Going against the current, Utah works to change an old western water rights rule to encourage conservation

Utah Department of Agriculture and Food photo

Many western states apply the "use it or lose it" rule to water rights, which penalizes land owners for using less water.  But Utah is working to reward conservation, reports Nina Elkadi of Grist. "Amid climate change, drought, and increased demands for water, Utah is trying to change the system, bucking one of the oldest water rules in the western U.S."

In the West, water rights come down to the 'beneficial use' principle that "declares that water rights holders must use their water for beneficial purposes, such as agriculture, or give up those rights," Elkadi explains. "In Utah, though, the state legislature has passed multiple statutes that are attempting to encourage farmers to use less water without losing rights to it."

Even as the federal government works with western states to reorganize the Colorado River Compact, Utah is doing its own water resource management. Utah wants "to encourage farmers to conserve water without punishing them for it," Elkadi reports. "It's tackling the problem through its Agricultural Water Optimization Program, which awards farmers funding to become more efficient with their water use. . . . [It's] meant to address stress and uncertainty for farmers. And aims to thwart, or at least delay, catastrophic water shortages in the region."

Utah's Agricultural Water Optimization Program provides support to farmers through grants "to improve water practices," Elkadi writes. "Farmers can also file a 'change application' to lease out any 'saved water' through a water marketplace. Utah's State Engineer Teresa Wilhelmsen told Elkadi, "It kind of gives an incentive to save that consumptive use and potentially be able to lease it or do something else with it."

Despite its benefits, some farmers have avoided participation. Wilhelmsen told Elkadi, “As you can imagine, there’s a fear of the state engineer with some folks." Elkadi adds, "This is why she is trying to frame these programs as opportunities to 'tune up your water rights.'"

While the state's water optimization program is a start, "some believe more needs to be done. Burdette Barker, an irrigation expert at Utah State University, thinks efficiency is not the only issue that needs to be addressed; adaptation needs to be at the forefront, too," Elkadi reports. Barker asked her, “Will [the optimization program] alone meet the objectives that the state and others have? Probably not. Will it allow farmers to adapt better as tighter crunches come? I think so. They will help provide farmers with tools to cope or adjust.”

Mormon Church donates reservoir of church-owned water; it hopes many others will follow suit

Farmington Bay, a critical habitat for wildlife, feeds into the
Great Salt Lake. (Photo by James Roh, The Washington Post)

In an unusual move, the Church of Jesus Christ of Lattter-Day Saints has set a pace for helping save disappearing Great Salt Lake. "Last summer, the church began urging conservation and touted its water-saving efforts in the American West. At its fall general conference, which Mormons everywhere follow for speeches considered direction from God, a senior bishop stressed using Earth's resources with restraint," reports Karin Brulliard of The Washington Post. "This spring, another senior bishop delivered what was praised as a landmark address on Mormons' history with water in the valley and outlined an unprecedented move: permanently donating a small reservoir's worth of church-owned water, the largest such gift ever made for the lake."

It's going to take a lot more water to save the damage done to the lake. "Experts say more aggressive legislation is critical. But the church is hugely influential in a conservative state where some 60 percent of residents, and an even larger portion of lawmakers, are Latter-day Saints," Brulliard explains. "Its decision to wade into a subject infused with politicized tussles over climate change has boosted the sense of urgency and underscored the existential threat of the Great Salt Lake's demise, observers say."

Commenting on the church's focus, Jenica Sedgwick, the church's first sustainability manager, "said the impetus was doctrinal, not political," Brulliard writes. Sedgwick told her: "We need to care for the Earth … and we're accountable to God for that," and the lake crisis "is something that we need everybody paying attention to and thinking about." Brulliard reports, "The church hopes other large landowners with water to spare will follow suit, Sedgwick said. It hopes the same of its work reducing the sprawling emerald lawns at the meetinghouses — neighborhood churches used for weekly services — that seem ubiquitous in the Salt Lake Valley."

