Postcards from the Rogue Valley

Local reservoir levels, 2.13.22 (Rogue Basin, Jackson County Watermaster)

The view of the Rogue Valley from Grizzly Peak, a spot named for the last known grizzly bear in Oregon, is nothing short of amazing. The Siskiyou Mountains flank one side, the Cascades the other, Mount Shasta looms in the distance, and rolling grasslands descend to the valley floor. As the crow flies, it’s roughly seven miles from there to where we live. 

A few days ago, as Tony and I skirted the peak on our return from a quick visit to Bend, Oregon—following the winding and disgracefully named Dead Indian Memorial Road—the sweeping views offered something we hadn’t expected: a large plume of smoke rising from the forest behind our house.

Had fire season already begun? 

An alert from the City of Ashland popped up on my phone, notifying me of a “controlled burn” on the forested ridge above our house. Throughout the winter, Ashland Forest Resiliency crews burn brush piles to improve wildfire safety in the city’s watershed.

The hummingbirds have yet to return to our living room window feeder, but spring has come early this year. For the past six weeks, night time lows in the mid-30s have given way to day time highs in the 60s, recently the 70s, along with consistently brilliant skies. 

As COVID continues its squeeze, the warm temperatures and blue skies make us doubly glad to be alive. The absence of rainfall, however, sinks our hearts. We entered this winter already dogged by extreme, record-breaking drought and summers caked with wildfire smoke and heat. The wet months—roughly 75 percent of our annual precipitation falls in November-April—would change the narrative, we hoped. Certainly, it couldn’t get worse. But we haven’t had a drop of rain since January 2^nd, another record.

The snowpack, which received a welcome boost from snows in late December, has now largely melted, thanks to the unseasonably warm temperatures.

With little replenishing rain predicted for the future, our water debt deepens. 

The Webfoot State

“Nicknamed the ‘Webfoot State,’ Oregon has a reputation for having an abundance of water,” a 2016 EPA pamphlet on Saving Water in Oregon begins. The assets area considerable. Thirty-six major rivers weave through the state, with the Columbia defining much of the northern border. The fourth-largest river in the United States by volume, the Columbia has the greatest flow of any North American river entering the Pacific. Ancient lava flows in northern Oregon also store and supply water, primarily for residential use, through an extensive network of aquifers.

Water, agriculture, and the Oregon economy are inextricably linked. Seventy-nine percent of the state’s water withdrawals are allocated to farmers and ranchers, and agriculture makes up 13 percent of the state’s gross product and supports over 370,000 jobs.  Irrigation—provided by an intricate network of ditches across Oregon—is used on roughly half of the state’s total crop land (1.7 million acres) by nearly 45 percent of Oregon growers. Less than 10 percent of Oregon’s water withdrawals are used in cities.

Annual average precipitation is 28 inches, but what most characterizes precipitation in Oregon (like politics) is its extremes: the western mountainous region can receive more than 200 inches of rain per year, while the eastern region can receive less than eight inches. Ashland weighs in at roughly 18.5 inches.

An inflection point

In the 2014-2015 water year (a water year runs from October 1 – September 31), Oregon lost its webfoot moniker.

On July 27, 2015 Oregon Governor Kate Brown declared drought emergencies in 23 of Oregon’s 36 counties, citing record-breaking low snowpack levels, high temperatures, and significantly reduced stream flows. Many Oregon counties had experienced, by then, two consecutive years of drought emergencies. For the first time in the state’s history, several reservoirs had reached zero percent of capacity.

Not mincing her words, Governor Brown warned that similar conditions were predicted for the upcoming water year, and “that if climate predictions were correct, these conditions will become the new normal”—indeed they may grow worse.

Drought, the Governor noted, has multiple effects, including:

severe water reductions for irrigated agriculture; reduced forage for grazing; water restrictions or shortages for communities with limited supplies; low reservoir levels that permit or prevent recreational activities; low stream flows and high water temperatures that harm fish and restrict angling and other river uses; reduced productivity of forests and increased mortality of trees; and increased risk of wildfire.”

Oregon, along with other western states, “must plan for and address how a changing climate challenges our current systems and policies, and threatens our economy and quality of life,” Brown concluded.

Where we are now 

Jackson County ended 2021 as it began: desperately dry. 

The three reservoirs critical to irrigation here remained at historically low levels: Emigrant (7 percent full), Hyatt (6 percent full), and Howard Prairie (6 percent full). The Talent Irrigation District, whose canals supply water to farmers and adjacent home owners, usually starts pumping water in early April and shuts at the end of September. This year it closed down four weeks after it opened. The growing season, according to county water managers, was likely the shortest on record.

The National Drought Mitigation Center has a drought monitor classification scheme, with state specific possible impacts. In Oregon, it looks like this:

• D0: Ski season is impacted.
• D1: Some fields are left fallow; water levels begin the decline; recreation and other uses impacted.
• D2: Pastures are brown; hay yields are down and prices are up; producers are selling cattle. Fire risk increases. Marshes are drying up, little water is available for waterfowl and wildlife; bears are moving into urban areas. River flows are low and tributaries are running dry; conservation efforts begin in irrigation districts.
• D3: Planting is delayed. Wildfire activity is high. Waterfowl disease outbreaks increase. Low oxygen and high river water temperatures are affecting fish. Reservoirs and lakes are very low compared to normal; irrigation water is scarce. Pumping well water increases; wells are going dry; homeowners are trucking in potable water.

