or his house in Pendaries.

“It's just very traumatic, you know, and people don't realize that sometimes it's not just a structure. It's a building that means a lot more and holds a bigger place in your heart than just a bunch of bricks and mortar” Trujillo said.

Going forward, Trujillo says he will continue to balance the personal impacts of Las Vegas’s crises with his commitments to his job and his community.

“It requires a certain person to be able to balance and deal with everything. But you know, this has been a good lesson. This first term has been a good lesson on how to balance all that,” he said.

He said it’s possible he will decide not to run for another term, but so far, he has managed to handle everything pretty well, even if it requires diving into cold water every so often to decompress.

Since 2010, the proportion of Mexican households without access to drinking water has doubled. By the 2020 national census, the figure was roughly 22%. In that same year, two thirds of the country was experiencing drought, ultimately leading the Mexican government to declare a state of emergency in 2022. People’s taps ran dry, and protests erupted in northern Mexican cities. 

But not all of Mexico’s water stress was a result of natural drought. In 2020, Mexican journalist Mónica Cerbón joined eight other journalists participating in the award-winning “Water Exploiters” project, a journalistic investigation by Mexican watchdog organization Mexicans against Corruption and Impunit

y that exposed rampant corruption and mismanagement in Mexico’s water sector. Cerbón and other journalists discovered that government officials and powerful companies were hogging Mexico’s water resources while common people were lining the streets to fill buckets for household use.

 “There are companies and people who have so much water at their disposal that it would be possible to serve entire communities,” the investigation’s front page reads. Large manufacturers, politicians, and industrial farmers count among those listed as self-interested water hogs. 

For Cerbón, who frequently covers corruption in the area surrounding her home state of Aguascalientes, the project exposed an old story of natural resource corruption in Mexico. One in which the law is subservient to profit.

“It is an issue that is known – the authorities themselves know about it and the authorities themselves have fed it … Natural resources in Mexico have always been a political and economic treasure chest that has caused serious problems of human rights violations without the Mexican State paying attention to it, without there being a matter of justice. Why? Well, because it is a lot of money moving around.”

But with water, this system strips people of their most precious resource. It sucks them dry. 

Legendary Mexican journalist and editor Thelma Gómez Durán organized the “Water Exploiters” investigation because, as Cerbón puts it, she wanted to “put a name to the big exploiters of water – who were they, what were they doing, how had they managed to amass and possess such quantities of water in states suffering from drought, where there was no equitable distribution of water.” She wanted to find the truth. 

Gómez launched an all-out investigation. She sought out a team of journalists who “knew their regions well” and asked them to investigate these regions through a lens they had rarely considered.

“With Thelma, we learned to review the [water] files – where the important things were, where there were discrepancies. To be honest, it was the first project where I learned those processes in greater depth. And she let us talk with communities that had been suffering from this discrimination.” 

Gómez recruited a team of three investigators for accessing government water records; the team made over 500 information requests to the Mexican government. Sometimes, when the government held out, they had to petition Mexico’s governmental transparency department to intervene. 

And their digging paid off – the “Water Exploiters” team exposed startling truths about corruption and overuse in Mexico’s water sector. The investigation’s homepage lists the major discoveries:

•           Groups and individuals who were legally required to use their water for agriculture were using the water for other purposes and still receiving governmental subsidies for farming.

•           Mexican law requires all water rights holders to meter their water use, but only 11% of the country’s water users had meters.

•           Only 37% of the water users who should legally pay taxes on their water use were even registered in the national water manager’s payment system, and only two thirds of those users actually made regular payments.

•           The National Water Commission was grossly understaffed: each of its 115 inspectors was responsible for monitoring over 4,300 water concessions. For each inspector to visit each concession-holder once a year, they would have had to make 82 visits per week. 

•           The National Water Commission had a backlog of around 130,000 procedures that had not been addressed. This backlog had led, among other things, to litigation: across the country there were 2,477 ongoing lawsuits directly involving the Water Commission.  

•           An illegal market for water concessions (Mexican law allows water rights to be transferred, but not sold) was so profitable that water users were selling falsified water rights documents.

•           As companies and certain individuals amassed thousands of cubic meters of water per year, more than eight million households in the country received water only three days per week or less, and 2.85 million only obtained water by carrying it to their homes from natural, untreated sources.

•           Mexico's Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources, Víctor Toledo, personally recognized that Mexico is home to “indiscriminate and ‘antidemocratic’ [read ‘inequitable’] water use”. 

Clearly the letter of the law was not the principal force running Mexico’s water management system.

Investigators also reported stories of the people who have been harmed by this corrupt system. In both of Cerbón’s two feature articles written for the project, she met people whose taps and wells had run dry because of corruption and/or lax law enforcement in Mexico’s water sector. 

In one article, “Water for the Mine”, Cerbón spoke with villagers in San Juan de los Cedros, Zacatecas, where one of the country’s largest gold mines was using so much water it nearly dried their wells. The mine, operated by an American company called Newmont, had secured a permit to use its water based on a hydrological study that it conducted. Years after the mine acquired its permit, researchers found that the mine was unsustainably draining the village’s aquifer. 

In the village, Cerbón met people who were struggling to find alternative water supplies. Unable to rely on the local well, a woman named Gloria told Cerbón she bought bottled water for drinking. But the bottled water was expensive, so for other uses, like cooking and bathing, she had to rely on irregular water deliveries provided, ironically, by Newmont. And residents said that water was giving them health problems. 

“[Gloria and her children] were visibly sick”, Cerbón said. “Both children were visibly sick. They had lesions on their skin, they had stomach problems … That someone would pay with their health so someone else can make money … is terrible to me.”

At the end of her article, Cerbón quoted another resident in San Juan de los Cedros, Alicia, who had concerns about the future of the village after the mine closes: “Who is going to be responsible for the damage? The mine is leaving without a problem, and the ones left with all the problems are going to be us. How are we going to survive without water?”

“That angers me a lot”, Cerbón says. “It could be any company, including one from Mexico, but to come from another country with much more development and much more money – so in your country clearly you have good policies, but outside your country what are you doing? Outside your country you are exploiting the resources of other people. That just seems reprehensible to me.”

And this phenomenon of a powerful actor with government permission leaving vulnerable people stranded without water would turn out to be a trend. 