The lake is a prime revenue generator for the region and "provides a critical way station for 10 million migratory birds," Brulliard writes. "Its evaporated water turns to snowfall in nearby mountains, buoying a massive regional ski industry. Ecologist Ben Abbott, a Brigham Young University associate professor, told Brulliard, "In both figurative and very literal ways, it supports our way of life. . . . [It's] facing a serious environmental catastrophe." Brulliard reports, "Abbott compares the churches donation to about equal to the amount used yearly on all golf courses in the Great Salt Lake watershed — to a drop of water in a bucket, albeit a large one." Abbott told her: "What we need is 20 to 50 of those donations."

Fertilizer washed from Midwestern fields slowly poisoning Gulf of Mexico; latest story uses Illinois county as example

Excess nitrogen fertilizer washing into the Mississippi River is slowly poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, Ignacio Calderon reports for USA Today and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting in the latest take on an old story.

The fertilizer fuels the growth of toxic algae blooms that suck the oxygen from the water and create massive dead zones. "The environmental devastation – increasing blooms and a consistently growing dead zone – has been well documented for decades," Calderon reports. "But changes in the way rain falls, as explained in a yearlong USA Today investigation, have set the stage for things to get much worse, many scientists now believe. The warming planet is bringing more precipitation overall, and more downpours in particular, to the same U.S. regions that grow a majority of America’s fertilizer-dependent crops."

Champaign County, Illinois
(Wikipedia map)

The investigation focused on Champaign County, Illinois, which sheds some of the most surplus nitrogen fertilizer in the nation. After analyzing spring precipitation and nitrogen levels in the nearby Spoon River between 2014 and 2020, "the analysis found that the kinds of extreme rainfall events made more common by a warming planet cause three times as much fertilizer runoff than other rain events and contribute to an outsized share of it in the waterways," Calderon reports.

Most of the nitrogen spikes in the river happened after a rainfall, and the three heaviest storms alone accounted for one-third of all the nitrogen measured in the seven-year period. "The findings mirror a larger study conducted by several researchers that found heavy rain across the Mississippi River Basin also contributed to one-third of the nitrogen flushed to the Gulf of Mexico. This heavy rain happens in just nine days per year.," Calderon reports.

Though the Gulf of Mexico dead zone is the best-known example, runoff-fueled algae blooms are happening in rivers and lakes all over the U.S. The algae not only hurt people and aquatic life, but also emit the greenhouse gas methane. The Environmental Protection Agency "recently found the emissions from blooms could increase 30% to 90% in the next century," Calderon reports. "It’s a devastating feedback loop. Algae blooms contribute to global warming, which increases rainfall [east of the Mississippi River], which then exacerbates fertilizer runoff."

Trump boat parades last summer resulted in injuries and accidents; some boaters want to organize more this summer

A 2020 rally at Lake Travis in Texas, where five boats capsized
(Photo by Bob Daemmerich)

Trump supporters across the nation staged many boat parades in lakes and rivers last summer, but law-enforcement officials, rally organizers and boaters say the events were often disorganized and a major source of boating accidents, Jose Pagliery reports for The Daily Beast. That could happen again this summer.

"In Tennessee alone, the state’s database shows that Trump flotillas made up a third of all 'congested water' accidents there last year," Pagliery reports. "National figures aren’t available that identify events as Trump flotillas, but a state-by-state review of incident reports in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas showed that most accidents never made the news." 

It's been difficult to find information on Trump boat parade accidents because "some government agencies claim to be missing records of publicly reported disasters. One docked boat sank into the St. Croix River in Wisconsin during a Labor Day weekend parade there, according to the local CBS Minnesota station, but the state’s Natural Resources Department said it has no log of an incident there that day," Pagliery reports. "The vast majority of the parades we reviewed took place on dammed bodies of water managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which issues permits. But it did not respond to questions or provide data."

