This is Paul Hurt of Arizona State University with Jennifer Sweeney,
research Associate at Arizona State University. And we are interviewing
with Jack Schmidt in Logan Utah on June 11th of 2018, Jack. Thanks for
joining us today. Thanks. Can you just start out by giving us your full
name, the positions that you held in the Adaptive Management Program over
time and the years in which you were involved.
Um Well, my legal name is John C Schmidt. I go by Jack. Um
I I I only served, I served in an official capacity with the program as
chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center from
August 2012,
2011. August 2011.
No, I just, I'm going through the numbers, but that doesn't work out.
August 2011 until November 1st of 2014.
Um but you were involved, but I have long so the longer involvement um
I did my first river research trip in uh spring of 1984
Colorado River, my first river research trip in Grand Canyon um with the
US GS to help and look for a um research opportunity
I was subsequently funded. That's its own story. Um And I did my first
research trip affiliated with the US GS
in the in May of 1985.
I um
pursued my dissertation, completed that in 1987
stayed working for the US GS. Another approximately
nine months um took my an academic position.
Uh was that here at Middlebury College in Vermont, um stayed active um
at a time when I was not getting any direct funding from the program in
the late 19 eighties. And that's its own story. Um
uh served as a sediment
as an advisor on sediment and geomorphology issues to Duncan Patton, who
was senior scientist, right? And so you're a geologist by the, I'm a
geomorphology geologist. OK. So I did have an active position then, but
that was before um
the Adaptive Management Program existed. Um
I guess the back up in the late 19 eighties before I went to Middlebury, I
was part of the team that wrote the phase one final report of the G CCS
program. So I was that sediment guy. Um So then I served as an advisor to
Duncan in the early 19 nineties. So I was involved extensively in the
development of the interim flow recommendations
in the early 19 nineties. Um
The conception of the Grand Canyon Protection Act, the discussions that
went on behind the scenes that ultimately led to the um creation of the
Adaptive Management Program. I was one of a group of probably five people
who originally thought of the idea of controlled floods
and worked extensively in the early 19 nineties to get that implemented.
Um Once the Adaptive Management Program was created, and GCMRC was created
and after the first flood was occurred, I actually had more mo more
limited
involvement I would occasion. I mean, I knew what was going on my grad
students. I mean, I've had, I've been involved in lots of ways and
continued to write papers. Um And so I had probably a reduced involvement
as somebody who was um
part of the academic, the funded academic group um until I uh became chief.
Um Yeah.
Mhm When you were,
I forgot my question, I had a question right in my mind and it, and it
just slipped out the window. So we'll just go to question number two then.
Um So, oh, I was gonna ask you when you came to Utah State University for
September of 1991 91. And um were you doing research uh along the river in
a canyon? When the floods of, I think that was 1993 there were some large
floods that came through, is that about the time that you started thinking
that we should maybe create some artificial floods because of your
observation of the effects of some of those large El Nino type flood
events?
No, that, that's not really how it worked. Um
So
um God, this is so hard to tell this. You know, it's such an involved.
Tell me like two or three, I'm tempted to just tell you historical subject
from the start. All right. Well, well, the next question was um uh which
of the three main components of the program were you mostly involved in
that scientific research would be? Uh And then policy and management is
the second component and social and institutional engagement like state
represented, representing stakeholders as a third. Did you do all three?
Um Certainly the first two, all the time. Um
um
Let me just try to tell you my story. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Um
uh You know, the, the program has evolved when, when the program um I gave
it, I gave a talk this um in Flagstaff just last month on sort of the
history of scientific ideas in Grand Canyon and how they've evolved and
what their, what their research focus. No, but I can give you the
powerpoint slide. That would be great. Um So if you look back at the 19
seventies and you look at the uh inception uh G CE S, it was focused on
the effects of hydropower generation on the downstream environment. Yeah.
Um And the lawsuit that created G CE S was all about what's gonna be the
effect of bigger fluctuations, you know, and then, you know, it, it, it
morphed into um one of the large scale operational effects of the Dam. Um
and uh the, the most notable incident that I remember from going well, I
was just a guy who'd gone back later in life to get a phd. I was gonna do
a dissertation in Montana and I wanted to go back home to Montana after I
got my dissertation done and through a set of connections, uh an
influential fellow in the US GS. Um and friend of mine, uh when I said to
him, are there any other dissertation topics you can think that I might
want to work on? And he said, well, I think we can get you and we could
get you involved in this brand new program that the US GS is gonna get
involved in, in Grand Keynes. And um was that before the GCMRC? This is a
19 0, this is, this is uh uh this is a decade before. OK. Yeah. And I
never looked back and that's what I did. Um, you know, and at that point
in the program in the early, you know, 19 eighties when G CE S was created
, you basically had this um unwanted irrelevant fish biologist who, you
know, they sent out who they let go to Flagstaff to go run something that
reclamation considered harmless. Was this Duncan Patton? No, no, Wagner
Dave Wagner, of course, I mean, he was a fish biologist and meanwhile,
because all of that would be harmless and stuff that really mattered like
modeling sediment transport or something was gonna be done by the US GS in
the traditional alliance between reclamation and US GS. That has been part
of those agencies history for a century. And it's a testament to the fact
that reclamation thought every this was all pretty irrelevant by the fact
that they would let somebody go to Flagstaff and create an office. Little.
Did they know what, what would happen? So to placate
the um
environmental interests, there were nominal questions listed like what
will be the long term fate of sandbars.
But, and so I showed up at the US GS and they said, well, we don't know
what you would do, but here are some questions we're supposed to answer.
So I said, OK, I'll work on the sandbar question. I, after I looked around
Grand Canyon, I um
wrote a grant proposal, submitted it to Wagner. Wagner said he would fund
it. Then the US GS said, well, if you're gonna be funded to work on this,
then you'll work for us. So I as a graduate student out of Johns Hopkins
ended up saying, OK, I'll do my dissertation through um the US G. It's not
because they care. I mean, just because they demanded it. And um and so I
did my dissertation as a hydrologist for the US GS as a graduate student
completing this dissertation.
And I had, um and there was a US GS uh scientist who was nominally my boss
and we were, I mean, she administered it and we did, there's all sorts of
, you know, we wouldn't get out of here if I started doing it. Is that all
in Flagstaff? Ironically, I, when I headed back to Arizona to start that,
I assumed I'd be living in Flagstaff. But the state office of the US GS
was in Tucson. And so I was told I was living in Tucson, which is
something about sort of the control and sensitivity of these things. But
we're so with that woman, I'm out on the river one time. And what was
distinctive about is that we had the great 1983 floods and then we had
really high releases in 1984 and 1985.
