- [David] A majority of the Southwest United States is desert.

Water is scarce and found mostly in a few rivers and streams.

But they are becoming exhausted.

A few people here and there are working on ways to confront this slow disappearance of our water.

- [Amy] I think there's a really important conversation to have about how we use water.

- [David] Their work is vital to every Southwesterner.

(soothing music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

(soothing music) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(soothing music) (upbeat music) (acoustic guitar music) - 300 years ago, missionaries from Spain founded missions like this because there was plenty of water in streams that flowed all year round, agriculture unlimited.

The streams flowed 100 miles to the north.

Now, with a huge population and an industrialized world, more and more demands are being made on that water.

And things have changed, changed drastically.

(somber guitar music) If there is any one indicator of the water situation in the Southwest, it's Lake Mead.

Which is a reservoir behind the largest dam in the Southwest, Hoover Dam.

As I speak, the level has dropped 140 feet.

And that massive bathtub ring, which is a result of mineralization from the water, shows the straits that the Southwest is facing, in terms of water shortage.

That degree of drop threatens the delivery of water all over the Southwest, to Mexico as well.

The drop is so dramatic that the marinas along Lake Mead have been moved, most of them.

Las Vegas has had to spend $1.5 billion lowering its intake tube to provide water for the residents of Las Vegas.

The bathtub ring signifies that there are more people using more water, that there has been a drought going on that has now extended more than 20 years, and water is just not available to the dam.

The third thing is that warmer temperatures are making for more evaporation, meaning that less water is available because more is being lost to the atmosphere.

Put those three things together, and you have a clear picture of the challenges that the Southwest of the United States faces in its water future.

(somber music) If Las Vegas is dependent on the water of Lake Mead for its survival, Tucson, Arizona is depending on ground water or imported water for its survival.

One of the symptoms that shows how desperate things can be is the depth of the rivers that used to have water but are now just dry watercourses.

They are a symbol of the challenge that water users, consumers and planners have to meet.

(thunder booms) (mellow electronic music) (rain spattering) - [Ty] We're in a very flashy river system.

And we don't know when we're gonna need data.

But we need to be measuring this data all the time.

So we're ready when these important events happen.

And even more important, we need to be funding measurement that happens over the long term, so that we can see changes.

- If there is a flood that reaches anywhere in here, something kicks on and we will get information from that.

- Yeah, there are different types of measurements.

One really interesting one here has an air hose inside, and it's bubbling air, and as the water level rises above the bottom of that tube, it's harder and harder to push out the air, and they can determine how deep the water is without having to send somebody out here, where it is dangerous to do so.

It's a big realization these days, that these storm events are things to be managed and things to be used.

But at the time, I think the big concern was preventing flood damage.

There's always this balance with these very flashy rivers.

A lot of energy.

- At the end of 1983, the level of the water was above where we are now walking.

- Well, the Santa Cruz is a dramatic example.

It can happen to many rivers in desert environments.

They have multiple stresses.

Either the water table is lowered by pumping.

(water splashing) Which means that more water is lost into the riverbed as it flows.

Water might be taken directly out of the stream.

Or again, water might be captured that would have reached the river and fed the river, and it's captured and used for something else.

So this is a dramatic example, because it's a dry riverbed for most of the time.

But what we might not realize is we might look at a river that's flowing perennially, and those same impacts are just reducing the amount of flow or reducing the number of days that it's flowing, or reducing the areas that see perennial and sustaining flow.

So I think the Santa Cruz in many ways is a nice illustrative example of how bad things can get if we don't manage the balance of use of water.

So you can think about water being taken out like a withdrawal from your bank account.

But you can also think that water that never makes it to the river is a reduction in your income.

Each of those will have a balance on your bottom line.

The flow that we see in any river is a reflection of that bottom line.

It's the balance between income and expenses.

And often we think about the expenses.

We think about reducing how much water is taken out of the river.

But it's much more subtle to think about how we're influencing how much water ever reaches the river in the first place.

Tucson Water in particular has done some fantastic things with managing water supplies for the future.

