Gary Wockner, Riverkeeper, discusses water rights and agency capture in the Western United States with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this episode. RFK Jr discusses family rafting trips on the Colorado River and a history of the Western United States. For more info on Poudre Waterkeeper and Gary Wockner visit: https://www.savethepoudre.org/about-us/
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey everybody, I have one of my favorite people on the podcast today, my friend Gary Wachner from Colorado, who is an old colleague of mine from Waterkeeper Alliance, and he is the Poudre Waterkeeper in Colorado, | |
| but he all Thank | |
| you, Bobby. | |
| I appreciate that introduction. | |
| You know, I've had some good mentors in my life, including you, I might add. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| That's very, very high praise. | |
| So, you know, I wanted you to come on just to talk about what's happening with the Colorado River. | |
| Colorado River water, millions and millions of people drink that in the western states. | |
| The Colorado River is now in crisis. | |
| It's drying up as you The IMAX film with Wade Davis in 2008 about the Colorado River. | |
| And we took dories down the river. | |
| It was really an amazing trip. | |
| It's been seen by 25 million people. | |
| But it was a contrast to me because I ran the river I think the first time in 1964 with my dad. | |
| And at that time they were just completing I think the Glen Canyon Dam. | |
| And so the river was still a wild river. | |
| It hadn't become a plumbing fixture yet. | |
| And the water was, it was warm. | |
| It was dirty, which is how it was supposed to be. | |
| There were seven species of native fish that were endemic that have all virtually disappeared. | |
| There were wide, sandy beaches where you could camp almost anywhere. | |
| And that also has dramatically changed. | |
| And the river was full of water. | |
| Nobody was worrying about, you know, the Colorado River drying up. | |
| The Colorado, as you know, is supposed to empty out into the Sea of Cortez between California and the mainland of Mexico. | |
| And there are many, many animals, unique, beautiful animals like the tiny dolphin, the pekita, that rely on that fresh water flow. | |
| And the problem is the Colorado now dries up in the desert and never reaches the ocean. | |
| And there is a huge human problem too, is that there's so many of us who rely for agriculture and our water and our health on those waterways. | |
| So this was a longer introduction than I wanted to give, but take it away. | |
| Let's talk to me about what's happening to the Colorado. | |
| Yeah, well, you certainly told part of the story there when Glen Canyon Dam started filling and And so, you know, at the time, you didn't know it, but you were, you know, one of the last of the few years of people there to be able to run an actual wild It's a relatively free-flowing Colorado River. | |
| I actually just ran the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon back in October, and they had just, during my run on the river, they had shut down more water out of Glen Canyon Dam than they ever had before, and so it's possible that I got to see some of the highest flows that we may ever see again in the Grand Canyon. | |
| As you mentioned, the Colorado River is in an extreme 20-year drought. | |
| Let me say something about that. | |
| I saw it when I was a kid. | |
| I saw a video that was taken from a helicopter. | |
| And it was a German or Austrian guy who was the last guy to run the wild Colorado River. | |
| And it was amazing. | |
| And his boat was a little Klepper kayak that was made of canvas. | |
| and he was hitting standing waves that were 40 or 50 feet high he was disappearing under them you know you would count and it seemed like he was gone for a full minute and then he would re-emerge and he would do a pirouette and this is before people were doing toy boating you know and that kind of stuff this guy was really unbelievable an unbelievable athlete and he made it down i understood that two or three weeks after that | |
| ironically he died by drowning in a bathtub but that was the last big water and that water just doesn't exist anymore because it all gets stuck behind the dam Yeah, it all gets stuck behind the dams and we have 20 years of extreme drought in southwest United States. | |
| At the same time, there's been increasingly more dam building going on, if you can believe that or not. | |
| So one of the things my organization does is try to stop proposed new dams because the river is already in extreme crisis so that it doesn't get drained further. | |
| You know, as you mentioned, the river used to flow into the Gulf of California, which is the Sea of Cortez, and there were two million acres of wetlands in the Colorado River Delta there across the Mexico border. | |
| It was wetlands as far as the eye could see. | |
| And I've stood there now and it is sand dunes as far as the eye could see. | |
| You know, Aldo Leopold and one of the historic figures in American environmentalism wrote a whole chapter of a book about traveling through the Sea of Cortez and the wetlands there. | |
| And he said it was a landscape of milk and honey as far as the eye can see. | |
| That's not there anymore at all. | |
| It's drained completely dry. | |
| You know, the big crisis, if you will, right now is that both of the main reservoirs in the district, in the river, Lake Mead, which is backed up by Hoover Dam, and of course Lake Powell, which is backed up by Glen Canyon Dam, are at historic lows right now. | |
| The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the system, or you might say mismanages the system, which is what I would say, Had declared the first official shortage of water. | |
| So entities, mostly farmers in Arizona, are being cut off this year and next year. | |