Inexperienced or inattentive boaters were a big part of the problem, according to Rob Crafa, the waterfront director at the State University of New York’s Maritime College. "When you have boat parades like rallies, the energy there creates a different vibe," Crafa told Pagliery. "People standing in parts of the boat where they’re not supposed to, flags that may limit visibility for the operator of the boat, and if there’s loud music, bright sun, maybe alcohol involved … all these factors contributed to dangerous situations."

The choppiness of the water is another culprit, said George Birdwell, an investigator with Tennessee's Wildlife Resources Agency. "Big boats show up, and they try to go slow. But they’re still throwing a big wake, and small boats show up too, and they have to deal with those large wakes," he told Pagliery. That has caused injuries—some requiring hospitalization—and damage to boats. 

The boat parades, which President Trump reportedly loves, are still happening and may continue. Every Trump boater Pagliery interviewed said they're working on bringing them back.

Wildfires threaten rural areas with expensive, lingering damage to water utilities

"When wildfires spread across California, they leave a cascade of water problems in their wake: Some communities have their drinking water poisoned by toxic substances. Others wrestle with ash and debris washed into reservoirs and lakes. And many living in remote stretches of the state struggle with accessing enough water to fight fires," Rachel Becker reports for Cal Matters. "Drinking water has been contaminated with hazardous chemicals after at least three California wildfires in recent years: in Santa Rosa after the Tubbs Fire in 2017, in Paradise after the Camp Fire in 2018 and now in parts of the San Lorenzo Valley burned by the CZU Lightning Complex Fires that began in August."

Fixing the damaged water systems can cost up to $150 million for a single small town, Becker reports.

Further complicating matters, "Towns and water agencies also are grappling with advice to give residents in fire-ravaged areas, who are confused by warnings that seem to continuously change about whether their water is safe," Becker reports. "In a state already plagued by water shortages, the problems in rural California are likely to happen again and again as climate change primes the West to burn."

Current drinking-water regulations can't handle the scope of California's problems, said one state official. “The Safe Drinking Water Act doesn’t have a clause like, ‘This is what you do in a fire when a community is completely burned to the ground," Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the State Water Resources Control Board’s Division of Drinking Water, told Becker.

Southern states, feds step up campaign against Asian carp

Photo from Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee

State and federal fish and wildlife agencies have spent about $607 million altogether to stop the spread of Asian carp since 2004. As more Southern states try to stop the invasive species, that total is expected to hit about $1.5 billion over the next decade.

"That’s more than five times the amount predicted in 2007 when a national carp management plan was crafted, and no end is in sight. Programs aim to reduce established populations and prevent further spreading, but wildlife officials concede they may never be able to eradicate the prolific fish," Travis Loller and John Flesher report for ABC News.

The invaders reproduce rapidly, and can kill off native species by eating or outcompeting them. That endangers fishing industries, habitats and tourism. Most of the money so far has been spent on apparently successful efforts at keeping them out of the Great Lakes, but "less money and attention have been paid to the carp’s virtually unchecked spread east and west into the Missouri and Ohio rivers, among others," Loller and Flesher report. But as the fish become increasingly well-established in the Mississippi River watershed, more Southern states are trying to keep them out of lakes.

In late November, state and federal officials began testing some creative tactics to keep carp out of Lake Barkley and nearby Kentucky Lake, including using electric pulses and huge nets to capture them, along with flashing white lights, low-level noises and streams of bubbles to scare the fish away.
Kentucky officials have been especially proactive in trying to get the carp out of the twin lakes, a major tourist destination near the Mississippi River. Last year the state partnered with a processor, Two Rivers Fisheries, to sell Asian carp abroad since the species are popular menu items in China. The program pays local fishers for their Asian carp catches. Kentucky anglers brought in 6 million pounds last year, Loller and Flesher report.

Selling the fish has had limited success, since Chinese buyers like them fresh. Angie Yu, president of Two Rivers, said she's trying to sell in Europe and the Middle East, Loller and Flesher report.