Ground water level in the central Tucson area had dropped to 300 feet or more, whereas the Rillito River used to run perennially, that drop in the water table had increased infiltration, and it caused it to be a highly ephemeral stream.

So they took active measures to do what they call a CAVSARP and SAVSARP programs.

These are artificial recharge programs where they take Colorado River water, infiltrate it, blend it, and start using that water.

So they're replacing a lot of the extraction that they're doing in Central Tucson, and using a lot of that water.

So we're actually seeing significant rebound of the groundwater tables in Central Tucson area.

So in a sense our local bank account is actually really increasing quite a bit.

- You know, it's a long way from the streambed up to the top of the soil cement, which was put in about 35 years ago.

But we have to think that at the bottom here, and up to the top is probably a good 15 to 20 feet, the top is where the Santa Cruz was 150 years ago.

And erosion has taken that much of the river down, exposed the roots of the trees, dried up.

What was up above and might be taken care of by the river will never have that happen again.

- Flood activity is part of it, but plants have also evolved over many millions of years to find water in these desert environments.

So if you look here, you have this impervious surface.

Where if there is any rainfall, it's not gonna get into the ground there.

It will come down to this first permeable area and start to infiltrate, and the plants' roots are sitting right there waiting to take it in.

- [David] It's sort of like the edge of a highway.

The grass is often greener.

- [Ty] Very much.

(somber piano music) - [David] Traditionally, farming and mining were the big water users in the Southwest.

- [Ty] I think the goal is in managing water sustainably.

It's to build on this idea that I think most ranchers and farmers already have.

That they are part of this environment.

So the more that we take ranches and say, you're a separate block, and we're gonna count how much water you put on your land, and that's the end of the story, that water is all used, the more we force them to be separated from that environment.

So if we can think of working with ranchers and farmers to have the idea that water might come out of the system, and if they apply it in a wise way, it might, some of it, come back into the system.

And help them to manage their practices in a way that is holistic, it's thinking about the whole cycle of water through that system, and how can they use every drop that they'll use consumptively for the best effect, and with the least impact on the environment.

I think that's the ultimate goal.

(somber piano music) - One of the ironies about people living in the desert is that on the one hand, people remove water from the desert, and cause streams to dry up.

At the same time, people like you and me bring water back to the desert because in reality, we only rent water.

We buy it and then we return it through our sewer systems as treated sewage.

And this gorgeous stretch of the Santa Cruz River is here thanks to people.

In spite of people.

- So the majority of water in this stretch of the river right now is treated effluent.

Which is water that comes into town from the Colorado river, or is pumped from groundwater.

It's delivered to the residents of the city, who use it in their homes and on their landscaping.

It goes back into the sewage system, where it's treated in a treatment plant, and discharged into the river.

In this somewhat of a circular way of being, this river is the signature of the people who live around it.

As soon as the treated effluent and any type of storm water was released into this river, all of the seeds and all of the life that was buried in the soil became alive.

Sprung to life, and we see the resulting riparian corridor.

This portion of the river with the riparian canopy is extremely resilient to flood events and other climactic events.

Riparian areas, by their very nature, are in a relationship to floods.

So cottonwood seeds, for example, will drop every season.

They nest into the soil, and they're just waiting for a flood to come through, wet the soil, and carry them downstream.

So it's almost equally accurate to say that a riparian area is in a relationship with climactic events, in addition to being resilient.

- 25 or 30 years ago, I believe I remember there being a dry Santa Cruz River here.

And thanks to sewage generated by local people, we now have this water.

But I also hear bird sounds.

That's gotta be quite a draw.

- There's a really remarkable artistic value to this landscape.

Which is that there are green ribbons of riparian area and rivers that run north-south across the US-Mexico border.

From the deserts of Mexico to the deserts of the Southwest.

It really is the veins of life through this desert landscape.

It brings birds up from the tropical areas to fly north.

And birds in the cold northern areas to fly south.

And so it's not uncommon in these riparian areas to hear the sounds of birds which are not residence birds.

(birds chirping) If sewage continues to flow in this river over the course of say the next 50 years, I would imagine that this portion of the river would look largely the same.

It would still have a riparian habitat.