In her second article. “Real Estate with Watery Foundations”, Cerbón covered the story of a housing development in Aguascalientes that has no running water. The developer who built the project received their permit on the condition that they build a new well to service residents. The developer never built the well, but they were allowed to sell the units anyway. Then, they declared bankruptcy. 

Cerbón spoke with Sandra Urrutia, who had recently bought a house in the development. Urrutia told Cerbón that when she realized the house had no water, she abandoned it and moved to a rented apartment in town. Even though she owned a home, she had no way to comfortably live in it.  

“Imagine you buy a house,” Cerbón says, “maybe the most important investment of your life – and you put in a lot of effort because in Mexico it is generally very difficult to own a home, and in Aguascalientes housing is expensive for people’s average income, and then you buy the house, and it doesn’t have water. It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

Cerbón writes that in Aguascalientes, the name of one of these developments, Barlovento, has been turned into a local saying that means to “take advantage” of someone.  

Already, Cerbón says water is becoming a bigger topic for dinner table conversation in Mexico. She says it’s causing a growing sense of anxiety for Mexicans in many regions of the country. 

“Now [water] is discussed with more nervousness because our water is running out, and governments keep making bad decisions”, she says. 

While she says some changes in Mexico’s actual laws will be necessary, it is the systems outside the laws that need to be addressed. Going forward, Cerbón says communities and civil society groups will have to continue fighting powerful interests for their well-being.

Already, she says some community activists and groups are giving her hope. The villagers in San Juan de los Cedros, for example, have protested the overexploitation of their water, and the mine has agreed to reduce its use.

“There have been several fights won. Several communities have suddenly obtained justice in some way … and it helps you have hope, that there are people fighting.”

And as these stories continue to play out, Cerbón says that journalism will continue to share them with the world.

“I believe these communities have their voice – they have it, and they have asserted it. What journalism does is make these problems visible.”

On Arizona’s water issues, Allhands is usually looking for realistic solutions – “what works”. Allhands likes to get under the hood and focus on the mechanics of state water policy. She says it’s not terribly hard to identify solutions; the hard part is finding the political will to implement them. 

After six years of writing on water, Allhands considers herself a “total water nerd”. In 2017, after becoming the Arizona Republic’s Opinions editor, she received an opinion article from the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources regarding negotiations over a drought contingency plan on the Colorado River. The article piqued her interest, so she started researching Arizona’s water struggles out of personal curiosity. 

“I just started making some calls, and ended up writing a piece about that, and then started making some more calls, and some more calls, and, you know, very quickly realized: this is the most important issue facing Arizona.”

Now, Allhands writes roughly five opinion articles per month about Arizona’s water politics. Because she’s an opinion writer, she can punch up her articles with tough takes and criticism. Most of her criticism is impersonal, directed at Arizona’s water policies, or its lack thereof. But sometimes, she holds politicians accountable, urging them to take necessary steps towards a sustainable water future in Arizona. 

To Allhands, the “Rio Verde Foothills situation” is a perfect example of Arizona’s water woes. For decades, more than a thousand residents in Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated community outside of Scottsdale, lived under the false assumption that Scottsdale would always sell them water. But with the West experiencing a historic megadrought, Scottsdale ended the sales at the beginning of this year. Once the deliveries stopped, 500 homes in Rio Verde Foothills went dry. Residents began flushing their toilets with rainwater, skipping showers, and eating off paper plates, conserving what little water they had left in their cisterns. And they still haven’t found a permanent solution.

To Allhands, Rio Verde Foothills was a disaster for Arizona’s image. The media ate up the story and blew it out of proportion. The community’s woes made national news, stoking the idea that Arizona was descending into an apocalyptic water shortage. One headline even read, “Phoenix Runs Out of Water”. 

And to make matters worse, the state of Arizona didn’t move to prevent the debacle from ever happening again. In most of Arizona’s urban areas, a developer cannot build a new housing development without proving they have a reliable hundred-year supply of water for its residents. But Rio Verde Foothills did not have that guarantee, and it was constructed anyway. Allhands says a legal loophole allowed the homebuilders to skirt the water-supply restrictions by “wildcatting” their lots, or subdividing properties into fewer than six parcels. 

Allhands says this unfortunate loophole is one of the simplest fixes in Arizona water management, and yet, the legislature hasn’t done anything about it.

“The whole Rio Verde Foothills situation has been an utter black eye on the state, and seriously, of all the water issues that we have, this is really the one that's easiest to solve, and it hasn't been solved because of petty politics, which just drives me nuts.”

Arizona’s population is ballooning, and its water sources are thinning. In 2021, Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix metro area, experienced the most population growth of any county in the country. The economy is growing – new factories are going in, new houses are going up, and the state is still reasonably affordable. 

The state uses a varied portfolio of water sources to sustain this growth. Around 40% of the state’s water use comes from groundwater, often fossil aquifers filled over thousands of years by natural processes. Another 5% comes from reused water, and another 18% from in-state rivers. The remaining 35% comes from the dwindling Colorado River.

Nearly all these resources are probably going to shrink in the long run. 

“You can't just grow solely on groundwater, you know. You're gonna have to have some kind of renewable source. And we thought, oh, well, we'll just have all this excess Colorado River water that we can use to replenish that. Well, that doesn't work, either.” 

Amid a historic megadrought on the Colorado River, Arizona has taken heavy federally-mandated cuts in its share of the river’s water, and it can expect those cuts to worsen, as the drought is projected to persist. 

But rather than demonizing transplants or developers, Allhands would prefer to focus on root issues in state policy. There is a widespread temptation to halt all growth, Allhands says. But growth is necessary for the state: 

“You still need to have an economic engine, you still need to have people who can come here and invest here and spend their money here. You can't just shut the door and be like, well, we'll just do everything on this tax base that we have right here.” 

Allhands sees a middle path forward, where growth can continue, but under smarter, fairer regulation. 

Arizonans and Westerners generally like to point fingers at various water users, and uses, and demonize them, Allhands says, but that’s not really productive. For example, it’s common for people to assert that Saudi Arabia is draining the state’s aquifers so it can grow alfalfa, which it then exports out of the country. But in a recent article, Allhands shows that the Saudi company people are referring to (called Fondomonte), which owns a farming operation in La Paz County, is only a small component of Arizona’s alfalfa production, 90% of which remains in the state. The real problem with Fondomonte is not the company itself, or its goals, but the fact that there are no regulations requiring it to report its water use or control its pumping. Allhands is also quick to point out that even though agriculture uses a huge portion of Arizona’s water, it also provides the state, and the country, with winter vegetables and dairy products. Arizonans would surely suffer from any price hikes on those two products.

