S3E28: There Ain't No Big Faucet: Water Politics with the Great Basin Water Network

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine 0 mile from needles.com. donate or text the word needles to 5355. Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Thank you, Joe Jeffrey, and welcome to another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:00:49 - (Chris Clarke): I'm your host, Chris Clark, and today we have a really interesting interview with Mister Kyle Rorink, who is executive director of the Great Basin Water Network. Great Basin Water Network has been a really important player in bringing environmental sensibilities to the water discussions that are happening in the Great Basin and adjacent parts of the arid southwest. Famously, Great Basin Water Network was crucial in the defeat of a proposal to bring a whole bunch of groundwater from relatively well watered northeastern Nevada down to Las Vegas and forced Las Vegas to take a hard look at how it's going to survive without importing more water from outside.

0:01:34 - (Chris Clarke): Nice little lesson in anti colonialism. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. We cover a lot of ground. But first, before we get to Kyle Rohrink, I wanted to remind you that you make it possible for us to do this podcast. We have expenses that need to be paid, and for the first few months, my former co host and I, back in 2022, we're paying them out of pocket. It has been extremely gratifying to have a couple hundred people who are interested enough in making sure people have access to desert environmental news about North America that they're willing to kick in some money.

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0:02:50 - (Chris Clarke): Now let's talk to Kyle Rohrink of Great Basin water Network about the work that group is doing in the Great Basin and in the Colorado plateau to protect precious water. I would like very much to welcome Kyle Rohrink from the great Basin water network to our virtual studio, where we are going to get an update on some things Colorado river related. Kyle, I'm really glad that you have joined us here, and it's good to see you, Chris.

0:04:01 - (Kyle Roerink): It's my pleasure. And you've been an inspiration for a long time. So it's an honor to be here, as well. As a pleasure.

0:04:08 - (Chris Clarke): Did you catch any of the 45th president's remarks at Rancho Palos Verdes in California, talking about a couple of watersheds over to the left?

0:04:19 - (Kyle Roerink): Yeah, I'll let you explain it.

0:04:21 - (Chris Clarke): Well, I'm not sure I can explain it, so let's just listen to what the former president actually said.

0:04:31 - (45th President (Donald Trump)): So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north, with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down. And they have essentially a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet, and it takes one day to turn it. It's massive. It's as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. And you turn that, and all of that water goes into the aimlessly into the Pacific. And if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles. They wouldn't have to have people not use more than 30 gallons and 32 gallons. They want to do that. Theyre trying to do that.

0:05:10 - (45th President (Donald Trump)): And you have so much water and all those fields that are right now barren, the farmers would have all the water they needed. And you could revert water up into the hills where you have all the dead forests, where the forests are so brittle. Because no places like California. I go to Austria. The head of Austria tells me, you know, we have trees that are much more flammable than what you have in California. We never have forest floods because they maintain their forests.

0:05:36 - (45th President (Donald Trump)): And you have all that water that could be used to as water, what they call water flow, where the land would be damp.

0:05:47 - (Chris Clarke): My question to you is, do you know where this big faucet is? And is there any way that we can get access to it?

0:05:54 - (Kyle Roerink): I've been banned from that big faucet. They just fall in the end. So, yeah, there's a big faucet somewhere that only certain politicians know about. I've tried getting access. It's like being on the Nevada test site. Barbed wire everywhere and people with machine guns. So you get close, they just. We'd be a shoe to what I.

0:06:18 - (Chris Clarke): Think, technically, what he described would actually be a valve rather than a faucet.

0:06:23 - (Kyle Roerink): Floodgates or something like that. I think the point that was interesting was that the 45th president was implying that you could have large scale interbasin transfers of water without consequence, and that there is water available somewhere. And again, it always goes back to availability. And he was focusing on Central Valley related sources, and I just thought, I don't think he understands how the state water project works or the central valley stuff even works, and which way the rivers flow off the mountains. But it goes back to this notion of availability.

0:07:03 - (Kyle Roerink): People think that, yeah, the winter of 2023 was pretty big, but it doesn't last that long in the grand scheme of things. Even if you had reserve storage built out. In the next couple of years, we're going to see the CB's news articles and all the other big news entities posting pictures of empty reservoirs again.