| And so there's going to be dramatic change in the Colorado River in the future. | |
| You know, what my organization tries to do throughout all that change is to look out for the ecological health of the river itself. | |
| Because, you know, as you know well, the human entities, the cities, And even the farmers. | |
| All the power and all the money are extraordinary lobbyists, but environmentalists are often the underdog, and so we do what we can to try to always keep one eye on the river's health and the health of the fishes and the health of the ecosystem so that it can still exist and even regenerate itself in the future. | |
| The people who follow this podcast are all familiar with the concept of agency capture. | |
| And the Bureau of Reclamation was kind of the original template for that, right? | |
| When the big corporate agriculture really got a hold of that agency. | |
| And it really is not a public service agency. | |
| It's an agency that serves the interests of this corporate elite. | |
| You know, the Bureau of Reclamation, as well as the seven basin states, which are Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, and California, Their entire goal is to drain the river dry every single year, to literally destroy it. | |
| And what they don't drain and destroy, of course, Mexico does right at the border and takes every other drop out of the river. | |
| So, you know, it's the concept of regulatory capture is, you know, extreme in the Colorado River Basin where Entities that work for the water management of the cities and the states, there's just a constant revolving door of them also working for the entities like the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Department of Interior, etc., etc. | |
| And so, you know, we end up in this crazy situation where there really aren't watchdogs except for a few environmental groups. | |
| You know, everyone is kind of a lapdog, not a watchdog. | |
| And the entities that are supposed to fix the problem And of course, the problem is that the river is completely drained, and the reservoirs are increasingly drained, and they're already having to cut back. | |
| The entities that have to fix the problem are the very same people that have created the problem. | |
| So, you know, how do you think that's going to go? | |
| Who's going to look out for the health of the river itself in that equation, in that algorithm, if you will? | |
| It's going to be very difficult, but that's the work that we try to do. | |
| Tell us what happens. | |
| A lot of that water ends up going through Arizona and then it gets recycled, right? | |
| I think the water that we get in Los Angeles It's actually been flushed down toilets in several Arizona cities and then recycled before it shipped to us. | |
| Yeah, you know, it's a funny story. | |
| I mean, I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, which gets water from Colorado River, and you live in Santa Monica, California, which gets water from Colorado River. | |
| In Santa Monica and in Southern California, you are drinking recycled water. | |
| You know, the interesting thing is you always hear about the controversy around water recycling, especially the concept of toilet to tap, because there are actual formal water recyclers there in Southern California, including there in San Diego at a facility I've toured. | |
| But if you live in Southern California, you're drinking, just think about this, you're drinking the wastewater of the entire city of Las Vegas. | |
| So imagine what goes down the drain in Las Vegas. | |
| Now, granted, they purify the water to EPA quality standards before it does it, but they do not purify out pharmaceuticals. | |
| They do not purify out all sorts of things. | |
| And there's a variety of things that are difficult to purify out. | |
| So, you know, that just flows down the Colorado River, gets diverted out by Southern California, and away it goes to all the cities. | |
| So there's lots of chaos, for sure, including Arizona, which is an extreme stark cycle of water. | |
| You and I have spent, you know, 30 years sewing sewage treatment plants. | |
| When they test the water at the sewage treatment plant, you know, the government makes the sewage plant test water. | |
| They're testing for a very limited number of parameters. | |
| They're testing for biological oxygen, and they're testing for suspended solids, or settable solids, or pH. | |
| And I think that's pretty much it, maybe one or two more. | |
| They're not testing for chemical residues. | |
| Some of them test for phosphorus and nitrogen, but they're not testing for chemical residues. | |
| And when we went to the New York City, you know, upstate New York, there's 104 sewer plants discharged into New York's drinking water in Westchester, Putnam, and counties in the Catskills, 104 sewer treatment plants. | |
| Most of them are broken. | |
| But when we tested those plants independently, we found stuff coming out of their sewage stream that nobody ever measures, like huge amounts of caffeine, earth control pills, all kinds of hormones, and hundreds and hundreds of pharmaceutical drugs because they're going right through the people into the toilet and there is no system for removing that at the sewer treatment plant. | |
| The sewer plant, that whole agency, as you know, EPA is another victim of corporate capture And the way that they avoid talking about all of these chemicals that are flowing into our drinking water Well, there's been, you know, numerous studies in the United States, and even here in the state of Colorado, | |
| where they've had some three-eyed fish downstream, and they assume that it's because of all the pharmaceuticals or whatever that's been dumped into the water, which is anything you pour down the grain, really. | |