Rather than blaming a single user, Allhands looks to smart policy. Arizona’s growth shouldn’t stop, but it will definitely have to change. And policies will have to change, too. Fixing legal loopholes, updating regulations, and tweaking policy are all better solutions than litigation and infighting. By enacting smart laws, she says, Allhands wants to put everyone on a “level playing field”.

Loopholes and antiquated regulations allow some water users to benefit over others. In urban areas, factories, wildcatters, and “build-to-rent” housing developments exploit existing loopholes in groundwater management laws. Right now, a new Nestle factory is lobbying to receive special treatment under state groundwater laws, carving itself out of the broader management system. In rural areas, there are almost no regulations on groundwater pumping. As a result, rural Arizonans are watching their wells run dry while big neighbors, like Fondomonte, suck unregulated amounts of water out from under them. “There have to be some ground rules out there,” Allhands says, “I mean, ‘he who has the deepest well wins’ should not be dictating groundwater use in rural Arizona.”

Creating a more fair, proactive system of water management will require action from state legislators. Allhands keeps a sharp eye on the state legislature, even though she “totally hate[s] politics”. Allhands acknowledges that the Arizona legislature is malwieldy tool for water reform, but it is necessary for future change. “You need to have fair ground rules, and that's something that needs to come from the legislature. DWR (Department of Water Resources) can only do what DWR has spelled out in law …The cities, the farmers, the irrigation districts, they can't create that framework, they can't create the wider picture.”

Unfortunately, Allhands says the legislature is stuck on the “status quo”, and change is hard to come by. She applauds Governor Hobbs’s attention to the issue, but she doesn’t know if that attention will turn into real change. In the meantime, she says a single legislator, Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee Rep. Gail Griffin, has been strangling efforts at legislative water reform for years, and continues to do so. 

Allhands says that inaction will not only jeopardize Arizona’s water future, but also harm its reputation. Allhands likes to say that when it comes to water, “perception is reality”, in that people’s perception of water politics informs how they act on it. Too many people think that Arizonans are filling pools and watering lawns with reckless abandon, she says. No one is properly highlighting Arizona’s efforts to conserve water and prepare for the future. Phoenix recycles about 90% of its wastewater for secondary uses, and water managers have stored a “non-rainy day fund” of underground water, enough to serve Phoenix for thirty years in case of future emergency. Overall, even as Arizona’s population has grown since the 1950s, its overall water consumption has shrunk slightly – evidence of effective reform and conservation.

Nonetheless, she says, Las Vegas is winning the “perception war”, and Arizona is losing. Vegas has a reputation for being proactive and conservative with its water use, avoiding the negative connotations that come along with its spewing fountains. When it comes to the Colorado River, these kinds of perceptions matter. If people view you as wasteful, you will receive less sympathy when negotiating over water. Regarding Arizona, Alllhands says the state needs to do more to address its negative reputation.

Allhands says she hopes her writing will push lawmakers to take action, but sometimes she is just speaking for the record. “Over time, it’s that drumbeat of like, ‘this isn't good enough, this isn't good enough, we need to do more, we need to sacrifice,’ … Sometimes I feel like I might be whistling in the dark on some things. But, you know, if it's important, I guess, just keep whistling in the dark.”

Altogether, Allhands sees a path forward for Arizona. Maybe Phoenix will start to grow up, rather than out, and maybe stronger, more connected systems will make the state’s water use more efficient. At some point, something is going to have to give, she says, because the problem is not going away. Ultimately, water issues will force people to make tough decisions. 

She hopes it never comes to that. She would rather make a small sacrifice now and avoid a huge one later on.

“The definition of sacrifice is giving up something you love for something you love more … If we don't have water, we don't live here, you know, and I say that all the time to people. I like living here. So that’s why I do what I do.”

Cook has used data from millions of individual trees to research drought. In wet years, trees develop thicker rings in their wood, and in dry years, the rings are thinner. Through the story in a tree’s wood, scientists can see the history of the water it received. Through the stories of many neighboring trees, they can see the history of drought in an area. And from those histories, scientists can make predictions about the future. To create such immense narratives with so many tiny roots, Cook says, is a “magical” process. And an important one, too. Science tells us that the western United States is enduring a historic “megadrought”, an event that will become increasingly common in the future. To manage the current crisis and plan ahead, Westerners need science.

For the first twenty-two years of the twenty-first century, the western United States has suffered its worst drought since medieval times. Farmers in the Colorado River Basin have watched their fields go dry. State and federal officials have scrambled to save declining reservoirs. Fires have consumed huge swaths of Western forests and destroyed entire towns. With the climate slowly drying the West, this drought could be the first step toward a tougher future.

Cook’s research has repeatedly shown that humans can contribute to the severity of droughts. Human-induced land degradation in the Great Plains not only contributed to the iconic “Dust Bowl” dust storms of the 1930s, but also exacerbated the drought that caused them in the first place. Irrigation can change a region’s rainfall, sometimes even increasing it. And human-caused global warming has been worsening droughts across the globe for more than a hundred years. For Cook, there is no doubt that droughts are more than purely “natural” disasters.

When Cook went to research the effects of climate change on the West’s current megadrought (defined as a widespread severe drought that stands out from the last two thousand years), he found they were quite strong:

“What we found is really two things: one, you have to go back to these megadroughts of the medieval era before you can find a similar event in the western US to what we're experiencing now. And then two, the reason that it looks like a megadrought is largely because of climate change. This is a drought that certainly would have happened just through natural variability anyway, but it would have probably started later, it wouldn't have been as extensive, and it wouldn't have been as severe without the kind of additive drying from climate change.”

Cook’s team found that climate change was responsible for 46% of the drought’s severity.

But what does that really mean? Cook says people are quick to assume that climate change simply creates droughts, but that’s not really what’s happening here. Climate change and drought are both complex processes on their own. When they interact, it’s not a one-to-one relationship.