And um
I was down on a U on, you know what somebody else's Us GS trip just
helping. And I were making some comment after a couple of days about our
need to study what this 45,000 cubic foot per second flow was doing to the
river. And this person dressed me down and in no uncertain terms, she said
to me, we will not study this. We have a responsibility to study what is
the effect of increasing the range of power peaking from a high, high
releases of 31,000 to high releases of 33,500 CFS. And that's what we'll
study.
So why do you think uh she was that rigid about the, because that was,
that was what reclamation said. I mean, so it's, it's a reminder that um
the focus was on Hydro Peking and the high flows of the eighties were um
not understood, well, were viewed as a, um, we were viewed as a, um, an
anomaly
and not, and really just an impediment to study what needed to be studied.
That's how much the issue has moved over time. And, um, so, I mean, I did
my thing in the, in the midst of that in late 1985 and early 1986
reclamation had to schedule a special period of hydro peaking so that we
could measure what its effects were.
And they didn't want to hydro peak.
They didn't wanna uh they didn't want to, um they didn't wanna uh hydro
peak because they had so much water, they wanted to get out of the
reservoir and they had so much snow in the mountains and they scheduled
this four month period and we measured and studied it and in fact, they
bailed 3.5 months into the study because it was snowing again and they
needed to abandon it. So the important thing is that those studies went on
explicitly to study the effects of hydro peaking and the issue was too
much water and it completely changed the operations.
And um but it's a, it's a focus that everything was about hydro peaking.
Of course, the other goofiness it was about how do we preserve a trout
fishery? You know, it was, you know, the, um, I mean, there's all, you
know, and, oh, hydro peaking must be bad for trout because, uh, trout
spawning is adversely effective when the reds are dried every so. So this
complete hodgepodge of, of, um, of different values. So, anyway, um, that
it was the National Research Council. We, well, so I like other scientists
at that time, although we were increasingly aware of what had the floods
done. There was this drive that we focused on hydropic.
And so there was a drive that we looked at, understood our science in the
context of um what would limiting hydro peaking do to make for less
erosion. And there were lots of studies done by lots of people that sort
of looked at at those issues.
It took some external reviewers from the National Research Council to
point out that the issues of erosion and maintaining sandbars can't just
be about limiting Agrope. You've got to also rebuild those deposits. And I
mean, my research contributed, you know, um um
let's stop for a minute. This is a problem with Mesa. She's just
completely ramp. Um Let's just take a quick second. I'm gonna take her,
I'm gonna take this where you were um floods. So the National Research
Council
observed that
uh reminded us all that any geologic deposit and its status at any time is
both a result of the history of erosion, but also the history of
deposition and that river deposits do have to go underwater at some time
if they're gonna ever be rebuilt. And um
and in the early nineties,
the, the um the innovative discussions
were held in Duncan's offices
amongst um some key people.
And um
those people were
N Andrews of the US, Gs,
Jim Smith of the US Gs Dick Marz off of the US GS
uh Dave Rubin of the US GS.
Uh And myself
and I would say that probably at the beginning, Ruben and I were the most
skeptical and I would say that um Andrews and Smith and Marzo were more um
strongly advocating for floods from the get go. And um so I'm always
careful to say, I'm lucky enough to be part of a group of people who
conceived of this and nobody yet, no one person ever dreams these things
up. Um I'm not gonna go through the history of all that went on in the
early nineties. I, are you familiar? There's a book called The Controlled
Flooding Grand Canyon that uh is an eu monograph that is uh Robert H Webb.
It's Web Schmidt in Valdez. I think I'm not sure it's something like that
published in 1999.
It's an a gu monograph.
I mean, it's certainly one of the seminal publications of the, the Control
Flooding Grand Canon. It's certainly one of the seminal publications of
the program. And um um I wrote a chapter in that book called The History
of the Control Flood. You know, how it came to be and, and, and
everybody's a co-author, including Wagner. And so, rather than walk
through all of that, I mean, that's published and that's gone through peer
review. Um But what's important there is is that, you know, I tell the
story. That's an idea that came out as scientists
and the guys at the US GS in the early nineties would propose that every
year, uh Larry Stevens was very much against the idea of the flood. Dave
Wagner was very much against the idea of the flood and they fought it
behind the scenes relentlessly every year. Is that because they assume
that floods would only cause erosion and not deposition. Do you think it
was a mix of, of well intentioned scientific reasons and um who was in
political control?
And um when it was proposed as a US GS led science effort, um
Wagner fought hard against it. And so we were almo and, and we would use
to, I mean, in the early nineties, we would sort of year after year, we
would sort of conceive of who was gonna do what. And so, um and the film
at that time was coming from one, it was helter skelter US GS was
investing money. Some of the, I mean, uh in, in the late 19 eighties, I
led to winter research trips to measure sandbar erosion in the late
eighties funded on the backs of tuition from kids in Middlebury because
Wagner wouldn't give me a dime because pe, you know, it's a, it's a sad
thing about Grand Canyon. I mean, everybody fights for the money, the
agencies all want to be in control. You know, there's a, there's a
difficulty of who's gonna be, you know, just who, I mean, political
control is just the big thing. What, whatever the case, I think that I
write about that in a more politically acceptable way, you know, in this
article that I wrote, but the reality is after two or three years of
failed efforts to get the flood implemented because you had to line up all
the politics and all that. Finally enough people thought it was their idea
and how do you get anything done in the world? You got to convince other
people that it's their idea. And if you go around now, I could tell you,
NGO people who think they dreamed up the flood and different people and
agencies who used to run agencies for all. I know they think they dreamed
up the flood and that's all fine. But we're on, we're on record that. I
mean, that flood idea arose probably in 92 or something and it took us
four years to get that implemented and, you know, and it occurred in 96.
So that was the first quote unquote high flow event,
which is just administrative godly book, it's a controlled flood. But for
, you know, the one other thing that just in the past that's not written
about, I should say is that in the late 19 eighties,
um, on one of those win on the first winter trip when we were down there
after the high flows of the eighties, we've gone into high hydro peaking
in the late eighties. Um, I mean, I couldn't get any money out of
reclamation to work there anymore. So I would go there in the winter
because I still cared about it.