| You know, as you recall, there was an old saying back in the 60s and 70s, the solution to pollution is dilution. | |
| And one of the fascinating things going on in the Colorado River right now is because there has been this extreme drought, there is much less water to dilute the pollution. | |
| So the amount of pollution stays the same every year. | |
| I'm not trying to pick on Las Vegas, but, you know, gee, we've all been to Las Vegas, and imagine what goes on in Las Vegas. | |
| Imagine everything that gets flushed down the drain. | |
| Well, that all stays the same every year, but the amount of water in the Colorado River and Lake Mead to dilute that actually goes down consequentially. | |
| It's like one third of the water is in Lake Mead right now. | |
| Pollution is an issue for sure, you know, in addition to the dramatic crisis just around the The amount of water that, you know, not only is there 40 million people on the Colorado River Basin that rely on it, it also grows crops in Southern Arizona, Southern California, and even Northern Mexico that feed the entire nation too. | |
| And so, you know, the ecological health of the river is threatened, there's pollution issues, and there's also extreme drought issues. | |
| You know, one of the, I've seen studies that show that there may be that hint at an association between the amount of hormones that are now in our drinking water that are coming through this, you know, this reuse process that are associated with the lowering of the ATPase. | |
| Two or three years, you're now getting 10-year-old girls who are hitting puberty, which was not what they're supposed to be doing. | |
| Nine, eight, nine, 10-year-olds. | |
| Yeah, I've seen similar studies around testosterone levels, too. | |
| So there's certainly a lot going on out there. | |
| You know, I would say, and you know, you and your audience will certainly understand this. | |
| We have laws and regulations in the United States, but they are weak is all there is to it. | |
| And They are only as strong as they are enforced, so you need an organization to enforce them. | |
| And they can only be enforced as strongly as the courts will allow. | |
| And so the United States is often thought of as having very strong environmental laws, but it's a very difficult situation out there. | |
| The courts can get staffed, the agencies can get captured. | |
| And organizations, you know, like ours, which are relatively small, it's very, very expensive, you know, to go to court, especially if you have to have private attorneys. | |
| There's a lot of challenges to trying to keep not just the environment protected, but also the public health. | |
| Gary, your organization, the Poudre Waterkeeper, has recently launched for the Colorado a Rights of Nature campaign. | |
| Tell us a little bit about that. | |
| Yeah, you bet. | |
| There's two big challenges. | |
| Problems going on in the Colorado River Basin. | |
| And one, as we mentioned already, is that the laws are weak and they're difficult to enforce, so we need to make stronger laws. | |
| The second that's going on is as the amount of water increasingly goes down, investors, including Wall Street hedge funds and billionaires, are buying massive farms and ranches, not because they want to be farmers or ranchers, But because they want to invest in the water, because the water is exorbitantly expensive right now in Southwestern United States. | |
| So we created a program called Rights of Nations. | |
| That's how people understand. | |
| Water law in the West is irrational. | |
| It has the worst incentive system to incentivize bad behavior. | |
| And the reason for that, they have a system called First in Time, First in Right. | |
| Meaning if you arrive first, Out of the river that you saw fit and you permanently own the rights to that water. | |
| The incentive, the perverse incentives that come out of that is that if you stop using, if you reduce the amount of water that you're using through good conduct, through good practices, you can lose the right to that water and somebody else will get it. | |
| Oh, it incentivizes you to use the water as wastefully as possible. | |
| You're right to those acre feet of water annually. | |
| And so the farms and ranches that own the rights to that water are enormously valuable, not because of the land, but because the owner controls that water supply, which is now far more valuable than the land. | |
| And so you have Wall Street buying up the ranches that own these water rights. | |
| So these big elites from Wall Street will control all the water in the West. | |
| They'll control life in the West. | |
| We see the same thing happen in the pharmaceutical industry and the agricultural industry, which is, you know, they're all becoming commodity businesses. | |
| Yeah, and you teed me right up because what we are fighting against is the further commodification of water and of rivers. | |
| Because not only does the entity who owns the water right have the ability to take all the water that they have a right to, they have the ability to drain the river. | |
| And in many cases, rivers across the West and Southwest United States, including the Cashlaputa River in downtown Fort Collins, are drained, bones stinking dry. | |
| And so it might be that that can happen for two or three days in a row sometimes. | |
| So anyway, we launched this Rights of Nature for Rivers campaign to slowly work to try to change laws to better protect rivers in the state of Colorado and around the southwest United States, and also to battle against this commodification Where these people, they call themselves water marketeers. | |
| They're trying to turn it all into a big market. | |
| And then there's Wall Street hedge funds that are involved and also buyers and traders and all this kind of inside dealing going on around just trying to commodify the water to control it. | |