0:07:27 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, well, just gotta tap the Peace river up in British Columbia and just bring it.

0:07:32 - (Kyle Roerink): There won't be any consequence.

0:07:34 - (Chris Clarke): Maybe some grizzly bears will ride on rafts all the way down and repopulate the Sierra.

0:07:40 - (Kyle Roerink): I'd love to see it.

0:07:42 - (Chris Clarke): The question then becomes, if you're on an electric boat on that canal and it starts to sink and you have the choice of being electrocuted or swimming over to where the grizzly is on a raft, which do you do?

0:07:56 - (Kyle Roerink): I'd only be using ores, at least something to hang on to give you a little assurance.

0:08:04 - (Chris Clarke): I'm not sure whether or not that qualifies as gallows humor or not, but.

0:08:08 - (Kyle Roerink): I'll stand on the gallows with you anytime, Chris.

0:08:10 - (Chris Clarke): Hopefully not. So what is on the Great Basin Water Network's agenda in September of 2024?

0:08:20 - (Kyle Roerink): Yeah, what isn't on Great Basin Water Network's agenda? And I think right now, we are dealing with what I believe to be a precedent setting lithium mine near the banks of the Green river, the Colorado River's largest tributary in the town of Green river. Our organization really, the genesis of it began with a proposed bridge between the Colorado river basin and the Great Basin and the Las Vegas pipe line, which would have exported groundwater from eastern Nevada near Great Basin National park, into Lake Mead for Las Vegas sprawl and growth and things like that. And afterwards, the organization started digging in.

0:09:06 - (Kyle Roerink): And once you understand the connections between the two watersheds, you understand the inherent problems that they both face simultaneously. And so in the case of this lithium mine, what's interesting is that it's a proposed DLE project, direct lithium extraction project. This is a technology for lithium extraction that boasts a consumptive water use that is zero or 100% non consumptive. However you want to describe, basically taking.

0:09:42 - (Chris Clarke): The brine, getting the lithium out of it, and then re injecting it into the ground.

0:09:46 - (Kyle Roerink): Correct. This company, it's called Anson Resources, and it has a couple of subsidiaries on the Colorado plateau. And they are proposing to drill 10,000ft deep to extract the brines, extract the lithium and other minerals and then pump it back into the ground into different geologic layers. And from our perspective, the site in Green river, there's a lot of agricultural around, there are residents around, and it's an unproven technology on the banks of the Colorado River's largest tributary.

0:10:23 - (Kyle Roerink): We were in regulatory hearings with the Bureau of Reclamation late last fall and it was so ironic because we were both saying the same things. And I was there with my dear friend John Weissite from living rivers, one of the great Colorado river advocacy NGO's working today. And the bureau was saying the same things that we were. And that was there's a lot of uncertainty about connectivity with existing groundwater supplies in the region and with the river itself. And we know groundwater and surface water in many cases are the same thing. Now these deep brines are, it's fossil water in some respects, but it's either moving somewhere or it is isolated. And then once it's gone, it's gone if it is consumed.

0:11:18 - (Kyle Roerink): I think the most interesting thing to me is this mine is going to set a precedent not just on the Colorado river for mineral extraction, but for elsewhere throughout the great basin, Utah's parts of the Great Basin, Nevada's parts of the great basin. There aren't dle projects anywhere else right now. So for us we got involved because that groundwater precedent, we know there are mine proposals all around, near Great Basin National park.

0:11:48 - (Kyle Roerink): There are other proposals near canyonlands and arches that people I work with really care about, that I, as an american, care about. And again, what's the precedent going to be? So we've been engaged with that for more than a year. And unfortunately, late last week the Utah state engineer approved water rights for that mining operation. And now we're talking with the attorneys about next steps. And I think we know that this isn't going to be the first and last of these, there's going to be more coming down the pike. So we're just very interested in making sure that we get the best precedents, the best standards, because western water law did not really foresee this type of extraction, whatever lawmakers were creating the laws that we currently live by today.

