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Jerry Sehlke just posted about a national water vision for the US, and what happens? A Congressman takes him up on that!

Rep. John Linder (R-GA), who represents Georgia’s 7th District, the northeast suburbs of Atlanta (Gwinnett County and environs), has seen his bill H.R. 135 to establish a “21st Century Water Commission” get voted out of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure’s Subcommittee on Water and Environment. Linder’s bill has been down this road before, getting House approval in the previous two sessions but no consideration in the Senate. His Senate colleague Johnny Isakson (R-GA) hopes to change that should the bill be approved by the House.

Third time’s a charm, right?

Download linder_pr_water_bill_2008.pdf

Download hr_135_21_century_watercommission.pdf 

Linder is one of the founders of the House Water caucus and spoke at our Third Water Policy Dialogue [access his talk here: http://awra.podshowcreator.com/podcasts.aspx?feedid=994]

Download congresswatercaucus.pdf 

Linder’s bill establishes a nine-person commission with a three-year life and a $9M budget. The commission members will be unsalaried.  The keys are not only the commissioners themselves, but also the staff positions and the Director, all of whom are salaried. The commission will study and develop recommendations for a comprehensive water strategy to address future water needs.

Okay, here are my thoughts on the “good, bad, and the ugly” of the bill:

1. The commission is a very good idea and its charge is long overdue.
2. I like the idea of a water strategy as opposed to a water policy (thanks, Dick Enberg).
3. The commission, its charge, and budget should have been assigned to the The National Academies. They have experience with these kinds of studies, and would help ensure that politics would not rear its ugly head and that the “right” people would be appointed. I’d like to get a good national water strategy, not the SOS [”Same Old ****].
4. The commission Director is appointed by the Speaker of the House and that’s not a good idea; too much risk of political shenanigans. The commission itself should hire the Director, a la the 9/11 Commission (but see #3 above).
5. The commissioners should not all be “the usual suspects”; ditto the Director and staff.
6. Water quality and environmental considerations are embedded in the bill - great!
7. The bill calls for a 50-year horizon. A longer time frame is required - at least 100 years.
8. States’ water prerogatives will be respected - very good.
9. Conflicts and duplication among Federal water agencies will be addressed (great idea - good luck!).
10. The study will look at options other than simply trying to develop more supplies via infrastructure projects - great!

Time will tell whether the commission will produce a workable water strategy, but it’s a long-overdue start.

“I’d rather be upstream with a ditch and a shovel than downstream with a decree.” – Western USA water saying

Dick Engberg posted a very interesting concept to the AWRA board/staff and technical committee listserv’s today  that may be of interest to our members related to the potential of developing a National Water Policy or Strategy (see below).  There has been quite a healthy discussion that has been going on about it most of the day.  I am hoping that those that responded to Dick’s posting will be willing to capture their thoughts from that discussion and bring them over to the blog to share those thoughts with our membership.

My personal thoughts are that it is pretty amazing (but not in a good way) that the US doesn’t have a National  Vision for what is arguably the most/one of the most important natural resources on earth.  The vision doesn’t need to get to long, complex or contentious - the goal of developing a vision is to state the ideal of what you would like to accomplish; e.g., we want to make water available and to utilize it for the benefit of all man kind, yet not pollute it or overuse it to the deteriment of  the environment.   I’m not saying that is what the vision should be, I just saying that it doesn’t need to be difficult or contentious to develop.  Of couse, the potentially difficult and contentious aspects come soon thereafter, if we decide that we should develop water resources strategies, goals and/or policies on how to implement such a vision.  As always the devil is in the details and the details are in the strategies, goals and policies.

So, what are your thoughts?  Do you think that the US needs/should develop a National Water Vision?  Should AWRA help lead the way?  If so, should we develop an AWRA Vision and then share it with others or should we invite our sister professional water resources organizations to co-develop one?  Let us know what you think!

Subject: [Impacteditors] RE: [AWRA Staff] Rivers Running Dry

This is interesting. I’m glad to see others getting on the band wagon. Too late? Who knows? To have a coherent and cogent policy we need a National Water Vision. We don’t have a national vision, we have a variety of visions each based on the needs of the person or group’s specific concerns or needs. What is necessary is some way of coalescing these visions into a single one. Policy will come out of this. I find it interesting that there is now in Canada a CWRA (Canadian Water Resources Association) working group that is mapping out and energizing the processes needed to develop and implement a “National Water Strategy” for Canada. It’s interesting that the Canadians can get a group like this together and deal with this need. The CWRA Board of Directors recognized that a National Strategy must be developed and implemented with active participation from all levels of government, all business sectors and citizen groups. I like their use of the word “Strategy” - it ha!