| And communities like Fort Collins, but a lot of communities around the West, literally don't have any control whatsoever over the river that flows through their town. | |
| So we're trying to work towards giving communities the ability to increase the laws and their ability to, you know, create a healthy, vibrant river in their town and an ecosystem that people can go down to and enjoy, that they can recreate in, that they can fish in, that they can swim in. | |
| So these ecosystems and rivers are alive, rather than being commodified and sucked off so that, you know, Billionaires and hedge funds even make more money. | |
| It is a real problem in southwestern United States, in the Colorado River Basin, where, again, you've got more people, you've got less water, the price of water is going up and up and up, and every investor in the United States is looking at it, including some really smart people on Wall Street. | |
| Yeah, so the people understand the historical antecedents. | |
| There was a period during the settlement of the West when Washington, D.C., in order to control the Indians, there were often a lot of people taking their We wanted to move a lot of Americans out on the land, so we created this perverse incentive system. | |
| And it's different than how water is used in every other nation, because most nations, local waterways are owned by the public. | |
| They're called public trust assets. | |
| They're part of the commons. | |
| And you can't use that water unless you can show a community benefit. | |
| The community can sell somebody, can license somebody to take the water, but the community's The sovereignty of their land base. | |
| And this rite, which was an ancient rite, but, you know, during the Middle Ages, many of these local kings and feudal lords began privatizing the public trust, and that happened in England. | |
| And it was one of the reasons that the barons and the people rose up against King John and challenged him on the battlefield on the field of running need and forced him to sign the Magna Carta, which was the Bethlehem for most of our Bill of Rights in our country. | |
| But in addition to the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution, the Magna Carta also included rights to free access to waterways, the protection of the public interest in those ways so that they could not be commodified. | |
| They could not be stolen by wealthy people. | |
| There had to be a permit process that would make sure that everybody benefited from any dispatch of that resource. | |
| the Western system is a really undemocratic system. | |
| It's a system that reported traditionally this kind of what we call the welfare cowboys, this elite group who are making money by cashing in on public resources and public wealth. | |
| And more recently, they've made the handoff to Wall Street. | |
| So you have the most rapacious, venal, graven, destructive and greedy people in the world, the people who literally have got their jobs because they're the greediest guy in the world. | |
| And they're the ones who now are buying up all the Western border and they are going to strangle those communities and they turn the communities into feudal fiefdoms. | |
| It's exactly what our British ancestors fought the Magna Carta and that kind of feudal system. | |
| And we've installed that system in our Western states. | |
| Yeah, and you know, at the same time that that is going on, there's another fascinating thing going on in the west and the southwest especially. | |
| Because there's kind of, you know, the old west, which was all about resource extraction, building dams, cutting down timber, etc., etc. | |
| And the new west is really much more about enjoying nature and a recreational economy and appreciating the health and vitality that being out in nature and wild landscapes brings to you. | |
| And so a lot of communities around the Southwest United States are built along rivers, as most communities are, and they're building whitewater parks. | |
| They're building huge parks and open spaces and recreation facilities so that people can raft in the river, can kayak in the river, etc. | |
| And so at the same time, you have this where the public, the public's values are towards appreciating, recognizing nature and knowing that is intrinsically useful and beneficial to us. | |
| But you have this massive, you know, corporate, monetized, commodified machine which is trying to, like, take all the ability of the public away to get the benefits of public health. | |
| And so that tension is playing across the Southwest United States, especially in the Colorado River, especially as the amount of water in rivers continues to decrease. | |
| In addition, there's fights for even more dams to be built. | |
| And so, you know, I can't, I apologize, I can't paste a very good story on the whole thing or put a happy face on it, but to say that there are groups like mine that are in there every day fighting to try to keep, to protect the public self and protect the ecological health of the non-human world that we depend on for our survival. | |
| Ari, how can our listeners support your efforts? | |
| The best thing to do is go to SaveTheColorado.org. | |
| SaveTheColorado.org. | |
| We're working hard. | |
| We've got a number of programs on there that you can read about. | |
| My email's right on there, and you can give me a call or send me an email. | |
| We're happy to accept donations and include you in the community of people that are trying to protect the public's health and protect the environment rather than and against the raiders and the corporate vehemence that are trying to destroy. | |
| Gary Wachner, Blue J. Water Keeper of the Colorados. | |
| Thanks so much for joining us and for your commitment to our waterways. | |
| Good to see you again. | |
| You too. | |
| Thank you so much for joining us. |