WEBVTT 00:00:01.240 --> 00:00:05.677 This is Paul Hurt of Arizona State University with Jennifer Sweeney, 00:00:05.710 --> 00:00:09.956 research Associate at Arizona State University. And we are interviewing 00:00:09.989 --> 00:00:16.956 with Jack Schmidt in Logan Utah on June 11th of 2018, Jack. Thanks for 00:00:16.989 --> 00:00:21.366 joining us today. Thanks. Can you just start out by giving us your full 00:00:21.399 --> 00:00:25.105 name, the positions that you held in the Adaptive Management Program over 00:00:25.138 --> 00:00:29.666 time and the years in which you were involved. 00:00:29.699 --> 00:00:37.699 Um Well, my legal name is John C Schmidt. I go by Jack. Um 00:00:40.908 --> 00:00:48.908 I I I only served, I served in an official capacity with the program as 00:00:50.429 --> 00:00:56.156 chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center from 00:00:56.189 --> 00:01:04.007 August 2012, 00:01:04.040 --> 00:01:08.626 2011. August 2011. 00:01:08.659 --> 00:01:11.885 No, I just, I'm going through the numbers, but that doesn't work out. 00:01:11.918 --> 00:01:17.516 August 2011 until November 1st of 2014. 00:01:17.549 --> 00:01:25.549 Um but you were involved, but I have long so the longer involvement um 00:01:27.829 --> 00:01:35.829 I did my first river research trip in uh spring of 1984 00:01:37.439 --> 00:01:45.439 Colorado River, my first river research trip in Grand Canyon um with the 00:01:45.959 --> 00:01:53.959 US GS to help and look for a um research opportunity 00:01:55.650 --> 00:02:02.727 I was subsequently funded. That's its own story. Um And I did my first 00:02:02.760 --> 00:02:08.475 research trip affiliated with the US GS 00:02:08.508 --> 00:02:14.797 in the in May of 1985. 00:02:14.830 --> 00:02:18.036 I um 00:02:18.069 --> 00:02:24.896 pursued my dissertation, completed that in 1987 00:02:24.929 --> 00:02:31.156 stayed working for the US GS. Another approximately 00:02:31.189 --> 00:02:39.189 nine months um took my an academic position. 00:02:39.469 --> 00:02:47.469 Uh was that here at Middlebury College in Vermont, um stayed active um 00:02:51.159 --> 00:02:57.995 at a time when I was not getting any direct funding from the program in 00:02:58.028 --> 00:03:05.267 the late 19 eighties. And that's its own story. Um 00:03:05.300 --> 00:03:10.237 uh served as a sediment 00:03:10.270 --> 00:03:17.207 as an advisor on sediment and geomorphology issues to Duncan Patton, who 00:03:17.240 --> 00:03:22.525 was senior scientist, right? And so you're a geologist by the, I'm a 00:03:22.558 --> 00:03:27.525 geomorphology geologist. OK. So I did have an active position then, but 00:03:27.558 --> 00:03:31.005 that was before um 00:03:31.038 --> 00:03:36.217 the Adaptive Management Program existed. Um 00:03:36.250 --> 00:03:40.666 I guess the back up in the late 19 eighties before I went to Middlebury, I 00:03:40.699 --> 00:03:48.699 was part of the team that wrote the phase one final report of the G CCS 00:03:48.969 --> 00:03:56.969 program. So I was that sediment guy. Um So then I served as an advisor to 00:03:57.460 --> 00:04:05.460 Duncan in the early 19 nineties. So I was involved extensively in the 00:04:05.949 --> 00:04:11.025 development of the interim flow recommendations 00:04:11.058 --> 00:04:16.736 in the early 19 nineties. Um 00:04:16.769 --> 00:04:23.697 The conception of the Grand Canyon Protection Act, the discussions that 00:04:23.730 --> 00:04:30.276 went on behind the scenes that ultimately led to the um creation of the 00:04:30.309 --> 00:04:37.387 Adaptive Management Program. I was one of a group of probably five people 00:04:37.420 --> 00:04:43.906 who originally thought of the idea of controlled floods 00:04:43.939 --> 00:04:49.455 and worked extensively in the early 19 nineties to get that implemented. 