0:12:40 - (Kyle Roerink): So we need to be careful and exacting. And we can only do the green energy transition once. There's no room for error, there's no margin for error. You only do it right once. And that's where we're really coming from on this.

0:12:55 - (Chris Clarke): Yes. So I'm a little confused, which is not unusual. If they are not using water, at least in the net sense, how do water rights come into it?

0:13:09 - (Kyle Roerink): That's an excellent question, because they're extracting these brines. And so the regulators in Utah, water regulators in Utah have to answer a couple questions. Whenever an applicant comes to them requesting an appropriation, they say, is water available? Will an appropriation conflict with existing rights holders? And is an appropriation in the public welfare? In the case of Utah law, and I think there's a belief right now, at least it may change that brine is water, and these brines have been untapped.

0:13:50 - (Kyle Roerink): Now, in the aquifers higher up, 500ft deep, 400ft deep, 100ft deep, there is some water there, not a whole lot of it. There's connectivity with the river, with that water. So what actually is available? One of the cornerstone provisions of western water law is what is actually available to whom and when? And that's why all these battles on the Colorado river are in vain in many cases, because we should just be talking about what is available now.

0:14:22 - (Kyle Roerink): So with these brines, it poses a very novel question about how we think about groundwater in the west and companies, why they're salivating over this is they're saying, oh boy, there's a lot of available water around. And it just so happens to have a very profitable mineral and element in it, being lithium right now, and other things, other elements as well, and minerals. But that's, again, where the precedent that interests me as someone who engages in the water world is how are we going to be thinking about availability?

0:14:59 - (Kyle Roerink): What these companies say is these brides are very deep and they just say there's no connectivity at all because they're so much deeper than the aquifers that are at 400ft, 500ft or a thousand feet. And I think that is what makes this so challenging for all parties, is because what is connectivity? Right? And the challenges of understanding what's going on, 1000ft, 2003ft, 3000ft and beyond, is you could have ten modelers lined up in a room and you get ten different answers.

0:15:41 - (Kyle Roerink): So there's those issues and then there's the issues. As I mentioned earlier, this company in particular wants to re inject into a different layer of the aquifer. So what does it mean to actually be consumptive in addition to what is available? These are novel situations, these are new, these are things that water law didn't foresee, and that's what make them very important. And I think we've just taken a position that it is it's good to be engaged on these things. It's good to be challenging regulators. It's good to be holding regulators accountable to the best standards that we can under the existing law.

0:16:17 - (Chris Clarke): The idea being that if you're re injecting the brine, but it's going into a different aquifer or a different section of the overall aquifer, there's actually an argument to consider that consumption, because you're taking it away from someplace and not putting it back.

0:16:36 - (Kyle Roerink): That's correct. And that's correct.

0:16:38 - (Chris Clarke): The fact that it's not flowing down the Colorado to Yuma to add to their salt load is irrelevant.

0:16:44 - (Kyle Roerink): Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of many issues. I think the issue of connectivity is one, because also there's an old uranium mill at this site, and that aquifer that exists there that goes four or 500ft deep, that's radioactive. The tailings pile had leaked and seeped into the groundwater over the years. So you have radioactive water there. So is it in the public welfare to be drilling deep wells through a radioactive aquifer to access these brines right next to the river in an area where the geology is gaseous?

0:17:26 - (Kyle Roerink): It's gaseous and it's a bit volatile, I guess you could say.

0:17:31 - (Chris Clarke): What do you mean by that?

0:17:33 - (Kyle Roerink): It is high pressure, very high pressure systems, high pressure gases. This is. It's called the paradox formation. And these high pressure gases, methane, is a hallmark of the geology. And so we had said that, hey, there's potential for blowouts here. And sure enough, when the company was drilling its test well, there was what we described as a blowout. They don't describe it as a blowout. I don't know what you the technical word, but water was gushing everywhere and there was major concern about whether or not it would get into the river. It didn't get into the river, but it was a mess.

0:18:14 - (Kyle Roerink): And it proved our point that this is a volatile formation that you're drilling through. I'm always thinking about when companies are coming in, making promises for new appropriations, that standard, is there water available? Will there be conflicts with existing rights holders? Is it in the public welfare? And companies that are coming in with new technologies promising to save the world with their mining solutions?