Mostly the same species.

The height and age of the trees would be different, but the character of the area would remain the same, so long as there's water flowing through the stream.

There's a lot of conversations about how to conserve water.

But I think there's a really important conversation to have about how we use water.

And how we interact with water, and what our relationship is to water.

And as it becomes drier and hotter in the area, understanding that essential relationship of how we use water in our homes, on our landscapes, in our lives, walking next to, for farmers and ranchers, how ranchers and farmers use water on their land to grow food, which feeds into the local economy.

All of these things about our relationship to water become ever more important as the projections for the climate project hotter and drier times.

(soothing music) - [David] Tucson has been overdrawing its water bank account for more than 100 years.

Something had to be done.

Water interests in the mid-20th century came up with the idea to reroute the Colorado River.

And direct its water to Phoenix and Tucson for their benefit.

- And what we're doing here is we're recharging our allotment of Colorado River water.

It comes from Lake Havasu, approximately 315 miles here to SAVSARP.

This is the Southern Avra Valley Storage and Recovery Project.

It's one basin out of 20, on two separate projects here in Avra Valley and Tucson, Arizona.

We're recharging 144,191 acre feet of Colorado River water that's been allocated to Tucson back in the 1940s actually.

And the Central Arizona Project is the canal that brings it to us.

And we recharge it out here in these dirt basins.

The water that Tucson originally used for decades was groundwater.

We did have some surface water in the Santa Cruz, but after they brought in cattle and they brought in pumps, all that disappeared.

We had a lot of groundwater, and for decades, that's what we supported Tucson on was groundwater.

However, we were having extreme draw down of the aquifer.

We had depleted the aquifer so much that water levels in the central part of Tucson dropped from 20 feet all the way down to beyond 200 feet.

We had two problems associated with this.

One was subsidence, where the ground can actually shrink because you're pulling the water out.

And the weight of the material on the ground compresses the pores.

The other thing was we realized that we could not continue pumping the groundwater forever before it would be gone.

Avra Valley is a really unique place.

It's fairly close pumping-wise to Tucson.

When they built the canal, luckily the canal went between us and Tucson, and so we were able to take advantage of being so close to Tucson, having this really clean aquifer with about 1,000 feet of alluvian fill, which is sands and silts and gravels, and so it was the perfect place to recharge and store water for long term.

'Cause the evaporation rate say in June is a little over 11% on these type of basins.

The infiltration rate, the rate at which the water is going into the ground, is much higher than that.

Our lowest basins are operating maybe at one foot a day.

And some of our better ones, like the one behind me, can get up to two and a half feet a day or more.

So when you're putting in two and a half feet a day, but you're only losing 11 inches out of the month, you're really not losing a lot of water.

- The cities and farms of the Southwest have benefited from the arrival of the Colorado River.

Downstream users in the Colorado have not fared so well.

All across the country, small towns that aren't located near cities are having a hard time of it.

Water is harder and harder to get, rains are fewer and fewer.

In many towns, the mines nearby have closed down.

Even harder hit has been ranching.

The cost of beef hasn't nearly kept up with the cost of living.

(cow moos) The price that the rancher has to pay for raising the cows has gone way up, and the income has stayed the same or dropped.

So it's a tough place to make a living.

When you add to that the ongoing drought that the Southwest has experienced, you find a situation that's made it almost impossible for small farmers, for rural people to survive the way they used to.

Some people are trying to make a difference.

- Double Check Ranch as a business proposition is trying to sell not only the product but the idea that you can raise food without degrading the environment.

There's a tendency to simply use what is produced on the land itself mostly in the way of forage as a resource to be exploited to the fullest in order to transfer to the most cash return.

Where our philosophy is very different.

Our belief from the very beginning is that our long term success depends on the long term stability of that same forage resource.

What we're doing is trying to get rid of the idea of pens except for handling facilities, and the pastures are being used as vegetation production to help stabilize the land, that the animals that we bring in are able to use to help pay the cost of doing that.

In this case, we're watching the San Pedro River drainage drying up.

When we were last here, till about, oh, eight or 10 years ago, in this region, the San Pedro River had never dried up.