As, for me, a more positive connotation than “Policy”.

We attempted to do something like what the Canadians are doing with the Water Policy Dialogue series and our “After Action” reports. I believe what the Canadians are doing, though, is one step further, that is, taking the equivalent of the after action reports together with imput from government and citizens and building a strategy.

I’m wondering if AWRA should take the bull by the horns and put together a working group to do the same thing as the Canadians? Who would we invite to be part of such a group? Would it be relevant? Would anyone listen? Would anyone care? I think there are a lot of us that care - it might be a way for our voices to be heard. Perhaps the meeting that Gerry Galloway has proposed for September should be constructed along these lines?

Some random thoughts.

Dick Engberg

Several months ago now, facing the cold, wet, foggy, dreary and long 28 days in the dreaded month of February and desperate for a diversion, I proposed in the AWRA e-newsletter, Connections, a film festival to be held in each of our homes, and I provided a list of 28 films (mostly readily available) in which water plays an important role either as setting, protaganist or antagonist, supporting cast, metaphor, symbol, or allegory.  You can see the complete list here: http://www.awra.org/newsletter/0801newsletter.html.  I named it WaterDance and launched it into cyberspace with my “send” button.

Such a response I got!  I had no idea there were so many like me who love movies and dread the month of February, too.  There were those who added to my initial list, those who provided commentary on my selections, and those who set out to watch as many as they could of the films I suggested.  Many, many people could not believe I left “Chinatown” (1974, Roman Polanski) — that classic story of California water rights, intrigue, and incest — off my list, and I could hardly believe it myself.  So, I tried to make amends in my next issue of Connections (available here:  http://www.awra.org/newsletter/0802newsletter.html).

I had a number of great one-on-one email conversations, and one insightful person suggested posting the idea of WaterDance on a blog so the conversation could be more inclusive.  While I had to wait for the AWRA blog to exist in order to put her idea into action, here it is at last! 

I’ll start you off with a sampling of suggested additions to my original list from Connections readers: 

• Deliverance (1972, John Boorman)
• The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, David Lean)
• The River (1951, Jean Renoir)
• Sphere (1998, Barry Levinson)
• Cast Away (2000, Robert Zemeckis)
• Holes (2003, Andrew Davis)

(Visit www.imdb.com for lots of information about these and many other movies.)

And, you can check out my previous lists at the links provided above, and with your help WaterDance can run all year long. 

With this post I launch WaterDance into the blogosphere.  Let’s see if it floats!

Robert M. Hirsch, Timothy L. Miller, Pixie Hamilton, and Robert Gilliom

Series: Water Resources in the Next Decade

Challenges to sustaining sufficient and high-quality water for human consumption, industry, farms, energy production, and ecosystem services continue to intensify in many parts of the Nation. We face four key water issues that call for support from the science and engineering communities.

1. Streamflow to Support Aquatic Ecosystems. The historic question in water-supply development was “How much water can we take from the river on a reliable basis?” The contemporary question is “How much water do we need to leave in the river to support and sustain stream biota and habitat?” Far more than a question of minimum in-stream flow requirements, this challenge involves the entire hydrograph, interactions of flow conditions with channel form and water quality, and the consequences of these changes on ecosystems.
2. Sustainable Ground-Water and Surface-Water Supplies. Historically, ground-water resources were tapped with little consideration to aquifer-storage depletion or streamflow effects. Now, ground-water storage is diminishing in many aquifers, resulting in higher pumping- lift costs, land subsidence, saltwater intrusion, and reduced streamflow. The contemporary question is “How do we manage ground water and surface water as a single sustainable resource?” To answer this question, we must expand systematic collection of data for tracking water resources, develop reliable hydrologic models for analysis of the interconnected ground-water and surfacewater systems, and evolve legal and economic institutions that consider the whole interconnected resource.
3. Sustainable Water Quality. Since implementation of the Clean Water Act in 1972 point sources have been largely controlled for regulated contaminants, and waterquality concerns have increasingly focused on difficultto- control nonpoint sources of pollution, such as agricultural and urban runoff, and atmospheric deposition. Possible causes of impairment can include: changes in flow, increases in water temperature and salinity, presence of natural or anthropogenic chemical contaminants (including those at concentrations that are not lethal but may have adverse effects on humans or aquatic life), invasive species, riparian disturbance, and construction of physical barriers. The analysis of changes in water quality is complicated by the fact that variations due to normal fluctuations between wet and dry periods can overshadow the human influences. The contemporary question is “Can we identify which causes of impairment are dominant so we can successfully manage our water resources?”
4. Effects of Climate Change. We have managed and developed water resources on the premise that water resources behave in a stationary and relatively predictable manner foretold by historical data. However, we now see that both short-term and long-term hydrologic variability is the norm, ranging from natural short-term climate swings related to El Niño to long-term changes associated with increased greenhouse gas concentrations. These influences can change the magnitude and timing of streamflow, which in turn changes the reliable supply for human and ecosystem uses. The contemporary question is “How do we manage water resources knowing that hydrologic processes are not stationary and our current ability to make reliable predictions is limited?’