0:18:40 - (Kyle Roerink): There shouldn't be any free passes given what's the royalty structure going to be to extract the mineral wealth from the state of Utah? These are things that lawmakers are probably going to get figured out by the end of the next session in Utah. But there's uncertainty right now. There's just a lot of uncertainty and were not anti lithium, were not anti renewable energy transition, were just pro law.

0:19:09 - (Kyle Roerink): We like a lot of the elements of the existing law. I think that standard that ive repeated, those three considerations are actually very good in some contexts, especially in the vacuum of western water law. Things get complicated out there in the real world, so we have to hold companies to it until new standards are created. It's a challenge.

0:19:34 - (Chris Clarke): So who owns the land that the drilling would be happening on?

0:19:38 - (Kyle Roerink): The company bought it, and they bought it from folks that are all tied in with local government and Green river. And there's definitely some money making going on there. So a lot of the operation is on private land, which the company did that on purpose because they didn't to be dealing with the BLM and other agencies. Because you do have a DoE legacy management site right there because of the old uranium mill.

0:20:12 - (Kyle Roerink): So it was smart in that context. But you're on their private property and there's a giant old tailings pile covered with rock to meet current DOE standards for remediation and public safety standards. But the aquifer is still contaminated, but it's right there. It's close to the river. And that's just a legacy of the way we did things 75, 80, 90 years ago. So it's complicated. But again, for me, what's the greatest interest is we're starting here in Green river, but then there are proposals for the severe desert, and there's lithium claims being filed everywhere. I. Obviously on the Great Salt Lake, this is going to happen now under Utah law, the Great Salt Lake has its own bubble for regulating mineral development there, but it's going to be happening everywhere. There's also a proposal near dead Horse State park, canyonlands and arches that there's been filings for water rights. There has been filings with the federal government for mineral exploration.

0:21:20 - (Kyle Roerink): So it's coming and we're tracking it because I think nobody cares about groundwater as much as we do at the great Basin water network. And Nevada and Utah are our territories. We're just. We're going to stay on it. And happy to answer any questions from. From your listeners. They can reach out to us and we'll just let them know we're going to do the best that we can. If only we had as much money as everybody else.

0:21:47 - (Chris Clarke): That's. That's a problem. There's a whole lot of money that you can make in destroying the desert, but not too much in saving it.

0:21:54 - (Kyle Roerink): And especially in the west desert of Utah, near the Nevada border. These are the places that are often thought of as wastelands. These are the places where past administrations, the Carter administration, wanted to put whole missile transportation systems. And this is where the solar plan goes so hard. In the west desert and in eastern Nevada. You look at the folks on the coast and they may not think much about these places, but this is where the biodiversity is.

0:22:28 - (Kyle Roerink): This is where the people are. This is where families are. This is where the traditional cultural knowledge is, where a lot of indigenous communities. And we shouldn't forsake that. So then everybody can have a little less guilt whenever they turn on their big screen tvs or charge their electric cars. It's difficult.

0:22:51 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, sort of. A side note, you definitely brought back some memories with a mention of Carter and the Amex missile program in the west desert. I actually got arrested at the White House in 1981 protesting the MX missile program.

0:23:04 - (Kyle Roerink): So, Chris, that's why we're of the same hill. So many of my board members were fighting the MX on the ground and I. They are kind of quote unquote forbearers. We're doing it. And so we're all just, you know, we're just the next generation.

0:23:19 - (Chris Clarke): I am.

0:23:20 - (Kyle Roerink): And folks like Patrick Donnelly and I in Nevada and Utah have looked to the MX crew and gotten a lot of inspiration from them, especially about how we collaborate. And I think what makes our fights all over the west interesting, at least from the great Basin water Network's perspective, is we've been able to work with uncanny allies. And Green river, it's Melon farmers that we've been working with. And for your listeners, if they've never had a green river melon around this time of the year, you're in for a treat.