This dynamic is so complex that scientists struggle to even ask the same questions about it, let alone find the same answers. At the time Cook and his colleagues released their paper on climate change and drought in the West, another paper emerged that, on the surface, directly conflicted with Cook’s findings. Specifically focused on California, that paper found that climate change was not having an effect on the state’s precipitation patterns, and therefore, its drought.

But while the two papers seemed to contradict each other, Cook says they were really just telling two sides of the same story. While the other team was examining California’s precipitation, Cook and his team were examining soil moisture. Both are components of a drought, but neither is entirely responsible for it:

“We use the term ‘drought’ as this kind of umbrella phenomenon, which just means, you know, not enough water. But under that big umbrella are a lot of details that really do matter.”

Because of all these varying factors, the West could become drier in the future even with good precipitation. In 2023, precipitation has been above average in much of the West. In California, for instance, an intense series of storms has filled reservoirs and heaped the Sierra Nevada mountains with snow. The whole Southwest could also see even more precipitation this year because of changing water temperatures in the Pacific.

But even with more short-term rain and snow, much of the West will still have to contend with drying soils and rising air temperatures in the long term.

“I think the short-term prognosis is good from the perspective of, you know, the drought being moderated and some places being relieved, but the longer-term perspective is … everything we know about climate change is that the Western US is going to get drier.” 

In other words, climate change is going to move the West’s “baseline” conditions to be more dry. Even if rain continues to fall, less of it will stay in the soil, and the warm atmosphere will cause greater evaporation. When rain events occur, dry, hardened soils will struggle to absorb that moisture before it runs into rivers or the ocean.

Using sedimentary records from the last 15,000 years, scientists have found that whenever western North America has warmed, it has also typically dried. This pattern occurred at the end of the last Ice Age, for instance. Temperature increases cause more water to evaporate from soils and vegetation while also reducing snowfall and speeding up snowmelt – a critical source of summer water for the arid Southwest. 

Cook says you can understand this dynamic through the metaphor of human health:

“You can think of [climate change] almost as a kind of chronic underlying condition … you might have an underlying condition, and then certain activities just amplify the risk of something happening … It doesn't mean that we're not going to get wet years in the future, or maybe maybe even extended periods. I mean, we could get lucky – maybe the 2030s will be the wettest decade of the last 1,000 years. That's unlikely, but it's not something that’s precluded because of climate change. But, you know, what we do expect is that climate change is just making everything a little bit drier.”

This drying has already made a serious impact on Western landscapes. Experts estimate that total stream flows in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which includes parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, have decreased by 5% for every one-degree Fahrenheit increase in the regional atmospheric temperature over the last century (meaning a 20% reduction in flows). Warming and drying have also jeopardized Western forests. Cook points to a recent study in which researchers concluded that a fifth of trees in California’s conifer forests are now living in a climate that is too warm for them. Forests have also become more susceptible to pine beetles and other parasites as drought weakens their natural defenses. Meanwhile, fires have burned a quarter of California’s forests since 2001.

Climate change will also increase the chances of megadroughts occurring in the future. Cook’s research has shown that the West could experience two megadroughts in this century alone. In a 2015 paper, Cook and his colleagues found that in the second half of the 21st century, western North America will likely be much drier than it was for most of the 20th century, with an 80% chance of a megadrought occurring again after 2050.

The west has seen four megadroughts like the current one in the last 1,200 years, though all of them have been less severe. In the past, they have led lead to intense fire activity, vegetation death, and forest loss. Some of these droughts also coincided with major migrations, or “collapses”, for human civilizations, including Ancestral Pueblo people in the Four Corners area and the Hohokam mound-building culture of central Arizona. In these events, people drained from entire cities and villages, leaving them uninhabited.

As megadroughts play out in modern times, Cook says it is important to be able to make sense of their complexity. Precipitation patterns, ecosystem health, reservoir levels, and fire conditions are all connected, but they all move on their own timelines. Depending on which of these timelines a person examines, they might see a drought very differently.

A farmer, a hydropower professional, an urban resident, and an environmentalist might all see a drought through different lenses. When does dryness really end? Is it when reservoirs refill, or when forests recover, or when groundwater sources fully recharge? As the West’s baseline becomes drier and drier, it will be more difficult to say if droughts really “end” at all. It’s hard to define drought as a period of sub-normal water availability when “normal” no longer means what it used to.

A drought’s visible impacts can also change people’s perceptions. For instance, the drought currently affecting the Colorado River Basin has been statistically more severe than the drought that created the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Even so, farmers in California today are not dealing with the same devastation that farmers in Oklahoma experienced then; modern farmers enjoy better economic conditions, and their modernized farming practices are not contributing to the kind of dust storms that gave the Dust Bowl such an apocalyptic aesthetic. The aesthetic of this drought, Cook says, is probably the “bathtub ring” of exposed rock in the Colorado River’s draining reservoirs. By the numbers, the current drought is worse, but in pictures, some could argue that the Dust Bowl was a greater calamity.

Cook says people can also see drought differently depending on what they’re used to. For people who moved out West during a spurt of growth in the 1980s, this drought might come as a kind of shock. While the West has experienced several droughts in the twentieth century, the century also saw two “pluvials”, or periods of abnormal wetness, at its beginning and end, which established unrealistic expectations about water availability in the region:

“In fact, much of the 1980s and 1990s was one of the wettest multi-decadal periods maybe of the last 1,000 years. And so, effectively, this created conditions where, after the 1950s drought, we saw lots of growth in western North America – people building, moving out there, agriculture intensifying and expanding. And at the time, there was plenty of water to go around. And so, I think people's expectations were a little skewed.”

If two people developed their idea of “normal” in the 2000s and the 1980s, respectively, those two normals would be vastly different from one another, and the two people’s reactions to the current drought would be different too. 

As 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River struggle to manage dwindling water supplies amid a historic megadrought, these differences of perspective could have serious consequences. They could lead people into more conflict than collaboration, and they could limit people’s ability to plan for sustainable water use in a dry future.

Cook says this is where science comes in. Science can incorporate individual perspectives and detailed data-points to create a bigger picture of a drought. It can help establish a shared, realistic understanding of what’s really going on:

“We can take these little isolated bits of information – a single observational record or a single tree – and aggregate it all together to generate a large-scale understanding … we can put together lots of little bits of information that may not be very informative in isolation, but together, give us an incredible set of tools to understand what's going on.”