Two needs stand out as we attempt to address all of these challenges. First, credible long-term data and assessments are needed to understand our water resources and how they are changing through time. In addition to water quantity and quality data, we also need ancillary data on landscape features and human activities related to chemical, land, and water use.

Second, we need to accelerate the development of reliable predictive models to understand water resources in places and times that we cannot feasibly monitor, and to determine how resources will change as a result of our water management decisions and actions. These models must have a strong basis in theory but be guided by long-term observational data. Science and technology have been crucial to the development of our water-resources infrastructure and improvements in water quality to date. Science and technology are central to resolving the water issues that we face today.

Gerald Sehlke

Series: Water Resources in the Next Decade

I believe that the most pressing issue is “Global Change” and its impacts on humans and the environment. Changes on earth are always a mixture of natural and anthropogenic changes. “Global Change” research focuses on the anthropogenic aspects of climate change, land use change, water resources development, and urbanization.

Arguably, much of the success associated with human survival and prosperity has been related to our ability to control and utilize water resources to our benefit. We have developed reliable water supplies that provide water in sufficient quality and quantity, when and where it is needed to support basic human needs and economic development. We have protected humans and human development (e.g., crops and infrastructure) from destructive natural phenomena, such as hurricanes and floods. We have improved basic sanitation, controlled pollutants, and developed reliable irrigation, navigation, and energy systems. Energy production and use has also been a major factor relative to human survival and prosperity. However, while extending human longevity, health, and prosperity, our activities have altered the earth’s climate, and in many areas drastically affected the way we live (e.g., urbanization), how much land and water we utilize, and the extent to which we have polluted the environment.

Global change, at its root, is driven by two major factors; first, the overall size and growth of the human population; and second, by a combination of our life styles, our economies and technology development, which drives our utilization of and impacts on natural resources and increases the wastes/pollutants we generate and discharge to the environment. Humans have been incredibly successful organisms; unlike other species, we have been able to modify our environment on the large scale, allowing us to successfully reproduce greatly and survive by adapting and expanding into virtually every niche on earth. Hence, the human population that was relatively stable at a few millions to a few hundreds of millions until 1 A.D., began expanding rapidly to approximately one billion in the early 1800s to our present population of 6.4 billion people today. That number is expected to grow to 8–12 billion people by 2050. Like all biological organisms, our mere presence impacts the earth’s environment. Unlike other organisms, humans have been able to impact the environment on the global scale.

The hydrological and biological capacity of the earth must be shared by all living creatures. In early human history, there were few humans and little human technology, so humans could be as destructive as they were capable of being and have minimal immediate impact to regional or global environments; and they caused a minimal if not an unperceivable footprint on future generations. However, as human populations expanded drastically, we migrated and established significant populations in most niches on earth and our capability to impact the local environments also expanded, allowing us to impact regional and then the global environment. In addition, our technological capacity expanded allowing us to modify the amount, quality, timing, and location of water in most of the world’s major river basins; to extract, harvest, and utilize large quantities of earth’s biomass; to produce such large quantities of pollutants and wastes as to change the very chemistry of our atmosphere, and to degrade a large percentage of the land and water resources on earth.

Historically, humans have not been gentle to the environment or our fellow inhabitants and even though modern environmental and sustainability philosophies tout that we will be better stewards in the future, our environmental record is spotty. However, even if we succeed in living in harmony with the environment to the greatest extent possible, the likely impacts of having 12 billion people on earth in the future could very well prove to be catastrophic to both our fellow earth-inhabitants and to ourselves.