00:04:49.488 --> 00:04:57.488 Um Once the Adaptive Management Program was created, and GCMRC was created 00:05:01.129 --> 00:05:07.846 and after the first flood was occurred, I actually had more mo more 00:05:07.879 --> 00:05:09.856 limited 00:05:09.889 --> 00:05:15.356 involvement I would occasion. I mean, I knew what was going on my grad 00:05:15.389 --> 00:05:19.836 students. I mean, I've had, I've been involved in lots of ways and 00:05:19.869 --> 00:05:27.055 continued to write papers. Um And so I had probably a reduced involvement 00:05:27.088 --> 00:05:32.197 as somebody who was um 00:05:32.230 --> 00:05:40.230 part of the academic, the funded academic group um until I uh became chief. 00:05:42.410 --> 00:05:47.495 Um Yeah. 00:05:47.528 --> 00:05:52.276 Mhm When you were, 00:05:52.309 --> 00:05:55.856 I forgot my question, I had a question right in my mind and it, and it 00:05:55.889 --> 00:06:00.569 just slipped out the window. So we'll just go to question number two then. 00:06:00.858 --> 00:06:02.858 Um So, oh, I was gonna ask you when you came to Utah State University for 00:06:06.689 --> 00:06:13.817 September of 1991 91. And um were you doing research uh along the river in 00:06:13.850 --> 00:06:18.627 a canyon? When the floods of, I think that was 1993 there were some large 00:06:18.660 --> 00:06:23.086 floods that came through, is that about the time that you started thinking 00:06:23.119 --> 00:06:26.955 that we should maybe create some artificial floods because of your 00:06:26.988 --> 00:06:31.776 observation of the effects of some of those large El Nino type flood 00:06:31.809 --> 00:06:34.217 events? 00:06:34.250 --> 00:06:39.575 No, that, that's not really how it worked. Um 00:06:39.608 --> 00:06:43.217 So 00:06:43.250 --> 00:06:49.866 um God, this is so hard to tell this. You know, it's such an involved. 00:06:49.899 --> 00:06:54.166 Tell me like two or three, I'm tempted to just tell you historical subject 00:06:54.199 --> 00:06:58.596 from the start. All right. Well, well, the next question was um uh which 00:06:58.629 --> 00:07:02.346 of the three main components of the program were you mostly involved in 00:07:02.379 --> 00:07:06.757 that scientific research would be? Uh And then policy and management is 00:07:06.790 --> 00:07:10.705 the second component and social and institutional engagement like state 00:07:10.738 --> 00:07:15.226 represented, representing stakeholders as a third. Did you do all three? 00:07:15.259 --> 00:07:23.259 Um Certainly the first two, all the time. Um 00:07:24.678 --> 00:07:26.887 um 00:07:26.920 --> 00:07:34.920 Let me just try to tell you my story. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Um 00:07:35.829 --> 00:07:43.829 uh You know, the, the program has evolved when, when the program um I gave 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:48.736 it, I gave a talk this um in Flagstaff just last month on sort of the 00:07:48.769 --> 00:07:53.286 history of scientific ideas in Grand Canyon and how they've evolved and 00:07:53.319 --> 00:07:57.015 what their, what their research focus. No, but I can give you the 00:07:57.048 --> 00:08:03.455 powerpoint slide. That would be great. Um So if you look back at the 19 00:08:03.488 --> 00:08:11.488 seventies and you look at the uh inception uh G CE S, it was focused on 00:08:13.358 --> 00:08:19.015 the effects of hydropower generation on the downstream environment. Yeah. 00:08:19.048 --> 00:08:26.426 Um And the lawsuit that created G CE S was all about what's gonna be the 00:08:26.459 --> 00:08:31.877 effect of bigger fluctuations, you know, and then, you know, it, it, it 00:08:31.910 --> 00:08:39.910 morphed into um one of the large scale operational effects of the Dam. Um 00:08:41.750 --> 00:08:49.750 and uh the, the most notable incident that I remember from going well, I 00:08:51.048 --> 00:08:55.246 was just a guy who'd gone back later in life to get a phd. I was gonna do 00:08:55.279 --> 00:08:59.246 a dissertation in Montana and I wanted to go back home to Montana after I 00:08:59.279 --> 00:09:06.557 got my dissertation done and through a set of connections, uh an 00:09:06.590 --> 00:09:13.547 influential fellow in the US GS. Um and friend of mine, uh when I said to 00:09:13.580 --> 00:09:16.706 him, are there any other dissertation topics you can think that I might 00:09:16.739 --> 00:09:20.427 want to work on? And he said, well, I think we can get you and we could 00:09:20.460 --> 00:09:24.746 get you involved in this brand new program that the US GS is gonna get 00:09:24.779 --> 00:09:30.476 involved in, in Grand Keynes. And um was that before the GCMRC? This is a 00:09:30.509 --> 00:09:37.576 19 0, this is, this is uh uh this is a decade before. OK. Yeah. And I 00:09:37.609 --> 00:09:43.287 never looked back and that's what I did. Um, you know, and at that point 00:09:43.320 --> 00:09:49.476 in the program in the early, you know, 19 eighties when G CE S was created 00:09:49.509 --> 00:09:57.509 , you basically had this um unwanted irrelevant fish biologist who, you 00:09:59.779 --> 00:10:04.927 know, they sent out who they let go to Flagstaff to go run something that 00:10:04.960 --> 00:10:10.236 reclamation considered harmless. Was this Duncan Patton? No, no, Wagner 00:10:10.269 --> 00:10:18.015 Dave Wagner, of course, I mean, he was a fish biologist and meanwhile, 00:10:18.048 --> 00:10:23.885 because all of that would be harmless and stuff that really mattered like 00:10:23.918 --> 00:10:31.755 modeling sediment transport or something was gonna be done by the US GS in 00:10:31.788 --> 00:10:37.807 the traditional alliance between reclamation and US GS. That has been part 00:10:37.840 --> 00:10:43.505 of those agencies history for a century. And it's a testament to the fact 00:10:43.538 --> 00:10:48.086 that reclamation thought every this was all pretty irrelevant by the fact 00:10:48.119 --> 00:10:51.976 that they would let somebody go to Flagstaff and create an office. Little. 00:10:52.009 --> 00:10:57.496 Did they know what, what would happen? So to placate 00:10:57.529 --> 00:11:01.116 the um 00:11:01.149 --> 00:11:07.037 environmental interests, there were nominal questions listed like what 00:11:07.070 --> 00:11:10.696 will be the long term fate of sandbars. 00:11:10.729 --> 00:11:16.866 But, and so I showed up at the US GS and they said, well, we don't know 00:11:16.899 --> 00:11:21.826 what you would do, but here are some questions we're supposed to answer. 00:11:21.859 --> 00:11:28.755 So I said, OK, I'll work on the sandbar question. I, after I looked around 00:11:28.788 --> 00:11:32.667 Grand Canyon, I um 00:11:32.700 --> 00:11:38.696 wrote a grant proposal, submitted it to Wagner. Wagner said he would fund 00:11:38.729 --> 00:11:45.025 it. Then the US GS said, well, if you're gonna be funded to work on this, 00:11:45.058 --> 00:11:51.196 then you'll work for us. So I as a graduate student out of Johns Hopkins 00:11:51.229 --> 00:11:58.645 ended up saying, OK, I'll do my dissertation through um the US G. It's not 00:11:58.678 --> 00:12:05.047 because they care. I mean, just because they demanded it. And um and so I 00:12:05.080 --> 00:12:13.080 did my dissertation as a hydrologist for the US GS as a graduate student 00:12:13.428 --> 00:12:16.326 completing this dissertation. 00:12:16.359 --> 00:12:24.359 And I had, um and there was a US GS uh scientist who was nominally my boss 00:12:24.750 --> 00:12:31.726 and we were, I mean, she administered it and we did, there's all sorts of 00:12:31.759 --> 00:12:35.496 , you know, we wouldn't get out of here if I started doing it. Is that all 00:12:35.529 --> 00:12:41.537 in Flagstaff? Ironically, I, when I headed back to Arizona to start that, 00:12:41.570 --> 00:12:46.525 I assumed I'd be living in Flagstaff. But the state office of the US GS 00:12:46.558 --> 00:12:51.645 was in Tucson. And so I was told I was living in Tucson, which is 00:12:51.678 --> 00:12:56.606 something about sort of the control and sensitivity of these things. But 00:12:56.639 --> 00:13:01.996 we're so with that woman, I'm out on the river one time. And what was 00:13:02.029 --> 00:13:07.125 distinctive about is that we had the great 1983 floods and then we had 00:13:07.158 --> 00:13:11.616 really high releases in 1984 and 1985. 