Looking forward, Cook hopes those understandings can make a difference in how people manage drought. People tend to have short memories, he says. Science can be a way to remind people of larger trends that will continue to affect them throughout the future:

“I actually really enjoy the opportunity, and sometimes the challenge, of communicating this information and this work to people outside of science and trying to help them understand, or at least be well enough informed about what's going on so that they can make the best decisions they can.”

Without climate change, the West is naturally vulnerable to drought. With climate change, dry periods are even more likely. Planning now can make a big difference in the future. “What I always tell everybody” he says, “is that when this drought ends, that's the time to start thinking and planning for the next one.”

Roerink fights to protect local groundwater in Nevada’s and Utah’s Great Basin region. Roerink is the executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, an organization that has become famous for fighting water grabs by cities. GBWN’s best-known victory is its successful 31-year battle against the “Las Vegas pipeline”, which would have made a “dust bowl” out of large swaths of eastern Nevada in order to supplement water supplies in Sin City. Now, Roerink and his organization are engaged in another fight against a different pipeline, this one stemming from Cedar City, Utah. If completed, GBWN holds that the pipeline could destroy Native sacred sites, protected ecosystems, and a rural way of life, all by sucking the water out from underneath them.

As he builds coalitions to fight for local water, Roerink spends most of his time on the road, traveling the borderlands between the country’s two driest states. He speaks with small town governments, ranchers, environmentalists, federal officials, and even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church). All these groups, regardless of their individual disagreements, depend on the same groundwater, and they all share a home. Roerink says that in order to convince these groups to join GBWN’s effort, he has to meet these people face to face and build relationships with them. Roerink spends so much time on the road, meeting people, that the GBWN board is concerned about him “burning out”. But he says it’s necessary: “I'm just constantly on the road, but that's how you build trust.”

Roerink sees water as a lifeblood that nourishes the identity of a place. When the people who depend on that lifeblood come together, they can protect what’s precious to them, even if it means a battle with the rich and powerful. Roerink believes that if people pay attention to what’s going on in their own communities, they can understand the greater systems of human development and natural resources that form their lives. So far, that approach seems to be working.

The Great Basin Water Network is a 501(c)(3) organization headquartered in the tiny town of Baker, Nevada. The organization received non-profit status in 2007, but has its roots in an organized community effort in the 1970s and 80s that stopped the U.S. Air Force from testing intercontinental ballistic missiles and supersonic military operations in eastern Nevada; activists held that those tests posed a significant threat to the region’s groundwater. In the 1990’s, old members of that network reunited as the Great Basin Water Network to fight the Las Vegas pipeline – known officially as the Southern Nevada Water Authority Groundwater Development Project – a $15 billion dollar project that would have created a 250-mile pipeline and 44 wells across Eastern Nevada. Las Vegas, which relies on the Colorado River for 90 percent of its drinking water, was looking to tap the Great Basin’s ancient aquifers for a back-up supply. 

According to an article released in High Country News in 2020, the Las Vegas pipeline “threatened to make a dust bowl of 305 springs, 112 miles of streams, 8,000 acres of wetlands and 191,000 acres of shrubland habitat, almost all of it on public lands.” For context, the pipeline would have desiccated a combined acreage of wetlands and shrubland habitat more than ten times the size of Manhattan. Groundwater beneath the Great Basin is essential for plants and animals in Nevada’s only national park, Great Basin National Park, and in the Fish Springs Wildlife Refuge. The area’s aquifers are also critical to resupplying Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which is rapidly drying out. 

Groundwater nourishes the cultures and ways of life that define the Great Basin’s communities. Native people in the region rely spiritually on groundwater, which sustains sacred groves of swamp cedars (junipers) in a valley known as Bahsahwahbee, or “The Sacred Water Valley”. In the second half of the 19th century, the U.S. Army and vigilantes killed more than 300 Native people in that valley during several massacres. Goshute and Western Shoshone people believe that the swamp cedars hold the souls of their own relatives who lost their lives in these events, and they regularly visit the site for ceremonies, celebrations, and healings. 

Groundwater is also essential to the farming and ranching practices that constitute the region’s cultural character. All of these elements of regional culture would come under threat if the area’s groundwater was tapped by a major wellfield and pipeline. 

After a 31-year battle, the Great Basin Water Network successfully killed the pipeline in the spring of 2020. It was a David and Goliath story and a monumental feat of community activism. In GBWN’s Fall 2022 newsletter, Roerink looked back on the struggle, writing, “Incremental victories led us to one major victory. Death by a thousand paper cuts.” Hydrologists, lawyers, Native people, ranchers, environmentalists, and regular community members had fought an intergenerational fight to protect a regional resource against a far more powerful organization, and won, for the second time.

But as drought continues to ravage Western water resources, and populations continue to swell, the Great Basin will continue to face threats to its groundwater. GBWN is now embroiled in a fight to stop another proposed pipeline, which would feed the fast-growing town of Cedar City, Utah. According to the USGS, the pipeline would impact an area of over 10,000 square miles along the border between Utah and Nevada, lowering the regional water table by as much as 1,500 feet. GBWN refers to the proposed pipeline as the “West Desert Water Grab”.

Roerink grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, also known as the City of Three Rivers. His surname, by his claim, means “people of the Roer River” in Dutch. And he, like his Dutch ancestors before him, has lived a westward-bound life. After a stint working on Capitol Hill, Roerink became a reporter in Casper, Wyoming, and then moved to Las Vegas to work for the Las Vegas Sun. During his time at the Sun, he reported on the battle over the Las Vegas pipeline. Inspired by GBWN’s fight, Roerink left journalism and became the executive director of the GBWN four years later.

“I had to ask myself what I wanted to be in life,” he says. “There was truth beyond just putting economic value on water.”

Roerink maintains that the West’s water has always been allocated to where it will create the most growth, even when it has disastrous consequences. The West’s obsession with growth has pushed the region into its current water crisis, and yet Western society still tends to treat water like an economic variable instead of a precious natural resource. As water becomes more limited, ecosystems, rural communities, and precious sites of natural heritage will become targets for the appropriation of water. Without backing away from a growth mindset, Roerink says, their efforts at mitigating this water crisis are just “rearranging the deckchairs on the houseboats on Lake Powell”, meaning they are making meaningless, surface-level changes to water management without addressing root causes of the crisis. 