0:23:53 - (Kyle Roerink): But in stopping the Vegas pipeline, it was farmers and ranchers. And the Cedar City fight, same thing. And you know how it works. And the Max missile fight really, really did that in a special way. I think, like post federal lands Policy and Management act, that post Flitma era and push that really bolstered the environmental movement. After folks like David Brower and after the dam fights of the late fifties and early sixties, I think, of the white led environmental movement.

0:24:30 - (Kyle Roerink): The MX was a major flashpoint in the development of modern environmentalism. But one again, that doesn't get the attention that it deserves today, in my humble opinion. But I just. I love a lot of people who were out there, and there were a lot of native people out there too, in the bombing ranges, the expansion of bombing ranges in Nevada over the years, there were a lot of native people on the front lines, and same with Yucca Mountain. But I think all these movements coming together, it's really important to talk about that history and think about where we.

0:25:06 - (Chris Clarke): Are today, what's going on with new dams and diversion projects in the Colorado watershed these days.

0:25:14 - (Kyle Roerink): I've been working with some really cool students from UC Berkeley climate Futures lab, and we had made a spreadsheet with just done a lot of tracking. Guys like Gary Wachner had been, had done a pretty good job of just giving us an understanding of certain proposals that were out there. And so we've been able to do a lot of research, get some coordinates, and do a lot of mapping, do some gis mapping.

0:25:45 - (Kyle Roerink): And so we got like a grand total of between 35 and 40 proposed new dam and diversion projects in the upper basin and the upper Colorado river basin, totaling more than a million acre feet of new dams and diversions. Does anyone in their right mind actually think there's a spare million plus acre feet in the Colorado river system right now? You'd have to be crazy to believe that. And so they're all, I'm not saying every project will happen.

0:26:21 - (Kyle Roerink): I'm not saying half of them will. But I'm saying the desire is there by people to do it. And these projects are in varying degrees of permitting. Some are sitting on a shelf, some are moving forward. Some have gotten the green light and haven't been constructed yet. Some have been installed by litigation. Some are like the Lake Powell pipeline.

0:26:43 - (Chris Clarke): Side note here. I knew that we had discussed the Lake Powell pipeline on this podcast at some point, and I thought I would just lift a description of what that actually is. And it turns out it was from the fourth episode of our first season came out in the spring of 2022. And it was, in fact, Kyle that we were talking to. So here's what Kyle said about the Lake Powell pipeline in our fourth ever episode.

0:27:12 - (Kyle Roerink): Lake Powell Pipeline is a bonkers idea where folks in southern Utah want to put a new straw in Lake Powell to serve Washington county in southwestern Utah, and Kane county as well, would inevitably be a part of it. That project is essentially designed to serve St. George, the worst water wasting community in the western US. And everybody there has a green lawn, there's a number of golf courses, and they wanted to take out 28 billion gallons of water a year from the Colorado river.

0:27:49 - (Kyle Roerink): There was a federal and environmental review that came out in the summer of 2020, and there still hasn't been a record of decision or a supplemental environmental review released on that because the opposition to it was so overwhelming. Nevada and California and Arizona were commenting. When you see all the other Colorado river states writing letters and extensive comments about the dangers of that project, that was an eye opener. And then I think the past couple of winters have not helped.

0:28:25 - (Kyle Roerink): As we say, our victories are temporary, theirs are permanent. No project is ever dead. And that's just something we got to keep an eye on. When you look at a community like St. George, where everybody's got a green line, they're using more than 300 gallons per capita per day, and they want to become a little metropolis, something's gotta give. You can't have everything you want. You gotta take a hard look in the mirror.

0:28:55 - (Chris Clarke): Back to 2024.

0:28:57 - (Kyle Roerink): Some projects we haven't even begun to add in there yet. The proposed new diversions for the Navajo Nation, which I've always said, when you and I, when we stood on the Hoover Dam a few summers ago and the most heightened levels of those recent drought years, I've always believed that the tribes should get access to their senior water rights. A lot of people hate the priority doctrine, but if we actually lived by it, it would be a more just world.

0:29:29 - (Kyle Roerink): But we've had regulators disregard it so many times to favor special interests that we are in the situation that we're in, where there's an imbalance of paper versus wet water. And so why am I interested in tracking all these dam and diversion proposals in the upper basin? Is what does that mean for Las Vegas that tried to import water from eastern Nevada because they said the Colorado river was running dry?

