When Westerners think of Yellowstone, probably what comes to mind are its grizzlies, exploding geysers, wolf packs and bison traffic jams, not to mention bubbling, iridescent hot pools that attract swarms of visitors from all over the world. The park is a jewel of the Northern Rockies, but to this journalist who has covered its stories for 35 years, the real miracle of Yellowstone is its intricate world of wildlife.

Yet any discussion of wildlife here comes wrapped in a paradox. Despite Covid-19, or perhaps because of it, in 2021 Yellowstone smashed monthly, seasonal and annual visitation records, notching nearly 4.9 million visits. That is 860,000 more than in 2019, the year before the pandemic struck. This year, given social media and marketing aimed at the park’s 150^th anniversary, it’s possible that Yellowstone could surpass the 5 million mark.

Even if it doesn’t hit that milestone, many locals who have visited the park for decades say its roads and its capacity for serving visitors are already overwhelmed, as are many public facilities in the gateway towns of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Although the crushing visitation happens on a tiny percent of parkland, all these curious tourists create waves of troubling ripple effects.

Yellowstone is neither a standalone island nor a drive-through zoo. It is unique, the last ecosystem in the Lower 48 to contain all of the original mammal species that were on the landscape before Europeans arrived on the continent.

Now, based on the diversity and health of its wildlife populations, Yellowstone is wilder than it was in 1872, when poachers, bounty, and market hunters nearly wiped out all wildlife in the country.

Grizzly bears have been rescued from a population free fall. Wolves were brought back by the Interior Department under Bruce Babbitt in the mid-1990s, and the park’s bison population, which  numbered just 23 at one point in the late 19^th century, is at 5,000.

Had Yellowstone not been created, had winter range beyond Yellowstone not existed, and had environmental protection laws not been put in place, it’s doubtful that those original species would have survived. Many biologists think most would have been lost.

Not all are celebrating Yellowstone’s birth. Some have portrayed the park as an emblem of injustice that resulted in the removal of Indigenous people from native homelands. These critics see a park which non-white citizens say they have never felt invited to embrace as part of their heritage. This needs to be addressed by the National Park Service and remedied.

What cannot be repaired, once broken, are the fragile threads of biological connections holding the ecosystem together. And those connections extend for miles outside the park boundaries, through migration trails and rivers.

These days, the boom in outdoor recreation in the West has been crowding the park’s adjacent national forests. The high numbers rival public-land use levels around Moab, Utah’s Wasatch, and the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, places that don’t have Yellowstone’s diversity of wildlife. Another threat is that neighboring states like Montana have promoted the killing of park wolves and bison when they cross Yellowstone’s invisible boundary.

Private lands surrounding Yellowstone are also getting built up, transformed by mostly unplanned development. Such development is the biggest threat to the survival of grizzlies and other park species, warns Chris Servheen, who served as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s national director of grizzly bear recovery for 35 years. Wild animals always suffer when roads, houses and people move into their territories, Servheen says. Coexistence may be the goal, but humans always win any dispute with wildlife trying to survive.

Five years ago, Dave Hallac, who managed the science division at the park, told me he was worried not just about the Yellowstone ecosystem suffering “death by 1,000 cuts,” but death by 10,000 scratches, as more people scramble for their piece of paradise. The trend has only accelerated.

What is the most enduring “value” of Yellowstone? The park reveals that humans deeply appreciate this special place of wildness. But the park also has an urgent message to those same humans: Our consumption of wild places means we must deliberately decide to accept limits. This is a good thing—and an increasingly rare thing.

Todd Wilkinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and founder of Mountain Journal in Montana, mountainjournal.org.

The post Let’s Not Squander the Miracle of Yellowstone appeared first on Writers On The Range.

These farms often come to mind when we think about agriculture in the West: a cool riparian valley with adjacent fields and people rooted in the land, growing crops that may be sold at a farmer’s market in a nearby town.

So when former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt suggested in a recent opinion piece, (Writersontherange.org), that a portion of agricultural water rights should be transferred to urban areas, it no doubt conjured up some strong emotions — small family farms drying up so that suburbanites could water their lawns and golf courses.

But Secretary Babbitt’s proposal makes sense, and he is right about the need to recognize the mismatch in population in the Colorado River Basin between the urbanized West and rural areas where most of the basin’s water is allocated. He is also right that the Colorado River cannot continue serving 40 million people, irrigating the same acreage, and meeting our aspirations for healthy rivers, in this time of megadrought.

There are a lot of caveats to his idea of people voluntarily retiring irrigation rights, including the need to create a process that allows full public participation. But unless we begin to retire irrigated acreage with a carefully managed strategy, we will have showdowns among states and tribes that share the basin’s water and increasingly desiccated rivers.