Roerink subscribes to a version of the West’s history in which political and economic elites (senators, congresspeople, city planners, developers, industrialists, land barons, etc.) built a great dependence on the region’s water supplies for the sake of economic development, even though that water wasn’t guaranteed for the future. This narrative plays out in what he calls the “nouveau mythologies of the West,” which famously include books like Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert and Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. In these books, entrepreuners lobbied congress for federal projects that brought stable, reliable water to otherwise parched regions of the West, thereby increasing land values and enabling economic growth in Western states. Ultimately, that lust for growth overburdened the water system and exacerbated the modern water crisis.

You can think of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River as a prime example. Through major dams and aqueducts, an unreliable water supply in a desert river became a usable, reliable supply that allowed early American Westerners to “make the desert bloom” by supplying the United States’ second largest city, Los Angeles; its largest producers of winter produce, the Imperial and Yuma valleys; and the population centers of Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Denver. 

Now, the Colorado River, which feeds these cities and agricultural operations, is overdrawn. By the end of the twentieth century, humans were using every possible drop in the river, leaving it to trickle out of existence before reaching its natural terminus at the Sea of Cortez. in the last several decades, humans have not only taken all the water that runs in the river, but they are now using more water than the river can naturally provide, drawing down the river’s reservoirs. This is partially due to the fact that interstate water agreements and court decrees apportioning water between the states were built on faulty calculations about the river’s flow, but the largest causes in the current crisis are drought and population growth. The American West is currently experiencing its driest 22-year period in 1200 years. In the last century, the Colorado River’s flows have decreased by 20 percent, and researchers expect them to fall by another 10-25 percent in the next 30 years. 

As a result, the famous reservoirs, Lakes Powell and Mead, lose more water to human use than they receive from natural river flows. If their water levels decline too far, they could fall below the outlets on the reservoirs’ dams and cut the flow of the river altogether, initiating what is referred to as “system collapse”. In response, states and the federal government are struggling to conserve water in the river without damaging local economies, but to accomplish one, it is almost imperative that you do the other. So far, in order to stabilize water levels in the reservoirs, states have agreed to water cuts that have already dried out farms in Arizona. And water in the reservoirs is still falling. If you buy into the idea that this is largely the result of overdevelopment and poor planning, then you could say the binge on water development has ended in a hangover of tense negotiations and fallow fields. 

Prudent observers foresaw this struggle and warned against the spurt of development initiated in the late 19th century. The most famous of these is John Wesley Powell, who navigated the Green and Colorado rivers with one arm, and for whom the now-imperiled reservoir is named (this is unintentionally very ironic). To Powell’s mind, the desert West could only be developed with strict respect for the limitations of the region’s water supply. Powell argued that farming could only happen in small regions of the West where the land allowed (likely where Native people were already doing it), and Western states’ borders should be designed along the boundaries of watersheds. As head of the U.S. Geological Survey, Powell argued passionately for these points before Western legislators. Powell famously condemned legislators’ emphasis on land development in the West by stating, “Gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.” His case met stiff resistance, and development went on as planned.

Looking back on this history, Roerink says, “we're reeling from a lot of bad decision making.”

This is the story Roerink continues to see play out around him in the arid West. Developers and politicians are still eager to grow the economic output of Western states, and they underestimate, or more likely ignore, the limitations of the region’s water system in order to do so. 

Now, Roerink argues, instead of rethinking the West’s approach to water, federal officials and states are advocating for the same growth-minded infrastructure projects that created so much dependence on the river. A recent press release by the GBWN and three other Colorado River-focused organizations states that water managers are doing everything they can to save Glen Canyon Dam, the dam that created Lake Powell, even if it means destructive water cuts to California, Nevada, and Arizona. Rather than finding a way to allow the river to bypass the dam, federal officials and states are pushing to preserve the dam as it is, which means cutting releases to downstream users. Roerink wants to emphasize that those downstream users don’t just include Las Vegas and Los Angeles, but also rural economies and ecosystems with critically endangered species that are already hanging by the river’s ever-thinning thread. Roerink wants to know, is it worth sacrificing all that for a dam?

Imagine you are standing in Glen Canyon, the once spectacular gorge that was drowned in the filling of Lake Powell (some people have said it was even more beautiful than Grand Canyon). As the lake drains, you might expect to see the natural beauty of that place again. In some places, this is possible, but in others, you are faced with a drastically altered landscape. A layer of shifting sediment, which can sometimes extend more than a hundred feet deep, has choked the bottom of the canyon, deposited over many years as it built up behind the dam. The sediment cracks in places, belching up gas from the decomposition of riverside vegetation that was drowned almost 60 years ago. Wherever John Wesley Powell was when he boated down that section of the river in 1871, it is now invisible, buried beneath the shifting mire. The dam, named for the canyon it drowned, and the lake, named for a man who would likely have hated it, are now failing. Meanwhile, the sediment, built up in a geological formation sometimes called the Dominy Formation (named very ironically, and intentionally, for the man who led the construction of the dam and who argued that sedimentation wouldn’t be a problem in Lake Powell for thousands of years), is winning. The dam was meant to provide secure water supplies for a young corner of the nation, and now it has become little more than a giant clog. Roerink says that as you stand in that position, you are likely to feel that some principle, some promise, has been broken. 

To Roerink, that principle is the public trust doctrine. In the United States, this doctrine is commonly understood to mean that waterways, wildlife, and land can all be held for the public benefit. In Roerink’s words, the doctrine is meant to “maintain the scenic and therapeutic and recreational values that Mother Nature brings to us in the understanding that those should exist in perpetuity”. Even if Americans don’t understand the concept, he says, they can tell when it has been violated. Looking at the situation in Lake Powell, Roerink thinks it is clear that Western leaders prioritized economic development over nature. After destroying a canyon with that dam, water managers are now potentially going to harm ecosystems further downstream in order to save it. 

Hardly anyone with official power is proposing radical changes to this self-defeating system. In fact, for the most part, Roerink argues that the West is turning to the same systems that built this crisis to fix it. State water managers, federal agencies founded for the management of dams, and water purveyors that benefit from economic growth in their regions are the ones who are meeting at negotiation tables in efforts to save the river system. This summer, the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency responsible for managing dams on the Colorado River, is expected to release a plan for how it will direct states to conserve water in the river. The only problem is that the federal government’s legal authority to do this is questionable, and it may be more interested in saving the infrastructure that enabled reckless growth than saving a holistic and healthy river system. As Roerink puts it, “we're asking the doctors who committed malpractice on this system to come up with a cure”.