0:30:00 - (Kyle Roerink): What does that mean for the cap in Phoenix? What does that mean for met in Los Angeles? And what does that mean for farmers in imperial Valley? And what does that mean for all the lower base and tribes who are just trying to get a grip on things? Whether you're the crit, the Colorado river indian tribes, or whether you're the Kachan, you have different needs and uses and historical contexts of all that, economic contexts.

0:30:27 - (Kyle Roerink): But again, we have entities that hold water on paper and say, oh, we need this. This is ours. We have a right to this, and we need to educate people on that. So we're building some of these things because. Because I don't think the public at large understands what's even being proposed on top of what is happening before our very eyes. So it's scary.

0:30:54 - (Chris Clarke): I'm having trouble imagining, even if the water was arguably there, that California, Nevada, Arizona wouldn't sue the daylights out of Wyoming for trying to withhold even a couple hundred thousand acre feet.

0:31:10 - (Kyle Roerink): We're in a situation where it's going to be death by a thousand paper cuts to some extent unless you have a Lake Powell pipeline style project actually make it through the system. But I think it's more of a death by a thousand paper cuts. And the niche regulatory system is in the upper basin. It's different than in the lower basin. We don't have a federal watermaster in the upper Basin like we do in the lower basin, which was a result of the 1963 decision in Arizona versus California, the Supreme Court's decision.

0:31:42 - (Kyle Roerink): So you still have state engineers really making all the decisions and figuring out all the contracts, getting into that nitty gritty in the upper basin states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. And so it's a lot different than what we have to deal with in Nevada, Arizona, in California, where it's a lot easier to have maybe some smaller agricultural institution file something with the Natural Resource Conservation Service out of USDA for a small damn five, 6000 acre feet and have it not get a whole lot of attention than it is for the Lake Powell pipeline or even the green river block exchange when that was first moving. So it's a lot harder to track, it's a lot harder to follow. And that's why I wanted to help build a tool that should soon be public for public consumption just to see where things are and what they mean.

0:32:47 - (Kyle Roerink): We have a paper water problem on the Colorado river and it starts with it was over allocated from the beginning, 17, 18 million acre feet on paper. 20th century averages were just over 14 million acre feet. In the 21st century, we've lost about 2 million acre feet of flows from that 20th century average. The best scientists say we could lose another 2 million acre feet in the coming decades. So worst is yet to come.

0:33:19 - (Kyle Roerink): So how are we preparing? And right now, as many of your listeners know, we are going through ongoing negotiations about how to manage the nation's two largest reservoirs in Lakesmeade and Powell. And I think we should really be talking about how are we only going to manage one of those in the future. Instead, we're playing games with ourselves about we can keep these two and pretend like it's 1983.

0:33:53 - (Chris Clarke): Are you talking about the proposals to drain Lake Powell and store the water in Mead?

0:33:59 - (Kyle Roerink): Yeah, absolutely. The reconsultation of the interim guidelines is likely just to focus on pal and Mead. There are some greater watershed discussions about what could be included. We're looking forward to seeing a draft eis on that. But I think in the long term you're only likely going to be able to keep one of those puppies full. And you have to choose Lake Mead ten times out of ten over bal for the obvious reasons.

0:34:29 - (Kyle Roerink): That's the older reservoir in terms of priority status, getting water downstream to Arizona in California, the largest communities down there. It's just the only thing that makes sense. And then you add in, because Glen Canyon Dam was designed a lot differently than Hoover Dam, you have a lot of inherent infrastructure problems for water delivery downstream through the Grand Canyon and low flow scenarios.

0:35:01 - (Kyle Roerink): And so we have a lot to swallow, a lot to think about there, but foremost of which should be that there's going to be less water coming down the system in coming years if we're to believe the nation's best scientists.

0:35:16 - (Chris Clarke): Don't go away. We'll be right back. You're listening to 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast. You can help the desert by picking up those dang mylar balloons. Kyle Rorink, we had you on in 2022, and I think that's really the last time we discussed prognosis for the Colorado. What's happened in the last couple of years?