Um And uh there was lots of erosion going on. And so one night sitting at
Eminence break camp in Marble Canyon after days of, you know, a week of
measuring this stuff we got sitting around the fire, we got, um we got
worked up and so we sort of conceived of and wrote in my field book, um
uh the Beach Bill called It To Protect the Beach as the Grand Canyon. And
that was uh me and my students,
uh Dave Rubin, Johnny Moore in the University of Montana, Tom Moody, uh
Dan Dirk, uh both river guides. Um And we sort of collectively wrote this
thing and why was it like that would have been in uh probably January of
89? And for how long had you known that the dam operations were leading to
the loss, the erosion and loss of beaches? Was that just a few years No,
no, no, no, no, no, no. That's a longer history. I mean, the first
scientific article that the first scientific article that described that
erosion was published in 1974.
So the perception that hydro peaking played a role in that erosion um went
way back. The issue is now very nuanced in that. Um We now understand that
hydro peaking plays
some role. But it's also clear, you know, it's bigger issues, the sediment
mass balance, the absence of supply, things like that. But ju just to go
back just cause these pieces of the administrative history are important.
We came out of that and I got back to my office in Middlebury. I got on
the phone to Ed Norton, the head of the Grand Canyon Trust. He told me to
get lost that they didn't need any legislation that they were gonna work
with reclamation to get an environmental impact statement produced. So I
don't take no for an answer. So then I contacted Tom Jensen who was the
chief of staff for the Senate Natural Resources Committee and said, um you
know, this is uh this is what's needed. He was sympathetic. I wrote him a
letter to, you know, typed up the whole thing from my field books
corresponded with him and then work all of that spring to write a report,
you know, Middlebury
College Department of Geology Series number one or something describing
all that. And then um
it turned out ironically that Bill Senator Bill Bradley was the
convocation speaker at Middlebury that spring. So we all waited around, we
see on the Natural Resources Committee, he was the chairman, he was the
chairman, he was Jen and Jensen, of course, goes on to become, he leaves
the Senate that and becomes head of Grand Canyon Trust after. But, but so
anyway, and, and this was all led out of by Dan Beard and Tom Jensen to
get the Grand Canyon protection. Anyway. So in May at Middlebury, uh we
had the glossy report and we, um, and the pre in the university college
let us do this and I had three students, you know, with me and we stood
behind the bleachers and Bradley gets out of the limo coming down from the
Burlington airport and, you know, we all shake hands and he, you know,
Bill Bradley is a big, imposing basketball player and at some point, you
know, I just, you know, everybody sort of stammers for a minute and then I
sort of kick the kid next to me and, well, Senator Bradley, we know you're
a great friend of the environment and we've been working in the Grand
Canyon. We wanted to share with you this report in which we describe the
sandbar erosion in Grand Canyon. We'd like you to be. And so then we said
a few things and Bradley said, you know, it's some nice things and on, we
went and little did I know that within the month he flew out to Grand
Canyon to do a field review with Grand Canyon Trust and he got off the
plane with our report having been circled and said, what's going on? And I
have somewhere in my files, a letter of thank you from Tom Jensen telling
me, you know, I, when the Grand Canyon Protection Act was passed, no one
that I played a role in getting that going. Now it's like everything else
, everybody else claims their own credit for it. But I know that in the
late eighties, I kept the idea alive.
And that's my style, my style is that I call it the way I see it, but I
just don't write a science report. I go somewhere with it anyway. So
that's just that piece of that story. Um
uh So,
so um the other thing that went on in the mid 19 nineties as the Adaptive
Management Program was being created
was um that um those of us who were senior scientists at that time began
to realize that the program was pretty aimless and trying to be all things
to all people. And
so we got together and wrote what is surely one of the most influential
papers that guides the program uh called Science and Values
in the Grand Canyon or Science and Values in restoring the Grand Canyon
that was published in bioscience in 1998.
And, and you know that was, it's Schmidt and all, but it's Schmidt and
Webb and Valdez and Marzo and Stevens.
Um And it basically says we can give you any kind of Colorado River and
Grand Canyon that you want. And the problem is in science, you just have
to decide what you want and we don't think, you know what you want
and, you know, and that paper is still read that, I mean, that paper is
read around the country by classes still and that paper is read, um, you
know, by, by people who understand the history of these issues ever since.
Um
So in some ways,
um
can I go back to that for a second? Because I had, I read that in, in the
um memo that you sent me that you wrote in 2014 as you were leaving and I
was struck by that quote. I think it's really uh uh profound. And I was
gonna ask you if you would elaborate a little bit on that. Um When, when
you were there in the early years, what, what did people want from a
program? And how did that change over time? Did we ever get clarity? Um or
was it always a model, uh did it change as values or policies change? Well
, how do you see the evolution of that whole challenge?
You know, it's interesting when I teach courses in this stuff, I often say
that um
when you tell the history of water development in the West. And you tell
the story about how in the 19 fifties, the key decisions about building
dams and diversions were made by the technical elite, technical elite of
engineers, lawyers, civic boosters, corporate agriculture. Isn't this a
much better world that now everybody's at the table and then you turn it
on students and say, well, is it really a better world or if we just made
the world infinitely more model? Um
uh At the time I I in, in the, in
Wagner had a clear directive that I think came out of
uh administrative guidance and maybe even out of court rulings, I'm not
sure he surely knows this stuff by heart. So the issues were sandbars,
trout, endangered fish, maybe riparian vegetation. II, I think those are
the four or no or maybe it's recreation, it's a, you know, maybe ri you
know, maybe it's four or maybe it's five. It's damn simple. Now, there was
now,
you know, probably the G ce S phase one taught us more about what we
didn't know than what we knew.
Um
But whatever the case, we were forced to make little matrices where you
had some kind of operational decision, some environmental outcome and you
had pluses and minuses or you don't know. Um And I think that that's where
the perception that not everything benefited by the same operational
decision started to like become clear to people, but it wasn't until that
bioscience article that we made a huge table and systematically put pluses
and minuses. And then it became clear that there was no operational scheme
that benefited everything. And if there was no operational scheme that
benefited everything, then you darn well, better know
what you wanted. And so then an idea that's in that article that
I get credit for because I'm the senior author and I've got a lot of
mileage at it. But the idea was Dick Marzo, not mine was he coined the
terms relic resources and artifact resources, relics of the past and
artifacts of dams and, and, and Dick thought this up and then I, you know
, we all jump, you know how we all reconnected them, right? And I've
gotten so much mileage out of this and so many slides and so many talks, I
can't even keep track of them in which you, so we had those ideas, right?