In Southern Oregon, we teeter between levels D2 and D3. 

A threat multiplier

We are learning that drought, like its progenitor climate change, is a threat multiplier. The catastrophic September 2021 fires in the towns of Talent and Phoenix, which left nearly 3,000 families homeless—disproportionately Hispanic and poor—continue to displace almost every aspect of life in these communities. When the local pear harvest, a major employer of farmworkers, ended a month early this fall, workers who are used to having another month of income didn’t. Weeks of wildfire smoke—months in the summer of 2020—permeate everything from breathing to economic activity, small and large. When heavy smoke descends, Ashland becomes a ghost town; locals disappear along with the tourists.

We are also learning that temperature, more than precipitation, is driving exceptional droughts (The New York Times, Feb. 14, ’22). Precipitation amounts can go up and down over time and vary regionally, but as human activities continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, temperatures are more generally rising.

As they do “the air is basically more capable of pulling the water out of the soil, out of vegetation, out of crops, out of forests,” climate scientist Julie Cole says. “And it makes for  drought conditions to be much more extreme.”

The past summer, the heat in Southern Oregon was unremitting: from mid-June to the end of August, temperatures ranged from the mid-90s to a record-breaking 112 degrees. Thirty-five days registered 95 degrees and above.

What is to be done

Most of the public attention to water conservation, locally and elsewhere, focuses on investing in more efficient appliances (with toilets taking a star role), buildings, and municipal water delivery systems. The list of actions individual citizens can do are familiar. 

Install a dual or low flush toilet. Turn off the faucet while brushing your teeth. Only run the washing machine and dishwasher when you have a full load. Shower less and use a low flow shower head and faucet aerators. Fix leaks. Don’t overwater your lawn during peak periods and install rain sensors on irrigation systems. Install a rain barrel for outdoor watering. Monitor your water usage on your water bill.

Even if the majority of citizens were to put these tips into practice, the contribution to water conservation is important but minimal, however.

Agricultural water use is where the rubber meets the road, and here the non-farming 90 percent of the U.S., and Oregon, population know little.

Ten years ago, the Oregon Environmental Council published a report, “Making Water Work,” detailing a wide range of strategies for advancing conservation in the state’s agriculture. Their top recommendations included coordinating disparate energy and water conservation programs, incentivizing irrigators to adopt sustainable agricultural practices, identifying stream reaches that can benefit the most from water saved through conservation, and paving unpaved stretches of irrigation canals (which can lose 50 percent of their water to evaporation).

It’s not clear how far the state has progressed on any of these items. 

Water wars

The water wars last summer in the Klamath Basin, east and south of us, offer a worst case scenario. The national media jumped on the story, as farmers, fisherman from the Klamath and Yurok Tribes, and wildlife protectors sparred over who had first rights to the plummeting water supply along the Klamath River. At the height of the dispute, protesters affiliated with the rightwing anti-government activist Ammon Bundy took up the farmers’ cause and threatened to unilaterally open the headgates of the reservoir. The farmers, to their credit, walked away.

If water wars do arise here in Jackson County, they will target the illegal cannabis farms that have overtaken the county, not only scarring the landscape as out-of-state cartels reap their rewards and move on, but also stealing water, depriving legal users including farmers and homeowners of the increasingly precious resource. Cannabis, like alfalfa, is water intensive. Private wells adjacent to large grows—up to 1,000 illegal operations in a region of 4,000 square miles—are reportedly running dry.

This past October, the Jackson County Board of Commissioners declared a state of emergency, appealing to the governor and state legislature for help. They said law and code enforcement officers, along with county and state regulators, were overwhelmed and warned of an “imminent threat to the public health and safety of our citizens from the illegal production of cannabis in our county.” 

In a recent interview with Politico, a consultant hired by the commissioners to inspect the damage put it less politely: “You want to talk about clusterfuck, here it is.”

Our children’s trust

Recently, I signed up for a ten-week course with the nonprofit Southern Oregon Climate Action Now, aiming to become a “Certified Master Climate Protector” in Oregon. I have committed to 30 hours of coursework plus homework, 20 hours of service, and ongoing public action. After championing young climate activists across the U.S. and the planet, I figured it was time that I adopt the sense of urgency our youth are bringing to the streets, the courts, to our corporations and political bodies. As they say, “There is no Plan(et) B.”

I am swallowing hard. Having railed against climate change deniers for years, I realize that my own inaction effectively made me a climate change denier, too. 

“Our house is still on fire,” intones Greta Thunberg from the 50^th World Economic Forum in Davos. “Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour. We are still telling you to panic, and to act as if you loved your children above all else.”

An article in today’s Washington Post reports that the American West’s long-running drought, which has persisted since 2000, can now be considered the driest 22-year period of the past 1,200 years.

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