0:36:37 - (Kyle Roerink): I'll say this, everybody raved and ran raved about the winter of 2023 and 24 was pretty good, but 2024 was still below the 21st century average in terms of runoff, 2023 was obviously above average, but it wasn't like a 1983 or a couple of those years in the nineties. And again, combined storage right now is below 40%. Between pal and meadow, they're both below 40% full. How are things doing? We're likely headed into La Nina patterns, which means drier winters.

0:37:21 - (Kyle Roerink): It's hard to tell, and I'm no meteorologist, but it's reasonable to expect dry times to be coming back. So our large reservoirs aren't even 40% full, let alone 50% full. It's going to be a challenge to keep them full, so there's going to have to be sacrifices. And I don't necessarily know what the best things are to be on the chopping block, except a lot of this stuff at Lake Powell. Glen Canyon Dam should have never been built.

0:37:53 - (Kyle Roerink): But it's a sacred cow for the bureau, and they take great pride in that dam. But we've already seen damage to it from the recent drought years. We made a lot of news earlier this year that there were impacts from cavitation, which is this force of turbine spinning and air pockets building up in these tubes that spit out the water. Because it just, when you have lower flows, you have more opportunity for air to get in there. And that's damaging to the system itself. We know in 83 that the spillways were greatly damaged at Glen Canyon. And so those are two opposite situations. During flood scenarios, the dam doesn't work properly.

0:38:39 - (Kyle Roerink): During really dry scenarios, the dam doesn't work properly. So maybe Mother Nature is telling us something. I think folks like John Weissite with living rivers, the Glen Canyon Institute, have done a lot of work over the years. Mike DeHoff with the Returning Rapids project, have been educating all of us about what happens, what the world could look like without the dam. And my interests there go back to. I always want to make sure that Las Vegas is getting its water supply and the people in cities are getting their water supplies and in rural communities in the lower basin and the Grand Canyon.

0:39:16 - (Kyle Roerink): But that piece of infrastructure poses an impediment for us in the long term.

0:39:22 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's interesting to see all of the different, I don't want to say subsidiary issues, because they're arguably quite important for the people. They have to deal with them. The degree to which all these sort of unexpected aspects of our life in the desert rely on assumptions about the Colorado. The Superintendent of Lake Mead NRA National Recreation Area is having to contend with people driving from the boat launches down to where the water actually is and getting stuck, causing resource damage, both natural and cultural resources, and having to do search and rescue on these folks to get their Toyota tundra stuck up to the floorboards in old mud, just because the infrastructure didn't anticipate the reservoir ever being that low. And it's just.

0:40:11 - (Chris Clarke): It's interesting just to look at all the different things that we rely on, our assumptions about the Colorado for.

0:40:21 - (Kyle Roerink): If I had time, I would drive around Glen Canyon NRA and Meade NRA and do a stranded asset tour because we'd have millions and millions of dollars worth of infrastructure that's just completely useless and will be completely useless for years to come because of our either arrogance, ignorance, naivete, whatever you want to call it. And driving around Lake Mead NRA with former superintendent Alan O'Neill is you just start doing back of the napkin math on how much money that we spent over the years to try and put band aids over the gunshot wound of making it seem like everything's normal.

0:41:09 - (Kyle Roerink): New boat ramp here, new boat ramp there, new campsites here, new campsites there. And the river just keeps telling us, you're just going to have to keep going lower and lower. And it's just all the signs are there. All the signs are there. I think what's interesting about this past winter is. We had a well above average snowpack. That was one in the. But then we get that below average runoff, sublimation, soil moisture deficits, the albedo effect. We have more dust on snow, so it's melting faster.

0:41:45 - (Kyle Roerink): Earlier runoffs, greater evaporation. All these problems are just, they're becoming more and more apparent. So we'll live with it. All we can do is educate people, Chris, and people can listen to us or not. Mother Nature is the best teacher.

0:42:05 - (Chris Clarke): That's actually almost a segue into what I was going to ask you to tie this up, which is what brings you optimism or hope as you contend with all this, because you've set yourself and your organization on a chaotic quest here to educate people about the Colorado and to come up with some way to live with a drier Colorado river basin. And that's a lot of bad news there.