That, you know, folks, some of the environmental resources down there are
the relics of the past and other resources are artifacts of dams. The most
obvious being trout, recreational trout fishery as an artifact. That so
then
I will confess um that I got quite f first when the Adaptive Management
Program was first created, I got from afar. I got quite frustrated by it
because it just instantly wanted to make everything more complicated. And
so then, um you have all these stakeholders and all these stakeholders
have their pet resources, they care about and then
I
good. This is all fun.
Um uh um
There is a focus in these adaptive management programs and these
stakeholder processes and people getting along. And I used to flippantly
criticize the program because I would cynically say that, you know, it
became this whole trust building exercise and fall backwards into each
other's arms to learn to trust the other person and all this stuff that
goes on and nobody would make hard nosed decisions. And so what happened
was a set of object. And then let's get all the stakeholders to write
objectives of the program. And they, so this became cannon fodder for me
giving talks because I would show a slide in which all these objectives
would be listed, all written by the stakeholders and there was 16 or 20 of
them or something. I don't know. And then the next slide, I would just
have the same list except, you know, in one color would be relics of the
past and the other color would be artifacts of the dam and under artifacts
, dam would be a recreational trout fishery and maximum hydropower
production and secure water supply. And, and, and then it was just like,
and then, you know, well, folks, you can't do this. This is not a hard
problem. We can do really sophisticated science, but it isn't actually
that hard a problem for starters. We can't do all this. We need to make a
tougher decision because you're saying basically you can trade off, you,
you can't have it all. Somebody's gonna win, somebody's gonna lose and
what and what? Yeah. And so, so, so where I began to, so I became, I guess
a critiquer
of the program
um to go back is that because you wanted them to start making trade offs
and making decisions and it was taking too long to establish. I don't, I
mean, I have, I have my personal biases of what I'd like planet Earth to
look like, but I don't get to choose how many
billion people live on the earth's surface or how many 100 millions live
in the United States. And, and I mean, you can't have this, you know,
magical natural paradise and have however many people we have. So
tradeoffs are gonna have to be made. Um I just felt like tough decisions
weren't the, there was tough thinking that was, we had made such progress
in the early nineties to get to the idea of the controlled flood and then
we were losing it because everybody cared about just how they all got
along and which was delaying decisions.
I don't know. Uh government moves so slow. I don't know. I just, I just
wasn't a big fan of that. But um I would say that, you know, my experience
and the experience the, the early 19 nineties were a unique time. They
were a unique time because
um I, I flippantly sometimes refer to that as those were the years when
the traditional water managers and reclamation lost control of the dam.
And this small group of scientists sitting in Duncan Patton's office
actually just sat around and dreamed up. Oh, let's have interim operations.
Let's reduce the range of fluctuations. And the political force is
largely set up by Wagner, push those things through and reclamation in the
traditional stakeholders
hated it. And so by the time the Adaptive Management Program was created
in 96 or 97
um it was like we're doing this as a formal process. This is going to be
formal, this is a federal advisory committee. We're not going to have this
tyranny or anarchy of scientists running the show.
And, you know, if I sat in a room with Rick Gold who was a commissioner,
then, you know, I mean, the regional director, then I mean, I don't think
actually that it would be all that. I think everybody would sort of agree
with that. So there was something the Adaptive Management program
transformed, what some might call anarchy into a very formalized process.
Others might say stultify, others might say ossified, you know, and so,
you know, who am I to, who am I? I mean, this is what happens with any
government agency. I mean, EPA was a wonderful place. The first couple of
, you know, then it becomes a more a different kind of a place. The office
of surface mining, I I had worked the first years, it was organized in the
Carter Administration. It becomes a much more re, I mean, this is just
what happens. So the fact that that's what happened when the Adaptive
Management Program was formalized
is not, um I don't know that that's good or bad. It's just what happens.
Um um A and then
um
in the legislation that in the record of decision of the EIS what was
created was a formal adapt. It was formally called an Adaptive Management
program. And uh after the first hiccup,
you know, of uh the first head of chief GCMRC, a guy named Dave Garrett
who wasn't there very long before he had to leave for health problems.
We're meeting him in August and at his home in Colorado said to my, yeah,
he runs a winery. Really? Yeah, if you don't, you might do it, stop and go
here. But for heaven's sakes don't make the same mistake in there. Make
sure you tell your families you need to spend two full days talking with
Dave on his back deck, having a glass of rose or whatever. Uh Yeah, don't
, yeah, don't waste that trip anyway. But then uh but then uh after Dave
had health problems and had to leave, um
the second Chief Barry Gold was a real disciple of adaptive management.
And then they brought in,
you know, the international expert on adaptive management. What could
possibly be wrong with that? And So, uh, so they bring in Carl, um, and,
you know, Carl's a pretty strong headed my way or the highway kind of guy
doesn't take guff from anybody and he's a real straight shooter. He's
internationally respected, written books. I mean, he's a, he's, he's, he's
a force different and he had a vision of how everything was gonna work and
that vision of how it was gonna work, um, was that they could create
models of all these trade offs. And then if you made everything
transparent, of course, stakeholders are going to make the informed
decision and you can start to evaluate
the tradeoffs and you can start to evaluate whether you really need to
know X or Y or Z. And so they went down the path of building a big
ecosystem model.
And um
you know, and the metaphor uses that, you know, so they invited a whole
bunch of experts in every different field and they locked them in a room
and, you know, and Carl, you know, and his crew would say, OK, well,
what's this relationship between flow and fish populations or sand bars or
something? And if the scientists would say, well, we can't tell you that
one, then they'd say, well, OK, well, you know, we're, we're no, we're
locking in. I don't, I don't care how long it takes you, but you're not
getting out of the room, you're not getting another hamburger until you
tell me whether it's going up or down. And so, you know, and so out of
that, you know, it's just like we're not gonna just let scientists just
forever,
you know, study things like damn it, we're gonna get something out of you.
And so they did it and they built an ecosystem model and, and you could
run trade ups and do whatever. And as soon as that came out, the
stakeholders, you know, immediately ignored it and it had no impact on
decision making. Why, why did they ignore? Because you can't, you cannot
practice adaptive management in Grand Canyon at in the literature. And I
wrote about it in one of those memos, I sent you in the literature. The
circumstances in Grand Canyon are at best
described literally as adaptive management light, which means you're
trying to, you're either trying to practice adaptive management or you're
pretending to practice adaptive management in a context in which there are
major societal actions that cannot be experimentally adjusted.