It's dry right now.

In fact, I was just talking to the manager here, and the bobcats and the quail are all coming down here with coyotes and drinking out of the leaks from the irrigation pumps, because the river's gone completely dry.

Grasses are sort of the focus of grazing.

The way human beings tend to think of it, grasses have been hardly any longer than human beings have.

They are a particular type of plant that evolved as the earth dried out and became colder to withstand tough, dry, extreme conditions, and mammals evolved at the same time to take advantage of that and each helps the other.

So we use our livestock here to manage the grasses particularly, the other vegetation also secondarily, in order to make both as healthy as possible.

We started out at the beginning of the year with a plan that goes in advance for an entire year, projecting the growth and productivity of the vegetation, and the entire plan is predicated on only using the vegetation to the point where it is not damaged by grazing.

And so the whole plan is built around recovery time from grazing rather than grazing time.

If you look at the way herd animals in the wild behave, you'll get a much closer idea of what we're doing here.

What is unnatural is taking them and confining them the way we tend to do in commercial agriculture now.

It is looking really good right now from here, I mean, you can stroll out across it, and you're gonna see a lot of patchiness, because that just tends to be the nature of it.

If you, looking into the refrigerator, what you want everyday is different.

Yesterday, they decided this is what they wanted.

Now I couldn't tell you why.

Because we don't understand, that's exactly right.

There's some beautiful lush green grass 10 feet away.

They didn't touch it.

Right, you tell me why they made this choice.

I don't know.

Commercial, industrial, they're looking to get as much grain as cheaply and quickly as possible.

Here we're looking at a much less intensive kind of an operation.

I takes almost a year longer for us to finish an animal than it does in a feedlot.

But well, okay, there's a cost to that.

But what you're getting is a completely different type of metabolism.

Components of natural beef are very different from those of grain-fed, commercially raised beef.

This time of year, you'd like to be able to just dump water on the whole place.

That doesn't make sense anyway.

So what we try to do is phase it, so the growth and the irrigation is moving ahead of where the feeders have to be in a continual rotation.

And that still is predicated on the amount of grazing time.

- [David] In terms of water consumption, which is more efficient, the grasses here, or the alfalfa that used to be here?

- There's no question, alfalfa uses seven or eight acre feet a year, depending on the variety.

Grasses, we're down to about one and a half or two.

And that may change, it depends a little bit on what we're trying to encourage in the mix, but we're not even looking to have alfalfa in the mix.

What we're looking for in the longer term here is solid, perennial, native grass stands.

Because they're already adapted to this climate.

This is where they evolved.

This is where they are best suited and able to sustain themselves.

And they have a much wider tolerance for stress than most of our crops do, including alfalfa.

There is nothing complicated about any of these concepts, and they are workable, there might be changes in details.

But certainly workable anywhere in the world.

- More breaking news coming in.

This time happening much closer to home.

The water levels at Lake Mead are now at historic lows.

- And the fight to conserve water keeps growing.

In fact, according to new research from NASA, 35 years from now, if the current pace of climate change continues, the Southwest as we know it will experience.

- Scientists estimate that in the last century, 90% of all the stream-side habitats in the Southwest have disappeared.

That little that remains has become a truly vital resource.

Not just for people who live there, but for everyone in the Southwest.

The fact is that droughts are getting worse, the climate is getting warmer, and there are more and more of us to use that water that's left.

The challenge is to find people who are willing to take bold steps and conserve and save both the water and the resources that it supports forever into the future.

When Spaniards arrived in the 16th century to the Rio Grande, they found dozens of pueblos of Indians living around the Rio Grande.

Those people learned to live with what the water could give them, raise their crops, and develop their own religions.

The arrival of Spaniards changed all that.

And the arrival of people from Northern Europe changed it even more.

So today, we have an unusual mixture, which sets New Mexico off from any other state in the union.

(inspiring music) (soothing music) - [Announcer] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

(soothing music) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was also provided by the Guilford Fund.

(soothing music) Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order, call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

Please be sure to visit us at intheamericas.com or intheamericas.org.

(bright music)