0:42:30 - (Kyle Roerink): Yeah, it is. And we're the great Basin water Network. And that's the thing is that I want, we need to, we're doing the same thing in the great basin. And there's all these problems around here where places are going to get bulldozed over for solar and there's going to be resource arms on a watershed scale with all that considered on a cultural scale. But what gives me hope is the people with whom we work in both watersheds.

0:42:59 - (Kyle Roerink): And that's what it's all about is the people who are willing to do the work, who are willing to sacrifice because of all the things we cherish and hold dear for all the things that can't speak, that we all love. And it's people like you and your listeners and my board members and everyone who's stood out in the desert with me and others and folks like Delane and Rick spillsberry fighting to protect their sacred sites and tribal leaders all throughout the west who have been generous enough with their time to help us better understand their history, their pre colonial history.

0:43:39 - (Kyle Roerink): I'm just indebted to so many people, and knowledge is what gives me hope. It's just so easy to be cynical and all we can do is just hope that the knowledge gets to some and we go on from there.

0:43:53 - (Chris Clarke): Is there anything I neglected to ask you that I should have asked you?

0:43:59 - (Kyle Roerink): Oh, gosh. I think the question for the future is how do we adapt collectively? And that's going to be our challenge, how we each as individuals put the onus on ourselves to adapt. And that's just not saying, okay, I'm not going to water my lawn or something, but how do we collectively transcend. That's the challenge. It's the individual versus the collective. And how do we become more of a collective again? That's what I'm interested in trying to figure out.

0:44:31 - (Kyle Roerink): Need to get better at doing that. But I'm happy to work with anyone and we'll figure it out. Chris, that's just take time.

0:44:39 - (Chris Clarke): I think that's as good a closing line as any. Kyle roaring from Great Basin Water Network, thanks so much for joining us at 90 miles from needles.

0:44:47 - (Kyle Roerink): Thank you, Chris.

0:45:34 - (Chris Clarke): And that wraps up another episode of 90 miles from the Desert Protection podcast. I would like to thank Kyle Rohrink of Great Basin Water Network for joining us and talking to us about some of the work that his group has been involved in lately. Also want to thank Joe Jeffery, our voiceover announcer, and Martine Mancha, our podcast artist. We do not have any new donors to thank this time around. You can help us fix that by going to 90 milesfromneedles.com

0:46:08 - (Chris Clarke): donate and picking from one of the many options there, affordable and otherwise. Our theme song, moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music is via envato.com. we had a spate of really nice weather in the desert for about a week. It has warmed up again. I told myself I was going to take myself for a hike this week, kind of arrange my tasks so that I had a day that was free. And I might still do that. But I got to say, if it's going to be above triple digits, I might try and find a place that's entirely out of the sun to go hiking, shopping, mall, something like that.

0:46:57 - (Chris Clarke): At any rate, we will be back next week with yet another episode. And in the meantime, why not check out desertnews? Dot substack.com comes out every Monday, more or less, and it's a compendium of all the news that I could find from various sources, mainstream and otherwise, about environmental issues in our wonderful deserts in North America. In the meantime, stay well. The desert needs you, and I will see you at the next watering hole.

0:47:33 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now., 90 miles from needles, is a production of the desert advocacy media network.

0:50:02 - (Singer:): So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down, and they have essentially a very large fossil. And you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It's massive. It's as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. And you turn that and all of that water goes into the aimlessly, into the Pacific. And if they turn it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles. They wouldn't have to have people not use more than 30 gallons and 32 gallons. They want to do that, you know, they're trying to do that. And you have so much water in all these fields that right now, Baron, the farmers would have all the water they needed. You could revert water up into the hills, where you have all the dead forests, where the forests are so brittle because. No, no places like California. I go to Austria. The head of Austria tells me, no, we have trees that are much more flammable than what you have in California. We never have forest fires because they maintain their forests, and you have all that water that could be used to as water, what they call water flow. We're the war. War. You know, where the land would be down. We never have forest fires because they maintain their forests. And you have all that water that could be used to as water. What they call water flow. Where the war. War. You know, where the land would be down.