And even as water supplies get tighter, growth will likely continue. Ten of the 15 counties with the most new residents in 2021 were in the Southwest, led by Maricopa County, Arizona—home of the fast-growing Phoenix metro area. Number twelve on the list was Clark County, Nevada, home to Las Vegas. And in Colorado, 75 percent of respondents in a recent poll stated that too many people moving into their state was a “serious problem,” up from 47 percent in 2016. 

There are laws that are supposed to prevent this kind of growth when there’s no water to support it. But Roerink says those systems are already corrupted, and powerful people are willing to bend or break them in order to continue with business as usual. 

Roerink specifically calls out Arizona. In 1968, Arizona agreed to accept California’s priority over Arizona for the Colorado River water so that it could build the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile aqueduct that carries water from the Colorado River across the state. Phoenix is among the many Arizona population centers that rely on the CAP. Now, as states and federal officials are attempting to cut water use on the river, Arizona is arguing that the cuts should be distributed “equitably” between itself and California, rather than being distributed in accordance with the strength of the two states’ water rights, which would leave Arizona high and dry (California has promised that water necessary for public health and safety would always be available to Arizona). The way Roerink sees this, Arizona is trying to break the terms of its own agreement now that the state is in trouble. 

Likewise, Roerink says that regulators aren’t punishing irrigators for wasteful irrigation, largely because of “cowardice” in government institutions. If regulators came down on irrigators in accordance with the actual law, he argues, there would be a lot less waste. He also cites the defeated Las Vegas pipeline as an example of growth-above-law mentality. According to Roerink, Las Vegas’s water provider was prepared to exceed the limits of the law in order to obtain water from smaller, more vulnerable communities. 

“We hear a lot of talk about how we're a nation of laws and we have to abide by them. But what I see time and again, is that powerful interests who don't like the way that the laws function are willing to go to great lengths to change them, and I think they need to be called out on it,” Roerink says. 

Roerink sees powerful, growth-minded elites pushing the water system to operate in their favor, even when it means harming communities and ecosystems. In order to prevent even greater crises and destruction in the future, Roerink believes the West needs to stop behaving like the amount of water available is capable of feeding big dreams for growth. In the meantime, rural communities need to stand up for their water, because no one else will. 

Thomas Jefferson famously argued that the United States should operate according to agrarian ideals: farming should be Americans’ primary relationship to the land. Jefferson saw farmers as self-sufficient actors who avoided the domination of markets and industrialization. Farmers were aware of their relationship with the earth and their own sustenance, which gave them the power to protect themselves and their communities. 

Roerink argues that many Americans have lost that awareness, and therefore that power to protect themselves:  “We're so disconnected from our communities. We're disconnected from our food sources. We're disconnected from our water supplies. And we're disconnected from the things that inherently, you know, over time have evolved us into human beings … I think we've completely lost sight of truly what the fabric of our being is.”

Roerink acknowledges Thomas Jefferson himself is a morally fraught character in U.S. history (a holder of enslaved people who believed strongly in racial segregation). Nonetheless, Roerink recognizes the power in Jefferson’s emphasis on self-awareness and connection with land. Particularly, Roerink believes that Americans must reconnect with local politics if they are to protect their communities from the rash decision making of powerful people. 

To play a part in the politics truly affecting one’s life, Roerink argues, a person is better off attending their local water purveyor’s regular meetings than turning on their favorite national news channel. He thinks national media, urbanization, and short memories have isolated people from one another. 

 “I think one of the biggest problems in our society is that we've lost certain notions of the Jeffersonian ideal, where it was truly a civic duty to pay attention to what was happening at the local level, and you would go to the town hall, and you would be constantly engaged. Now we live in an era where people think it's a political act to turn on their favorite cable news channel.”

Having once worked on Capitol Hill, Roerink says he no longer cares much about national politics. The further away he gets from his time there, the further Washington slips from his priorities. The power of GBWN is ground-up, not top-down. 

In many ways, Roerink’s job is to reconnect people with the forces that sustain their communities and their homes – to make people aware of who they are by way of what and how they consume, and then invite them into a network that will fight to defend their way of life from threats like water grabs. Roerink wants people to understand that water means more than the economic development it creates. It is existential to nature and culture. It connects people with their world. 

For the moment, Roerink says his vision feels distant. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” he says. Shortened attention spans, an increasingly polarized national media, and a decline in local engagement have hollowed out people’s ability to fight for their communities. But for Roerink, the Great Basin Water Network’s past successes prove these forces are not insurmountable. While the organization relies on a wide array of supporters, he says the long-term consistency necessary to their success came from about twenty dedicated people, both within the organization itself and living in Great Basin communities. “There are some people who will carry on,” he says, “and sometimes that's all it takes.”

Roerink wants a moratorium on the development of Colorado River water. He wants people to see the idea of putting more straws in the river as nonsense. He wants water to mean something more than money. And he wants laws, principles, and the public to decide the most important questions of our fate – which, to him, is how this country was meant to operate.

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Teal Lehto is worried about the future of rural communities and wild rivers in the drought-stricken West, and she thinks that platforms like TikTok can promote the conversations we need to save them. Lehto says that digestible, interesting messaging on water issues helps inform wider audiences and open important conversations on water. Without them, she says we could fail to enact the reforms we need to conserve water and save rural communities from drying out.

As a TikTok influencer with over 50,000 followers and posts that consistently earn thousands of views, Lehto understands the power of messaging. Posting under the name “WesternWaterGirl,” Lehto explains various aspects of water management in the Western United States (Lehto lives in Durango, CO). Before taking to TikTok, Lehto studied water management as an environmental studies major at Fort Lewis College. She also worked as a rafting guide, competing in international rafting competitions in Japan, China, and Argentina.

Lehto’s content is punchy, conversational, and funny. Wearing cat-eye makeup and speaking directly into the camera, she explains complex stories about dams, drought, and water law to her audience. With graphics and images superimposed in the background, she makes complicated subjects digestible, but also funny, maddening, and intriguing.

