Water Worries

The Economist recently ran a piece on the Colorado River and the drying of the West.  We Westerners are generally aware of the rising bathtub ring on the reservoirs on the Colorado River as the result of a lengthy drought and a growing population.  But now our water woes are being noticed even by economic editors in London.  The fact that the river was over-allocated in the first place is interesting enough, but The Economist parses the problem into four clean dimensions of the physical, legal, political, and cultural.  The interest angle on the piece is that the problems have reached crises proportions: there's less water than generally acknowledged, and something has to be done.  By looking at the pieces dimension by dimension, solutions start to appear.  Do we really need to water so much grass they ask?

I'd mention to The Economist, if they asked me, that the grass we should be most worried about is not the residential lawns they bring up, but hay.  Some 80% of the water Westerners use is for agriculture, and in the Intermountain West, most of that water goes on hay.  There's where the cultural dimension gets interesting.  Why is the Utah hay farmer so determined to put water on his field for a subsidized $6 per acre foot when Las Vegas and Los Angeles would pay him and the state of Utah several thousands of dollars for the same water, and all the farmer has to do is turn off his sprinkler (taking care of the physical dimension)?

The Tragedy of the Commons

James Fallows of The Atlantic is a favorite writer of mine.  I first noticed him when he came out with his book More Like Us in the 80's regarding the Japan Inc. competitive scare.  Fallows' argument was that to compete with the Japanese globally America should act more like America and not try to be like Japan.  He was spot on and caught my eye as an up and coming public intellectual and superb big picture guy.

So I was a little surprised to see in a recent blog of his that he seemed to not quite understand his own argument about the workings of carbon credits -- until I realized Fallows is on book leave and hosting guest bloggers on his site.  Even though the guest blog, The Howling Wilderness of Carbon Credits, is slightly off tilt in its conclusion, I enjoyed running into the seminal essay there on The Tragedy of the Commons by environmentalist Garrett Hardin from Science in 1968.

As an investment manager in the 80's and 90's, I enjoyed the resurgence of free market policies and the enormous bull market they helped create.  I became a big fan of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," the idea, as Hardin explains, "that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote…the public interest." It's a complex concept stemming from Smith's 1759 work TheTheory of Moral Sentiments.  I was pretty sure back then that the invisible hand could do just about anything better than government could.  But, as Hardin explains, that hand reaches a door it cannot open by itself when it comes to "the tragedy of the commons."

The concept of the "The Tragedy of the Commons" underlies most of the economic and environmental policy regarding public land management.   I'm working on a longer piece for torreyhouse.com  on the subject but wanted to get it introduced in this blog.  Hardin's essay was the intellectual stimulus behind much of the productive work of the early environmental movement and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.  There is still more room for implementation of those ideas today on the Colorado Plateau. More coming up . . .

This Blog's Agenda

I started Torrey House Press (THP) with the goal of leaving more grass on the mountains and water in the streams when I am dead and gone (I hope I'm not in a big hurry!).  Their are plenty of able environmental conservation organizations already in existence working on that same goal.  It seems to me that what they need to get more done is a broader following, and the way to get a broader and more sympathetic following is to tell stories.  There are plenty of good writers out there whose work is flavored and informed by the western landscape they live in.  Our goal at THP is to get the best of that writing to the light of day.  For my writing part I'm going to pontificate on this blog about:

• Water and Western water rights, water economics and water resource management
• Grazing and promotion of the right for a rancher to sell and retire his grazing rights into conservation
• Mining and drilling that does more economical harm than good
• The resource that is the dark night skies of the Colorado Plateau
• The environmental economics of a natural and preserved landscape
• The theme of Old West and New West and particularly what the Old West legislators who predominate in Utah, such as Mike Noel, are doing to make Utahns' lives worse
• Special interest domination of the issues in the West, such as the Cattlemen's Association's lasso around the legislators
• Housing and development and its effect on the Plateau
• Sustainable building and living practices (my son's specialty)
• The activities and notable work of the local environmental agencies
• The rhetoric of the environmentalists and legislators

I also want to share some of what is going on at Torrey House Press including thoughts on:

• The people we are working with and what they are thinking about
• Small press publishing business and trends
• What I've been reading lately
• Transcendence-  one of my pet interests is consciousness and its quantum physics enigma.   I hope to chat a bit about how that enigma fits with the perception of nature espoused by Emerson and Thoreau, and with concepts like Emmanuel Kant's and Robert Persig's a priori knowledge.

I love this stuff.  I hope a few readers pitch in and share their thoughts and comments.