The real obstacle to Babbitt’s proposal springs from our romanticized vision of what agriculture looks like in the West. New Mexico may have acequia-fed fields, but it’s also in the nation’s top 10 for the number of dairy cattle, the products of which are largely exported to other states.

For every rain-fed cornfield sprouting emerald-like in the Arizona desert, there are tens of thousands of acres of alfalfa fields guzzling up millions of gallons of water per year. The United States is the world’s largest exporter of food, which means that the arid West is, in effect, exporting our water via huge, corporate farms.

Let’s not forget that it is agribusiness — not small farmers – that’s responsible for 80% of the water use in the West.

Meanwhile, climate change is drying up what water remains. The declining flows and warming temperatures are no longer just a contested forecast about the future, but our lived experience.

In my own corner of the West I’m astounded by how quickly desertification is occurring, with hard-packed soils

where there was vegetation just a few years ago. Those obnoxious dust storms (haboobs) seem to be moving northward, leading me to tell everyone to watch Ken Burn’s powerful TV series on the Dust Bowl. Ranchers are on the front line in New Mexico, where grazing is looking more and more problematic.

Of course, water isn’t just valuable to farms and cities. The West has a huge outdoor recreation industry that depends on hiking, rafting and fishing, and our riparian areas grant solace in hectic times. Declining river flows, dried up springs and parsimonious releases for fishes detract from this sector of a growing economy.

Babbitt proposes to alleviate this situation by creating a mechanism by which farmers can lease their water rights to municipalities for a set period of time. He proposes free-market transactions — entirely voluntary and at the full discretion of each operator — funded by the federal government. I suggest that agricultural water also be made available to remain in our rivers for the health of our fragile river ecosystems.

Of course, there is a danger to a market-driven solution. If there were a federally run market in water rights, one would expect to see low-value agricultural areas to be the first to be approached for water sales.

That may be why in Europe policies explicitly protect small farms. This could lessen the departure of farmers from parts of northern New Mexico or rural areas on Colorado’s

Western Slope, and other areas where small farms still exist.

No one is choosing the drought that has settled into the western United States, along with warming temperatures, wildfires and the rest of our changed climate. We have to cooperate to lessen the effect of climate on individuals and our shared environment.

That is why Bruce Babbitt’s proposal deserves a good, full-throated civic discussion. I just hope it is followed by actions to help the lands and people west of the 100th meridian thrive in the 21st century.

Denise Fort is a contributor to WritersontheRange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico School of Law and chaired President Clinton’s Western Water Policy Review Advisory Commission.

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Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt suggested recently in an opinion (Writers on the Range.org) that “retiring” 10% – some 300,000 acres – of irrigated agriculture would save 1 million acre-feet of the Colorado River. Secretary Babbitt wants the federal government to pay farmers in both the Lower and Upper Colorado River Basins to dry up their cropland. 

The imbalance on the Colorado River needs to be addressed, and agriculture, as the biggest water user in the basin, needs to be part of a fair solution. But drying up vital food-producing land is a blunt tool. It will damage our local food-supply chains and bring decline to rural communities that have developed around irrigated agriculture.

Let’s look at the river’s problems. First, Secretary Babbitt minimizes the challenge, as the overuse of the river’s system is even greater than 1 million acre-feet. The flow is so diminished that the end of the line the Colorado River Delta hardly receives any water.

The three states that make up the Lower Colorado River Basin – including the former Secretary’s home state of Arizona – have in recent years consumed at least 1.2 million acre-feet more per year than the 8.5 million acre-feet allotted to them under the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

This overuse has been perpetuated because the Lower Basin states and the Bureau of Reclamation fail to account for the losses caused by evaporation from reservoirs and the transit losses during water deliveries. The first step in fixing the imbalance must be elimination of the Lower Basin’s overuse.

Through the Drought Contingency Plan, the Lower Basin is actively reducing its water consumption when Lake Mead hits critically low levels.  But while this is a good start, more must be done.

Climate change is a major cause in reducing Colorado River flows, with recent studies putting the reduction between 3 and 5.2% for every 1 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature. Important water-producing parts of our basin, such as Western Colorado, have already seen temperatures rise by as much as 4 degrees since 1895, and predictions for a 2- to 5-degree increase in the foreseeable future will compound the trend.

It might be surprising to learn that the Upper Basin’s annual consumption of Colorado River water — less than 4.5 million acre-feet — is far below the 7.5 maf allotted to the four Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. But this is hardly the time to increase diversions. To sustain the communities and the ecosystems that depend upon the Colorado River, all water users — both Upper and Lower Basin states – will need to consume less water.

The Colorado River District has taken a stand against “buy-and-dry” practices because we recognize the environmental and economic harm of drying up agricultural lands. If the health of the river is balanced solely on the back of agriculture, the 10% suggested by Secretary Babbitt today will almost certainly lead to 20% tomorrow. 