The most fundamental in Grand Canyon is that you must pass
a large uh an explicit amount of water from the upper basin to the lower
basin, from Lake Powell to Lake Mead. And you're, you can't tweak that and
there are large external forces relative to water supply that um
must be acknowledged and respected and cannot be manipulated. And so, um
and there are large institutional forces that control those decisions and
those institutional forces of water supply are never going to let go of
their control and give it to the issues of Grand K.
And so you're never going to be able to practice adaptive management
because that requires experimental research. And there are certain
experiments that are out of the realm of possibility you're saying. And
not only that you can't, you can't, um you cannot
um
you cannot um
maintain a fixed experimental program,
you know, for 10 or 20 years, because the world changes, we go into a
protracted drought, we have five years of, of wet years in the eight and
everything goes right out the window. Yeah. But anyway, that's, yeah, so
that went on and then, you know, the tension
just finish the thought. I mean, then the um
there was a focus at Adaptive Management, GCMRC as an agency was viewed as
its objective was to be a small
contracting agency that let contracts for academics and consultants to do
re applied research that the role of GCMRC was to write guidance documents
in planning and adaptive management. That was certainly the paradigm of
gold.
The whole GCMRC gets absorbed into the US GS. There's intrigue with all of
these things and, and long stories and,
and then all the way through my predecessor,
um that was the focus of the agency or that's the focus of GCMRC. And um
and then I came in and said, well, that's great, but we're not going in
that direction anymore. We're going in this direction and then in that new
direction was
um
I guess two fold, I said, um the science questions that GCMRC is asking
that are coming from the stakeholders are um myopic unanswerable, complex
and intractable. And um
I, I viewed, I mean, I, I mean, I would, I would go to occasional meetings
of GCMRC annual reporting meetings of the death of management program in
the years before I became chief and, and people would come up to me in the
back of the room and say, you know, Jack, it's great to see you. Yeah.
Isn't this just crazy what it's become? And it was just a demoralized,
it was just a demoralized operation which people said, and what was the
source of that demoralization? Nobody knew what the questions were, nobody
knew what they were supposed to be working on. Nobody knew where they were
going. So there's no direction. There is just no, no, no, no, no. This is
adaptive man. I'm not the science. I'm not talking about, I'm talking
about the program itself because
so I just went in and said, we can't articulate, that's not how it can
work the way it has to work is that
the job of GCMRC is to re articulate science questions as big simple
questions so that every stakeholder if asked, what are you studying and
why do you exist? Every stakeholder will tell you basically the same thing
because everybody understands it. And um so an example of that kind of
simple, direct kind of question can we maintain? So I used to put them up
in all my talks. It was like this is, this program is about answering
these three questions or these two questions. This is all we're trying to
do. If it's not relentlessly fixed on this, we, we gotta, we gotta ask
ourselves, why do we do this? Um Yeah, the two fundamental questions for
Grand Canyon are, um, is it, I mean, everyone is a nuanced question, but
the first one is, is it possible? No, what is the s the maximum size of
sandbars that can be maintained
with the existing tremendous
deficit in sand supply and given the operational rules that exist and is
that size acceptable
to society?
And the other question is, um, something like, um,
what is the maximum population
of the endangered Humpback chub that can be maintained, given the fact
that so that we have made a societal decision to also maintain a
recreational trout fishery
when those trout eat the endangered fish. Now, there are the, the fish
horn is much more nuanced. Now, now there's razorback suckers along with
Humpback chub. Now it's brown trout rather than rainbow trout. Now, it
might be that operations don't make a hill of beans a difference, but it's
just that. And, um, and, you know, a and so, you know, we would, you work
with the administration and, and, and, and you, you get guidance. Well,
you, what you do is you sort of clue the administra high administration.
So, like, we'd like to receive a memo that says this and they say, well,
would you like to share with us any paragraphs that you'd like to,
wouldn't mind seeing, show up in a letter on this, you know, and that's
the game you play. But, um, we would get memo and the assistant secretary
that said, well, we know you have a lot of things to work on. But just to
be clear, it's sand, fish, fish, fish,
that's what you're working on. So that effort is simplified. Those would
come in the time I was there and so on like 2011 to 2000.
Yeah. And um uh to, to so one thing is make this question, make it simple
, make it so everyone can articulate it. And that the job of GCMRC
is to listen in a sensitive and caring
and careful way to the expression of stakeholders. What they're saying are
their concerns. And then to be able to be clear enough to tell, talk back
to a stakeholder and say, OK, I hear your concern and this is the
scientific question that I think you're asking or to say back to a
stakeholder. Um
Well, what you're asking
is a really hard and nuanced question and any time you're trying to answer
a hard and nuanced question in science, then it will cost you much much
more to answer it. That's just how it works. And you need to understand,
you need to ask yourself whether you really need that question answered
because what you, what it would, the resources it would take to answer
that are probably not reasonable or to say to a stakeholder. That's a
great question. That's exactly tractable. Or to say, I don't think that's
a question you really wanna ask. Here's a question and this is a trackable
one or perhaps even just as important. It is to say, I hear your concern,
but we can't tell you any more than we have told you already.
You need to make a decision.
We're past the point because what happens in these programs is that
OK?
You know, I keep going on these segues. OK. So one big one big thing is
the resources that people care about in Grand Canyon. Their artifacts are
relics, right? Another big categorization is the categorization of the
stakeholders, the stakeholders, some of the stakeholders represent
institutions
and perspectives
for whom they agendas and goals are met if radical and big change occurs
in operating rules. And the other group is those institutions and groups
who benefit because the status quo is maintained. And so when you have a
program that has two fundamental groups and the groups for whom this, if
the status quo is maintain, they benefit happen to also be the most
politically powerful people sitting around the table. And those are the
people who are paid real salaries to sit there at the table. Right. Then.
What's the game you play? Well, I'm not convinced. I think we need to
study that some more. Here's another alternative that might be plausible.
We really should study this other possibility before we take an action and
you endlessly delay decisions because you can always come up with some
other question or some other nuance. And the problem in Grand Canyon is
that um there's always some young hungry academic or some young hungry
agency person who will say, you bet I'll go, I'll take that on. Yeah, more
research. Uh I mean, I have colleagues, I mean, I'm an old guy. I have
colleagues who are my ilk who would look at me in years past and say
Schmidt, I can't believe you're still work in Grand Canyon. You've figured
it out, you know what the solutions are. There's not a societal will to
solve the problems. Why do you take their money? Can't you? Are you
incapable of coming up with anything else to work on?