The challenges for the next decade and beyond are to limit our population growth, to moderate our life styles, and to develop technologies that will provide for our human needs, yet protect and maintain the earth’s environment for all current and future inhabitants.

Brown and Caldwell has published a special Earth Day edition of its Water News.

“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read ‘President Can’t Swim’.” – Lyndon B. Johnson

Colleague Patrick Griffiths of the City of Bend alerted me to this information, which is from the American Bar Association’s Section on Environment, Energy, and Resources (www.abanet.org/environ/best/).

The ABA Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources recognizes the following paper submissions as the “Best Papers” prepared for the 37th Annual Conference on Environmental Law (Keystone), 26th Annual Water Law Conference, 15th Section Fall Meeting, and the 36th Annual Conference on Environmental Law. Each author was presented with a certificate of recognition and a Section publication as a token of appreciation for their outstanding submissions.

You can download each of these free at the above WWW site.

Here are the Environmental Law winners:

Thomas A. Bloomfield | Gallagher & Gallagher, a Professional Corporation
The Topsy Turvey World of CERCLA Uncertain Law – Uncertain Science

Sharon M. Mattox | Vinson & Elkins, L.L.P.
The 404(b)(1) Guidelines: Overview and New Developments

Rex R. Raimond | The Meridian Institute
Ethical Considerations Regarding the International Development and Application of Nanotechnology and Nanoscale Materials

Douglas R. Williams | Saint Louis University School of Law
Complexity, Competence, and Confidentiality: Ethical Issues at the Cutting Edge of Environmental Law

Water Law winners:

Charlton H. Bonham | Trout Unlimited
A Recipe from the Field for Dam Removal Agreements

Sandra Zellmer | University of Nebraska College of Law
Anti-Speculation: Ghost-busting, Trust-busting, or Ensuring Beneficial Use?

I have read only Zellmer’s paper, which I strongly recommend.

Professor Noah D. Hall of the Wayne State University Law School recently started the Great Lakes Law blog. Wayne State is home to the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, of which Hall is the Executive Director.

He describes his blog thusly:

A Blog on All Things Wet and Legal in the Great Lakes Region by Professor Noah Hall

If the first posts are any indication, then this will be a significant addition to the waterblogosphere. There are posts about bottled water issues, the Great Lakes Compact (hey, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: check these out) and a nifty little post about ‘Groundwater and the Public Trust Doctrine’, replete with a short document about GW and the PTD in Michigan:

Download Hall_PTD_and_groundwater_memo.pdf 

He also provides some Congressional testimony about Federal and State laws regarding bottled water industry, providing an overview and recommendations:

Download Noah_Hall_Bottled_Water_Testimony.pdf 

And view this article by Coral Davenport from Congressional Quarterly’s weekly magazine, CQ Weekly:

Download CQ_Weekly_Creating_New_Water_Ways.pdf

This is going to be an important source - not just a rehash of material from elsewhere, but some serious analysis by Hall, and not necessarily Great Lakes-specific.

Welcome to the waterblogosphere, Noah!

“But never underestimate the ability of the federal government to waste billions of dollars of taxpayer money on a dumb water project.” – Noah D. Hall, 1 April 2008

Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources: Final Rule

Army Corps and EPA Improve Wetland and Stream Mitigation

Check out the new rules for compensatory mitigation, hot off the presses.   The heirarchy for mitigation has been turned on its head.  This is good news for mitigation bankers, but what about the resource?  What do you think? 

Al Gore’s new video on climate change has just been released. It’s worth viewing (about 28 minutes).

Gore expresses alarm at the pace of melting ice - the summer pack ice in the Arctic Ocean and the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps.

What else is new?

But he is optimistic, and even says that in 1,000 years, this generation will be immortalized in music and poetry as the ones who made the commitment and laid the foundation for a bright and optimistic future for the human race. For that opportunity, he says, we should be grateful.

His talk reminds me of the Chinese character for “crisis”: it is actually comprised of two characters: one signifying “danger”, and the other, “opportunity”. We face danger, but we also have an unparalleled opportunity to “do good”.

Gore has also started a three-year, $300M ad campaign on climate change. Here is an article by Brad Knickerbocker from the 9 April 2008 Christian Science Monitor in which some of Gore’s critics opine on his new endeavor.

“There is an old African proverb: ‘If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.’ We have to go far, quickly.” – Al Gore