In Western Colorado, most of our agriculture is family owned and operated. These family farms provide a local food supply, form the backbone of our rural communities, and they are already under economic stress. So what can be done to both help the river and keep rural life intact?

Initiatives must be aimed at reducing consumptive losses due to inefficient irrigation systems. At the same time we need to incentivize selective retirement of marginal land, all while providing technical support and funding for growers to switch to higher-value crops. The Lower Basin must reduce the cultivation of highly water consumptive crops in the increasingly hot desert, such as cotton and alfalfa raised solely for export.

Increased funding is better directed to off-farm and on-farm irrigation improvements and growing alternative crops. An example of that kind of effort is the Lower Gunnison Project in Western Colorado, a partnership between agricultural producers, the Colorado River District and the Natural Resources Conservation Service. This project improves diversion structures by piping delivery ditches and modernizing irrigation technology on farms. The producers are also experimenting with new crops such as hemp and hops.

From a purely mathematical standpoint, the Lower Basin has to reduce its 1.2 maf in overuse. That’s a big start. But in both basins, agriculture must improve the way it uses scarce water taken from the river. We have no time to lose.

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It is no exaggeration to say that a mega-drought not seen in 500 years has descended on the seven Colorado River Basin states: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California. That’s what the science shows, and that’s what the region faces.

Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas and San Diego have already reduced per capita water use. Yet they continue to consume far more water than the river can supply. The river and its tributaries are still overdrawn by more than a million acre feet annually, an amount in consumption equaled by four cities the size of Los Angeles.

To close the deficit, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the states have been struggling to apportion the drastic cuts necessary.

So far, the parties have proceeded by adhering rigidly to historic doctrines: first users have absolute rights, though those rights were based on rosy projections of  the river’s annual flow.

For example, In  Arizona  the six million residents of Phoenix and Tucson will lose fifty per cent of their share before California gives up a single drop.

Nevada, which has a 2 per cent share, the smallest of any  state, is called on to take more cuts ahead of California, which has the largest share, 29 per cent

Within California, water to 20 million residents in cities will be completely shut off before farming districts adjacent to and within the Imperial Valley take any cuts.

And in the upper basin, the states of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico are faced with draconian reductions in their entitlements because they must deliver water to the lower basin states.

Brad Udall, a water scientist at Colorado State University, warns that something must give, that we cannot continue with a system that increasingly  “violates the public’s sense of rightness.”

There is a better, more equitable pathway for reducing the deficit without forcing arbitrary cuts. It involves 3 million acres of irrigated agriculture, mostly alfalfa and forage crops, which consume more than 80 per cent of total water use in the Basin.

By retiring less than 10 per cent of this irrigated acreage from production, we could eliminate the existing million acre-foot overdraft on the Colorado River, while still maintaining the dominant role of agriculture.  Pilot programs in both the upper and lower basins have demonstrated how agricultural retirement programs can work at the local level.  What’s lacking is the vision and financing to bring these efforts to a Basin scale.

Fortunately, there’s a precedent administered by the Department of Agriculture; it’s the Conservation Reserve Program, established in 1985 by the Congress. It authorizes the Farm Service Agency in the Department of Agriculture to contract with landowners to retire marginal and environmentally sensitive agricultural lands in exchange for rent.

Farmers who join the Conservation Reserve remain free to return the lands to production at the end of the renewable contract period, typically 10-to-30 years.

The national Conservation Reserve currently holds nearly 22 million acres under contracts with more than 300,000 farms. This legislation has strong support from the farming community and in the Congress, which appropriates nearly $2 billion each year for the program.

With this precedent, it’s time to create an Irrigation Reserve Program. To work, it must be voluntary, and farmers who participate must be adequately paid for the use of their irrigation rights.

A new Irrigation Reserve on a Basin scale will also require significant public funding. But the mechanism for financing an Irrigation Reserve is already available in existing federal law.

In 1973, faced with deteriorating water quality in the River, the Basin states came together and persuaded the Congress to enact a law known as the Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Act.

To fund salinity control projects throughout the Basin, the Congress allocated revenues from the sale of hydropower from Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon Dam and other federal dams throughout the Basin.

Three hydropower accounts — the Lower Colorado River Basin Development Fund,  the Upper Colorado River Basin Fund and the Hoover Powerplant Act– continue to capture and allocate revenues to basin projects.  Congress should now add financing of an Irrigation Reserve to the list of eligible expenditures.

With these two precedents, the Conservation Reserve Program and the Salinity Control Act, we have the road map to establish a basin-wide Irrigation Reserve.  I urge the seven Basin states to make common cause and join together to obtain Congressional legislation.

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