Lehto has a simple method for developing interesting content. When she’s creating a new video, Lehto tests her ideas in everyday conversation:

“When I write a script, I will do my research and type up a general outline of what I want to say in my video. And then I’ll also have that exact conversation with, say, my boyfriend or my dad or my mom and see, like, is it funny to them? Did they laugh at it? And if they're not understanding what my goal was for that video, then I will rework the way I phrase things.”

In the end, her videos have to work like a dialogue with a friend. Jokes have to land, and the idea has to make sense – even (and especially) to a person who isn’t already knowledgeable about water issues. 

Lehto says this approach is necessary in order to be successful on TikTok. She argues that Generation Z, the generation most commonly associated with using TikTok, prizes authenticity over glamor. Lehto thinks that TikTok’s algorithm is even designed to reflect that preference.

“On TikTok, the videos that seem to do the best are the ones that have really low production value – there are so many of me just being, like, a complete ding dong. Like in the future, I'm waiting until it snows in Durango and I'm going to make a video where the first few seconds are somebody pouring water on me while I'm standing in the snow in a bikini. Because I know people will actually watch the video then.”

In that kind of media environment, there’s very limited capacity to fully explain or grapple with complex subjects like hydrology and water law. To be effective, Lehto has to make those subjects engaging without distorting the facts. In doing this, Lehto says she is competing with people who capture audiences by relying on conspiracy theories, false facts, and oversimplification. 

“In the absence of policymakers and journalists and other officials in the industry coming out with clear and easy-to-understand explanations, people are coming up with their own, and they’re f***ing wild.”

Lehto has tried to confront content creators who are dealing in misinformation about water in the West. In one instance, she was censored by TikTok for posting a video in which she directly addressed the false information in another creator’s posts. TikTok took down her fact-checking video and gave her a warning about “bullying”. 

The myth she was trying to bust was a bunk theory in which the earth’s core is believed to create “primary water”, a limitless source of freshwater for the planet. The theory is sometimes used to ignore warnings about drought and to resist calls for water conservation. Lehto watches TikTok users commenting on these “primary water” videos, expressing their support for the theory. Once, she helped convince one of those users that the theory was bunk. “Just one person,” she says, laughing.

According to Lehto, this is an example of why accessible and accurate messaging is so important when talking about water. Without it, people will gravitate towards the simplest narrative they can find, which isn’t always correct. In the case of the “primary water” theory, it also means that people who live in water-challenged communities might be convinced there is no need for urgent action on water conservation, meaning harm for their own community. 

An additional benefit of simplifying these concepts is that the areas for change or improvement in water management systems become clear. When Lehto explains water law in layman’s terms, she exposes obvious contradictions and absurdities in our water management system that can be improved (she pointed to the generally defined “use-it-or-lose-it doctrine”).

In order to do that, though, she has to face experts’ and practitioners’ resistance to thinking outside the box. When she points out problems with our water management system, a typical response would be, “well that’s the way it is.”

Once, at a speaking event, Lehto asked a water rights attorney (who was a speaker at the event) about a potential change in Colorado’s water law system that would save water and benefit farmers. The attorney responded, “that’s not how it works, sweetie.”

This attitude frustrates Lehto, “I feel like people are talking in an echo chamber when it comes to water in the West. And I don't think it's helping us get any closer to solutions,” she argues.

Along with tunnel vision among experts, Lehto also points out entrenched biases and fears among agricultural irrigators. In southern Colorado, irrigators have resisted efforts to keep water in the Dolores River — where endangered fish species are threatened by low water levels — because they view them as a “California water grab”. Lehto, who wrote her senior thesis on the Dolores River, sees this as a form of “cognitive dissonance” in which irrigators are shooting down solutions while watching the problems fester.

Lehto believes that if the entrenched biases and beliefs among experts and water users are not openly examined and challenged, they might lead to the kinds of ecological and economic disasters that rural Westerners are fighting to avoid. Resistance to out-of-the-box thinking among experts, a misled public consuming conspiracy theories, and irrigators resistant to reform could all mean that real solutions to the West’s water problems remain distant.

Without real solutions, vulnerable Western communities face a bleak future. Originally from the tiny town of Hesperus, Colorado, Lehto is concerned about the future of rural communities. If irrigators don’t engage in some kind of reform, Lehto says cities will come for their water. Agriculture currently accounts for 86% of water used in Colorado, and cities like Denver need more water to grow. To obtain that water, they often “buy and dry”* agricultural lands.

“And so right now, these water rights holders in agriculture are holding out, but they don't understand that if they just keep holding out, eventually, their community is just gonna be ‘buy and dried’. Because that's the way things are going … The reason I'm fighting to do what I'm doing is because we are on a high-speed train towards drying out rural agricultural communities within the [Colorado River] Basin. When we talk about water running out in the basin, people always mention like, ‘Oh, we're gonna see Vegas and Phoenix and all of that disappear.’ But that's not what's gonna happen.”

Lehto says this kind of conversation about agriculture and water conservation makes people “super uncomfortable”. In the most extreme cases, she thinks she has even been denied job opportunities in the water space because of her insistence on having it.

But this boldness is part of what Lehto views as her real job — being an activist. Saying challenging things to people who don’t want to hear them is part of her approach towards making change. At times, as a result, she can be tough on the West’s water management systems in her videos, blatantly calling some aspects of them “dumb”. As long as her critiques are accurate and informed, she doesn’t mind if she ruffles a few feathers.

Lehto doubts this approach will make her career more difficult going forward. She mentions that while she thinks she has lost opportunities because of her direct opinions on uncomfortable subjects, she has also gained media appearances because of her willingness to speak her mind. Lehto is not alone, as heavy-hitting players in the water space are starting to call for fundamental change and innovation. She notes the Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s remarks that the Colorado River Compact** needs to be changed, and she mentions a recent MOU signed by 30 urban water suppliers calling for the removal of ornamental turf in their cities. 

In light of these changes, Lehto is optimistic that most people in the Colorado River Basin will eventually come to share her views on water management and reform:

“What we're seeing is slow change. And I think, honestly, that I'm just on the vanguard of that, and that in like a decade, maybe not even a decade, there are gonna be people who are reaching out to me saying, like, ‘you saw this coming’.”

*“Buy and dry” refers to the process of buying the water rights associated with agricultural land and then using the water somewhere else, typically for urban development. See here for more information

**The Colorado River Compact is a 1922 interstate agreement that governs water use between the eight states in the Colorado River Basin. See here for more information