At El Paso Times, “Quenching the Future”
“We live in the desert. There’s not much water.” But the bigger story turned out to be more complex.
If you live, work, or farm around El Paso, Texas, here’s the bad news: The Rio Grande Basin is drying up.
As the region’s population grows, as agriculture intensifies, and as extreme drought persists, El Paso’s water is disappearing. By the end of the century, water supplies in the Rio Grande from all sources will decrease by about a third, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The river’s big reservoir at Elephant Butte, New Mexico, is less than 10% full.
Bob Moore, editor of the El Paso Times, had been looking for a distinctive way into this story, which he knew would knew would shape the region for years to come. Now, he’s found it: “Quenching our Future,” a five-part solutions-oriented examination of the region’s water supply, launched in November 2014.
At first, “I thought the outlines [of the water story] were clear,” Marty Schladen, the lead reporter on “Quenching,” mused as the series began. “We live in the desert. There’s not much water. We waste too much. Instead of managing the Rio Grande Basin as a whole, Texas and New Mexico usually just sue each other.”
It turns out to be a lot more complex. Per-capita water use in El Paso has dropped 41% since the 1970s, yielding the lowest consumption rate in the state. But that conservation success has been offset by a doubling of the city’s population. Meanwhile, agriculture saps up 80% of the region’s water — and irrigation is determined, as Schladen observes, by “a tangle of laws, interstate compacts and treaties that were written at a time when the government saw the West as an arid wasteland in need of settlement.” Those old policies “did a poor job of anticipating a time when there might not be enough water — no matter how far you diverted it or how many mountain ranges you pumped it over.”
Meantime, a period of unusually wet weather has ended, creating the prospect of increasingly dire water scarcity in a region that’s not set up to accommodate more than incremental measures. How could the Times help El Paso navigate that challenging future?
“Quenching the Future” began by forcefully articulating the problem. “People who live in the Rio Grande Basin will have to take dramatic steps if they hope to have a future that involves more than just dust,” Schladen wrote in the first article of the series.
Then, the Times took a startling detour. For his second article, Schladen and photographer Mark Lambie, with KINT-TV reporter Benjamin Zamora, traveled to Australia (a trip funded by the Solutions Journalism Network with support from the Rockefeller Foundation). The Murray Darling Basin in southeastern Australia looks a lot like the American Southwest. The climate is similar, as is the agricultural economy. Like Texas, the region endured a staggering drought — the six-year-long “Big Dry” that literally stopped rivers from flowing.
Australian policy-makers have put in place a series of measures to “drought-proof” the nation. A ministerial council was formed to bridge federal, state and regional governments — manage the basin as a whole, instead of letting parochial interests battle it out. To stem agricultural overuse, the council imposed caps on the amounts of water that could be diverted from the rivers. At the same time, the Council of Australian Governments “unbundled” water from the land: “They substituted tradable water entitlements for the traditional water rights that had been permanently attached to land titles,” Schladen wrote. “That, eventually, led to what many experts say is the most-developed water trading system in the world.” The federal government is also investing billions to improve irrigation infrastructure.
Could all that work in Texas? No one knows for sure. But by introducing the Australian model, explaining how it has worked and acknowledging the challenges and trade-offs, the Times has brought a new potential narrative into a often-bitter public discourse that’s long been stuck in gridlock. The Australian example, ironically, may prove more accessible and less threatening to farmers and others in the Rio Grande Valley, precisely because it’s at once so similar and so far away.
A third article returned “Quenching the Future” to Texas, focusing on efforts by the El Paso Water Utility to recycle city waste water by 2018. The closing features, both of which appeared in December 2014, examined environmental impact of the overexploitation of the basin’s groundwater and considered public policy alternatives in advance of the state legislature’s next session. The Times held a number of events, including a public forum featuring a panel of local officials, that connected its journalism to constructive public conversations on the issue.
Water scarcity is a story that won’t end with the next good rain. And it’s an opportunity to create enormous regional impact with credible reporting on solutions that could work. Schladen says: “We have to make a commitment to ride this horse for a long time.”
Originally published December 16, 2014