You know, just have enough nerve to walk away and go studying something
else. And one of the dilemmas in Grand Canyon is that the game of
stakeholders asking ever more nuanced silly questions
is perpetuated and in a world in which research money is hard to come by
or just maintaining, you know, GCMRC is an institution. You know, somebody
say, oh, I'll take that question. Huh?
So anyway, this whole, so my agenda at GC, that's one thing with big
questions. And then um
the other one was internal, the GCMRC. I said, um GCMRC cannot be an
agency
staffed by people who write contracts that if that's what you do, you, you
can't manage excellent science unless you are yourself an excellent
scientist. And so,
um I, I remember one of my former students who is down there now, um when
he was hired down there, I was a prov, he left here to go down there and
he was a finalist for the job. And at the time, um
you know, the biggest concern within GCMRC about whether to hire that guy
is they were concerned that he might be too much of a scientist and he
might want to actually do science and he needed to understand that. No,
he's coming down to run a program and write contracts, contracts for
research. Yeah, for someone else to do it. And so I just said we're not
doing that. And so the other big change that I made at GCMRC was uh saying
, no, we're gonna convert all these people to um what are called RGE
scientists. They're basically within the US GS your research grade
evaluation scientists. I would not as chief control, whether you get a
promotion, you are evaluated for promotion by an external national uh
committee of your peers and they could care less what you do in your day
to day work, you're either producing at the rate at which you would
justify tenure or promotion in an academic arena or you're not. And so I
took it out of my hands and then I just said, well, you're on your own now
, you better produce. And then the other one is that, you know, when GCMR
,
so there are multiple people who come up to me and thank me for having
their words, save their career. Put them on a path of research
at, at GCNG and C two. And the other one was that I happened to be chief
at a time of financial
relative abundance. Uh Anybody looks good in the top, right? Rising time
floats all boats. So my job was a hell of a lot easier than the job now.
Um But because of that, I was able to hire a number of postdocs because
that was based on the F I had my philosophy was, you know, it's hard to re
you, you, you know, I was trying to inspire people. I couldn't inspire
everybody.
You can only pull that off. So they're federal employees, you can't fire
them, you know, all that sort of stuff. And so in an effort to inspire the
place I filled it with postdocs
young hungry and it was just like, ok, get, get some people, get some
people um swimming fast and then maybe other people will swim fast and you
know, and anyway, So those are the two, I mean, those are the two big
changes that I'm proud of. Um It was easier because there was money
available to do it. Yeah. So it sounds to me a little bit like um you
very aware of and concerned about the uh tension between um administrators
needing to make important decisions about dam operations, tradeoffs
between resources while at the same time attempting to be collaborative
and democratic and participatory that there's a tension between those two
and that you feel that maybe we need to bite the bullet a little more
often, be less like conflict diverse and be more willing to just say, OK,
this is what we want. These are the decisions we're gonna make and, and
not like sort of endlessly worry about all stakeholders being represented
and satisfied. Is that to some, yes, to some extent. Yes. And
um
it's a universal challenge in every age. No, I'm trying to, I
there are big real estate. Um M
there are big realizations of that I came to in that position.
One of them was the realization that Grand Canyon as a segment of the
river is trapped.
It is prisoner of the fact that if you think of the big map of the
Colorado River watershed, you essentially have
everything, the upper basin, the land where the water comes from and then
everything below Hoover is the land where the water goes, the land where
the water is used and connecting
those two is the bottleneck. Every drop of water from the land where the
water comes from to the land where the water is used must pass through
Grand King. And
um and so your management options in Grand Canyon are, are tiny, very
constrained, tiny. And that all became clear to me in the development of
the long term experiment management program. EIS the Ltmeis when well
intentioned
personal friends of mine, who I like and, and remain friends with today
and who were my bosses in Washington DC, right? Just completely took off
the table. Every fundamental decision that would really affect the place.
You're not gonna mess with the compact, you're not gonna mess, you know,
with any law, the river Administrative agreements, you're not gonna touch
the 2007 interim shortage guidelines, you're not, you know, and so every
water supply,
every water supply agreement that is in place is untouchable then for good
measure, they said, and you're not going to touch sediment augmentation.
We we would never get that. You're not going to touch temperature
manipulation, you would never achieve that. Now make the best of it. So
what happened? So I did let you mess with hydropower generation, of course.
So that is so that so,
so the irony is that in the in the in the long arc of this issue, this
issue started with a focus on hydropower because nobody understood it to
be anything other than hydropower. We then came to realize no, it's
sediment supply. It's a lack of sediment supply. It's the absence of
floods. It's the absence of rebuilding of the deposits. Hydro peaking is
one part of it, but it's a small piece of a bigger harder puzzle. But then
it turns out that every other piece of the puzzle.
Water supply, routing sediment trapping in Lake Powell temperature
modification are all off limits. And so the only whipping boy you're left
with is hydropower is everybody's whipping boy. And so ironically, no one
, no one who knew me would ever perceive me as an apologist for hydropower.
And yet I actually believe that hydropower now always has to take, make
the compromise because they're the easy fall guy for much bigger problems.
And that's the crazy. So my big thing now, what I work on and work on
with trying to do grants and writing articles and stuff is a and I've
given these talks in lots of places in which I sort of talk about. What
are the big changes we're willing to make, what are the big changes we're
not willing to make. The problem in Grand Canyon is we're stuck on hydro
ping. And so that's a problem. And so I'm focused now in my work at trying
to make sure that when the interim shortage guidelines are reopened for,
for um renegotiation in 2020 the river and the river environment is on the
table. It is the a clear piece of the conversation because the way things
have worked over the last 20 years is every deal is cut amongst the water
supply players.
And then after you cut all the deals, then you get on the phone to GCMRC
and say, OK, we cut all the deals now, make the best of this, but you
can't touch the deal. We just cut now. So what do you think we want for
the river and the river ecosystem? So that's a great idea. Yeah. Ok. Yeah.
OK. So given that, given the fact that we're locked in right then, um
uh what do we want? Um Oh God. Um
I, well, I still do things that different stakeholders want different
things. I think the National Park Service just wants control. I'm not even
sure they care what they want. They just want to feel like they're in
control and they're never going to be in control because it's the state's
water managed by the national government to allocate for 40 million people.