Fertilizer use poses environmental risks, even climate change, but state-based regulation hasn't proven effective

Orange area is annual "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico,
caused mainly by fertilizer in Mississippi River watershed.
(Image from four-minute video by Grist)

Fertilizer has caused more environmental problems in recent years, and regulation by states has been ineffective, Joe Wertz reports for The Center for Public Integrity's nonprofit newsroom.

"In America’s Corn Belt and around the world, some of the fertilizer applied to fields escapes the soil in new forms that contaminate and warm the planet. Some of these compounds enter the atmosphere as a potent greenhouse gas that’s now at its highest concentration in the last 800,000 years, helping fuel climate problems like the flooding that upended farmers’ lives last spring," Wertz reports. "Other fertilizer byproducts contaminate water wells, especially in agricultural areas, where the U.S. Geological Survey says one in five has levels exceeding federal health limits. These contaminants also wash into streams, rivers and lakes, where they become what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls 'one of America’s most widespread, costly and challenging environmental problems.'"

Farmers are using 40 times more nitrogen than they did 75 years ago, and though EPA has advised limiting its use for years, states have most of the authority and have preferred to depend on voluntary cooperation instead of laws that enforce compliance. "An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, Grist and The World found that when states do try to regulate farms and reduce pollution linked to fertilizer, rules are often derailed or softened after industry pushback and political pressure," Wertz reports.

The video with the report emphasizes one solution: cover crops that keep rain and snow from hitting bare soil and leaching its nutrients into streams. It says only 4 percent of U.S. cropland is planted in cover crops after harvests. It cites a cover-crop experiment in the small watershed of the William Baker Ditch in northern Indiana, which reduced runoff by half, nitrates 20% and phosphorus 70%.

Ohio farmers support new state program to reduce fertilizer runoff into Lake Erie that causes toxic algae blooms

A July 30, 2019, satellite photo of Maumee Bay shows a toxic
algae bloom at the western end of Lake Erie. (NASA photo)

"Ohio farmers say they're on board with the state's plans to slow agricultural runoff into Lake Erie, which Gov. Mike DeWine has said is the biggest contributor to toxic algae blooms," Karen Kasler reports for the Statehouse News Bureau, which reports on state government and statewide issues.

Much of the $172 million allocated by the new "H2Ohio" fund will cover startup costs for farmers who agree to start using certain science-based practices that will reduce phosphorus runoff, including soil testing, crop rotation, using cover crops, and allowing buffers at the edge of fields, Kasler reports.

The program is notable because farmers and other agribusiness interests like the Ohio Farm Bureau, which tend to oppose government intervention into agricultural practices, are joining environmental activists and conservationists in supporting the plan. "Farmers had pushed back on an attempt to toughen regulations on agriculture in an executive order from former Gov. John Kasich last year," Kasler reports. "That led to Kasich's decision to fire Agriculture Director David Daniels just before Kasich left office."

Scott Higgins, CEO of the Ohio Dairy Producers Association, said this program is different. "By recognizing the needs to have the financial support to implement some of those best management practices, we now have a much better chance of even coming close to achieving the stated goal that the state of Ohio has set," Higgins told Kasler.

Fish & Wildlife employs bubbles, noise to thwart Asian carp

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service officials are testing some creative tactics in the battle to keep Asian carp out of Barkley Lake in Kentucky and Tennessee, with an eye toward using the system elsewhere if it works. The new Bio-Acoustic Fish Fence (BAFF) at Barkley Lock will use flashing white lights, low-level noises and streams of bubbles to frighten the fish away. FWS officials say the deterrents pose no threat to boaters, Shelley Byrne reports for The Waterways Journal Weekly.

"The fish fence is part of a three-year experiment in which biologists will track bighead silver carp fitted with transmitters to see if the BAFF limits their passage from the Cumberland River into Barkley Lake," Byrne reports. West Coast fisheries use a similar system with trout and salmon.

Rob Simmonds, a fish biologist at the regional FWS office in Bloomington, Minn., told Byrne that officials are still installing some survey parts and other last-minute actions, but the primary structures are in place and working. FWS "turned on the fence Oct. 21 on the downstream side of the lock in Grand Rivers, Ky. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ended navigation closures that were in conjunction with the construction Oct. 30," Byrne reports. "The structure’s christening is scheduled for Nov. 8," this Friday.

Simmonds said Lake Barkley was an ideal place to test the system since there is already an Asian carp population and Kentucky has been aggressive in trying to address the problem. If it works well, other agencies will likely want to replicate it, Byrne reports.

"The project cost roughly $7 million and was funded through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative through the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee’s Asian Carp Action Plan" and FWS base funding, Byrne reports. "The project involves multiple agencies and partners, including USFWS, the Nashville Engineer District, the Kentucky Fish & Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency."

Wildlife officials recommend you kill this air-breathing, invasive fish on sight. We say: 'Cook 'em up!'

Northern snakehead fish (Getty Images photo by William Cain)

Georgia wildlife officials are trying to figure out how to prevent an invasive species of fish, the northern snakehead, from spreading to other rivers and lakes in the state. The problem is, it can breathe air. That allows it to travel over small stretches of land to other bodies of water, Lateshia Beachum reports for The Washington Post.

A northern snakehead was caught earlier this month in a pond in Gwinnett County, near Atlanta; it's the first time the species has been found in the state, but it has been reported in 14 other states and is abundant near the Chesapeake Bay. It's native to eastern Asia and was sold in American pet stores and live-food fish markets before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banned it in 2002. "Invasive fish like the northern snakehead are often introduced through unauthorized release, according to Georgia wildlife authorities. In Georgia, it’s illegal to import, transport, sell, transfer and have any species of snakehead without a valid wildlife license," Beachum reports.

The northern snakehead can grow to three feet and weigh up to 18 pounds. Because it's a voracious predator with a varied diet, it's well-placed to crowd out native species, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. "Should the species succeed in establishing more populations of predatory offspring, it could alter food webs and ecological systems that could leave a permanent change to other species in water bodies," Beachum reports.

"Wildlife officials in Georgia are asking anglers to learn how to identify, kill and photograph the fish and reporting their catch to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife Resources Division Fisheries office," Beachum reports. Bonus: since northern snakeheads are pretty nutritious, fishermen can help the local ecosystem and take care of dinner in one shot. We suggest a nice cornmeal dredge.

Blue-green 'algae' blooms threaten dogs and livestock

Blue-green algae (Kansas State University Extension photo)

This time of year, it's normal to see a scum of algae in lakes and ponds; be careful about letting your dog or livestock come into contact with such water. Blue-green cyanobacteria, often referred to as algae, can kill. Two North Carolina women learned that when all three of their dogs died after swimming in a pond laden with the stuff.

"The health threats to animals range from skin rashes to neurological problems. The blooms can release toxins that can cause liver damage, lead to respiratory paralysis or produce other fatal conditions," Christine Hauser reports for The New York Times. "Intense blooms have led to swimming bans from lakes in the Pacific Northwest to the entire Mississippi seacoast, to Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey’s largest lake. Algal blooms tend to thrive in high temperatures and after heavy rains carry fertilizer runoff and sewage into waterways."

Blue-green cyanobacteria can go undetected below the water's surface or dry up in crusts onshore, so check carefully before allowing your dog or livestock to go swimming, wallowing or drinking, Hauser reports. The blooms may vary in color to gray, red or brown, and can establish themselves quickly in a pond, A.J. Tarpoff reports for Drovers. Click here for tips on how to sample and remedy blue-green "algae" in your water.

"Dangerous algal blooms are a 'major environmental problem' in all 50 states, and scientists believe they will continue to wreak havoc on U.S. waterways with the rising threat of climate change, according to the Environmental Protection Agency," Katie Mettler reports for The Washington Post. "Red-tide algal blooms have killed marine life on the Florida and Mississippi coasts."