And so they just want some say so that's sort of, but they just are
insulted by the fact that, you know, they manage the, you know, the sides
of the ditch and the bottleneck. Um
It's clearly understandable how um the, the, the most important thing that
the stakeholders almost universally agree on is they can't allow any
endangered species to blink out because that would bring compliance from
um uh that would bring on court ordered environmental compliance. So there
is so, um one more reduction of flexibility. So there's, that is
myopically first among equals. So, ironically, you might have thought it
was sand or something. It's the population of Humpback chub. And now it's
also potentially, you know, this population of razor back suckers, but
it's es a compliance species that is head and shoulders above anything
else. It's not about it. Well, that's it then. Um I think it's arguable
whether
the next tier down is sandbars for camping
or it's just whatever kind of a river ecosystem, make sure that those
species don't blink out.
But
to me,
what's not on that list is a natural native river ecosystem. That's nobody
does that come automatically. The irony is it doesn't come on. The Grand
Canyon ecosystem is a fundamentally damaged,
fundamentally
um screwed up artificial Disneyland ecosystem. And for me to say that
after spending 30 years of my life, there is tragic and it is
heartbreaking for me to say that. Um But it's not a real river. You go to
the Yampa River. If you want to see a real river, you go to desolation in
Great Canyon. If you want to see a real river. Grand Canyon is this
fundamentally screwed up river ecosystem, which is still life's greatest
recreational experience where people's lives are transformed
just because they go through what they perceive as death defying rapids in
the most awesome landscape on earth and they're alone with their friends
for seven or 18 days and they do whatever screwy stuff goes on on river,
you know, and all of that. But it's, it's got a screwed up temperature and
empty, empty eddies from sand and riparian vegetation that doesn't look
anything like what it should and the whole thing is screwed up. And I
believe that in the eyes of most people that's just fine. Just so because
ironically, the Humpback Chub had figured out a life history
in which they can exploit this one natural place, the little Colorado
River, if it. And as one GCMRC scientist said to me years ago, you know,
it really, we can't really tell him this, but it really doesn't matter
what we do with the dam. I mean, so long as the little Colorado River is
there and it's viable and all of that, it's gonna be ok. Now, the reality
is the little Colorado River is subject to lots of development pressures
itself. What if the monsoons are failing? We don't have floods. There's a
lot of bad things can happen there. But um so, so I, I honestly believe
I'm being e exp or particular with my words, whatever kind of a river
ecosystem,
however artificial it is, who cares just so long as these target
populations of endangered species don't blink out. And that's what you're
saying is the current sort of core I that is the, I I believe that is the
consensus now.
And would you like to see a much broader vision for river restoration? Do
you think it's even possible? No, I don't think it's possible. No. II, I
believe that the,
what should we want? No, no, here's what I, I believe that that may be all
that's possible in Grand Canyon. What I believe
deep down inside is that we do the American public a disservice by not
telling them how screwed up it is. I believe that they're given false hope.
Exactly. No. Simply that I believe that where we have made the mistake is
that we fail to tell the American people, we fail to tell the citizens of
Arizona,
the Grand Canyon State that um there was an irreversible
cost to the construction of Glen Canyon did and there's an irreversible
cost to large scale water development, the Colorado river. And um
and we're never gonna get that back.
And therefore, as we proceed into the future, we should be very careful
about what new developments we make on the, on the river. We should be
very careful about which places we do want to protect and that the
disservice that we pay to the American public is that we pretend that
Grand Canyon is restorable and that, that is, that is wrong. And that then
what do we do now? We just absorb $10 million a year of a budget as the
cost of doing business. And we never just say, you know what, this place
is really completely artificial and screwed up now and we're going to
continue to make it the best we can. You're not saying we should, we have
a, we have a moral obligation. It's one of the greatest places on planet
earth, but we're also not going to decommission Glen Canyon Dam.
So never say never. Well, that, that's a different topic. I mean, I've
written, I've written on that as well, but the point is I don't, I think
that we have fuzzy logic or fuzzy headed thinking, whatever it is and we
don't talk about the real issues in front of us and we just pretend this
feel good. We're gonna make everything a little bit better and we're gonna
spend this much of our budget to study how much the wind blows up and
buries archaeological sites and hillsides and we're gonna, you know, and
stuff that's completely intractable
and that's crazy. Um No, I don't.
Uh
um I would say that the brave new world of climate change and the brave
new world of um decrease runoff in the Colorado river system will force
our um, forces are hit.
That's how I end my talks. As I show those graphs. And I say, OK, so we
got to think big. We gotta think like maybe,
um
it doesn't make sense to equalize the storage contents of pal of mead.
Maybe it makes sense that we ought to redd out the river diversion tunnels
around Glen Canyon Dam. So that, um you know, we you
that there's a, that maybe it's better to fully drain Pell and, and keep
me full. But, but I will also recognize that one can make utterly rational
and reasonable statements about why it makes more sense to keep needful or
powerful and need empty. I, I mean, well intentioned smart people make
those arguments and, and I'm not gonna, but we need to increase
operational flexibility. So that's the other big,
that's the other big enormous
issue that this is so wandering. That's the, this is the other big
enormous issue that the Adaptive Management Program and GCMRC are not
doing now. They um
you know, the, the, the, you know, the signpost saying, you know, we got a
crisis coming are just all, you know, they're all blazing, right? And the
, the interim shortage guidelines are coming in 2020. I mean that, that
this is what I'm working on. I've got a, I've got collaborators who are
working on this now and,
and so
instead, so the stakeholders in the program sort of pushed GCMRC to
develop an annual work plan that they're in now. That's all about how to
implement the L TB is when you know, it's like, how do you ski? You ski
through the slalom gates as soon as you know, you're past the gate, you're
looking where the hell is the next gate down the slope and you know,
focusing the adapted the work plan on how to implement L temp is like
focusing on the gate, you just passed. The next gate is climate change and
decreased runoff and changing water temperatures released from a much
lower lake pal. And that's the big sector. And the science questions that
are gonna be asked by G of GCMRC.
Two years from now are gonna be all about that brave new world and the
science program needs to be focused on answering those questions. And um
that's a a and that's all gonna be about questions like
um OK, we're now in the 20th year of drought.
Um
Maybe we wanna selectively store all of our water and need to preserve
vegas' water quality. I'm, I'm just making things up. OK? If we do that,
then the water released out of P is gonna be really, really warm. If the
water coming out of Pell is really, really warm, is that going to
constitute a
short term, easily reversible, temporary inconvenience to the ecosystem or
is it going to cause an irreversible tipping point that will change the
ecosystem forever after such that everything that we've done in the
Adaptive Management Program for the last 20 years is irrelevant. Would we
get more of a river like it used to be? Well, so the arguments you're
gonna get from different people. I, well, the answer is people will say to
you, we don't know the answer to that. And so I would submit, we need to,
we need to get our essence in gear to be doing the science to figure this
out because, um, we, we just, so we finally, so I, I'll just take partial
credit. You know, we all are, you know, I'm not unique in figuring this
out. And so we working with three of my old staff, three people who work
at GCMRC right now,
they figured out the models. We got three GCMRC staff, me and a, and a
fish biologist in the upper basin. And we get an article that's in review
and bioscience that says how we make decisions about water storage will
set the fate of all these river ecosystems. And we better be thinking
about that. And if we don't have the science ready to go, we better get
because here's the, here are the arguments you might say
the envi the most environmentally oriented among us would say,
oh, no warm water coming out of Grand Canyon. That, that, that's just like
it was in the old days. That's just the river of the 19 fifties. That's
wonderful. That's what we want with sediment in it. And OK, and let's put
sediment in. They would say that's the most wonderful thing. That's what
we want. And ironically, every fish biologist at GCMRC
plus
a whole bunch of other people in Flagstaff who I don't need to make any
more enemies on this tape, you know, are all, would all say no, no, the
devil, you know, is much better than the devil. You don't. We know that
Humpback Chub are the largest population of Humpback chub on earth is in
Grand Canyon and it might be the most screwed up ecosystem, but that
screwed up ecosystem keeps the warm water predators away from the Humpback
chub. And it would be worse if the river was warm because then the river
is not only good for natives, it's good for non natives
and the non natives will eat the natives. No, it is being trout or
something. No, the trout or cold water, small mouth bass, large mouth
stripe or stuff like that. So that's the problem and they could move in if
the water always. Now there's, there's different ways to argue this. And
so the point is when you put like minded people, as of, we've, I've had a
couple of these wonderful experiences in which we would write a scientific
article. And then so for us, it was like, I mean, those guys did great
modeling. I helped them with the sort of. So what of it? And how do you
write the discussion and all? And we had to nuance the discussion to not
say the potential they cause their original draft of the article was the
rivers are gonna get warmer and that's terrible. And I'm saying, well, you
can't say that because that's like what it was, you know, you at least got
to say, we don't know and we better get better science. Same way when
Larry Stevens and I wrote an article back in the late nineties and we
wrote it about marshes in Grand Canyon and as the most biologically
diverse place in Grand Canyon where the freshwater marshes, except that
they're an artifact of, of the absence of floods. And so we wrote in the
discussion, well, the authors of this article actually disagree with
whether this, whether this article is a big deal or not, because you can
either argue that this is the most biologically diverse and wonderful part
of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon or it actually shouldn't even be
there because they never were there before. They only are artifacts of the
dam and who the hell cares about.
So it's fun. Those are fun. Those are fun when you do that. But no, I
would say that, I mean, I know we're at a time but
I think that what I'm my mission is all about making decisions transparent.
I mean, I, I mean, I personally
would love a world that there wasn't a Glen Canyon dam and I could float a
boat all the way through. And, but that's not a world that I'm gonna, I've
never, you know, that that's that my mission is not to get that back. My
mission is to
try to make all these decisions transparent in a democracy
so that people make intelligent decisions about them And, and yeah. So
anyway, yeah, what else? You, well, we gotta, you gotta go more minutes.
So you did say um one last question that I want to follow up on, you said
earlier that uh there's a whole set of um um factors that go into
influencing the ecosystems through the Grand Canyon that are off limits.
So basically, hydropower is a whipping boy because it's the only thing
that you can actually modify but that there are other more important
things that you can't modify. Could you could you total flow? Yeah, total
monthly flow, sediment supply temperature.
And the new one that nobody had thought of that might be is nutrients. And
if and if somebody said to you, you know what, we're going to rethink
everything, you can adjust any of those factors in order to get more of
what we want for the Colorado River ecosystem, which, which of those
factors would you go and adjust and what would be the effect on the river
? Well, so OK, see I always go back to the very practical thing. The first
thing that I would do is we need to have a preliminary
engineering, a formal pre preliminary engineering analysis of what it
would cost to red drill out the river diversion tunnels. So we at least
know what the hell is. The number is the number $7 billion or it's $7
million. It'd be nice to know. For instance, we know what sediment bypass
with an existing reservoir would cost, there is a preliminary engineering
analysis done by reclamation.
It's a number like 10 or 15 million. It's 250 or 400 million depending on
how you design it. I mean, it's a big number but it's not billions. And
the annual operating cost for that pipeline is essentially the same as the
budget of GCMR of the that management program. Right. So, right. So it's a
big number but you know. Right. So, ok, so that's so I would, I would
create operational flexibility. Um I would um I would somehow get the
brightest minds on the planet to figure out whether it really is true that
it would be terrible to reinstitute a natural temperature regime and a
natural sediment regime in Grand Canyon
because I want to sound stubborn, but I just don't want to take that as
the answer. It seems like a ludicrous answer. And yet I understand why so
many aquatic ecologists and bio and fish biologists say that I understand
there are not just the ones that want to preserve non native trout fish.
No, no, no, no. These are well intentioned people who care about
endangered species. It's kind of crazy. And I understand their argument. I
just keep saying really, how can that be? Because no, deep down inside,
I would like to see the Grand in an imaginary world. I'd like to know
whether it's possible that we can meet society's needs for water supply
allocated to the most economically important places in the watershed and
have a more natural Grand Canyon. But what that would take would be the
ability to bypass sediment and bigger floods uh in drilled out diversion
tunnels short of that, you can't do it. But I'd like to believe that's
possible. And I think that a declining water supply
might give us the opportunity. But at the same time, I recognize that you
might do all that science and you might conclude that the thing that is
the best public policy decision is the one that in my heart I don't really
want, which is, you know, keeping powerful and me. But I, if it comes to
that, I mean, you have to make decisions with your head. You, I mean, so
I'm willing to let the chips fall where they may, but I just don't think
we're working on enough. So, so getting bigger flows of the right
temperature with an abundant sediment supply is the ultimate is what you
need. And all this tweaking with all this other stuff is largely just
going through the motions.
That seems like a great place to end. I'll never be. Yeah. Yeah. Thank God.
I'm 67. I've been looking for another job.
Uh I think it'd be great if we could follow up with you a little bit later.
Um uh And uh maybe see if uh we can drill down a little deeper on some of
these issues that we touched on. But, uh, I, I think this is a good place
to end. We've covered almost everything on the list and I apologize if I
talk too long. If this isn't, I don't know how you make sense of this are
going to turn it off.