00:13:11.649 --> 00:13:16.086 And um 00:13:16.119 --> 00:13:20.717 I was down on a U on, you know what somebody else's Us GS trip just 00:13:20.750 --> 00:13:25.246 helping. And I were making some comment after a couple of days about our 00:13:25.279 --> 00:13:32.076 need to study what this 45,000 cubic foot per second flow was doing to the 00:13:32.109 --> 00:13:40.109 river. And this person dressed me down and in no uncertain terms, she said 00:13:42.529 --> 00:13:49.005 to me, we will not study this. We have a responsibility to study what is 00:13:49.038 --> 00:13:55.336 the effect of increasing the range of power peaking from a high, high 00:13:55.369 --> 00:14:01.505 releases of 31,000 to high releases of 33,500 CFS. And that's what we'll 00:14:01.538 --> 00:14:03.677 study. 00:14:03.710 --> 00:14:09.407 So why do you think uh she was that rigid about the, because that was, 00:14:09.440 --> 00:14:16.505 that was what reclamation said. I mean, so it's, it's a reminder that um 00:14:16.538 --> 00:14:24.265 the focus was on Hydro Peking and the high flows of the eighties were um 00:14:24.298 --> 00:14:32.298 not understood, well, were viewed as a, um, we were viewed as a, um, an 00:14:34.750 --> 00:14:36.836 anomaly 00:14:36.869 --> 00:14:43.635 and not, and really just an impediment to study what needed to be studied. 00:14:43.668 --> 00:14:51.668 That's how much the issue has moved over time. And, um, so, I mean, I did 00:14:52.440 --> 00:14:59.566 my thing in the, in the midst of that in late 1985 and early 1986 00:14:59.599 --> 00:15:07.599 reclamation had to schedule a special period of hydro peaking so that we 00:15:09.668 --> 00:15:14.797 could measure what its effects were. 00:15:14.830 --> 00:15:19.956 And they didn't want to hydro peak. 00:15:19.989 --> 00:15:27.596 They didn't wanna uh they didn't want to, um they didn't wanna uh hydro 00:15:27.629 --> 00:15:32.875 peak because they had so much water, they wanted to get out of the 00:15:32.908 --> 00:15:38.236 reservoir and they had so much snow in the mountains and they scheduled 00:15:38.269 --> 00:15:44.047 this four month period and we measured and studied it and in fact, they 00:15:44.080 --> 00:15:49.297 bailed 3.5 months into the study because it was snowing again and they 00:15:49.330 --> 00:15:55.505 needed to abandon it. So the important thing is that those studies went on 00:15:55.538 --> 00:16:03.196 explicitly to study the effects of hydro peaking and the issue was too 00:16:03.229 --> 00:16:08.336 much water and it completely changed the operations. 00:16:08.369 --> 00:16:14.307 And um but it's a, it's a focus that everything was about hydro peaking. 00:16:14.340 --> 00:16:18.706 Of course, the other goofiness it was about how do we preserve a trout 00:16:18.739 --> 00:16:24.596 fishery? You know, it was, you know, the, um, I mean, there's all, you 00:16:24.629 --> 00:16:30.196 know, and, oh, hydro peaking must be bad for trout because, uh, trout 00:16:30.229 --> 00:16:36.586 spawning is adversely effective when the reds are dried every so. So this 00:16:36.619 --> 00:16:43.946 complete hodgepodge of, of, um, of different values. So, anyway, um, that 00:16:43.979 --> 00:16:50.736 it was the National Research Council. We, well, so I like other scientists 00:16:50.769 --> 00:16:57.736 at that time, although we were increasingly aware of what had the floods 00:16:57.769 --> 00:17:04.617 done. There was this drive that we focused on hydropic. 00:17:04.650 --> 00:17:10.426 And so there was a drive that we looked at, understood our science in the 00:17:10.459 --> 00:17:18.459 context of um what would limiting hydro peaking do to make for less 00:17:18.588 --> 00:17:22.696 erosion. And there were lots of studies done by lots of people that sort 00:17:22.729 --> 00:17:27.294 of looked at at those issues. 00:17:27.327 --> 00:17:33.405 It took some external reviewers from the National Research Council to 00:17:33.438 --> 00:17:40.245 point out that the issues of erosion and maintaining sandbars can't just 00:17:40.278 --> 00:17:47.845 be about limiting Agrope. You've got to also rebuild those deposits. And I 00:17:47.878 --> 00:17:55.878 mean, my research contributed, you know, um um 00:17:56.380 --> 00:18:00.706 let's stop for a minute. This is a problem with Mesa. She's just 00:18:00.739 --> 00:18:05.506 completely ramp. Um Let's just take a quick second. I'm gonna take her, 00:18:05.539 --> 00:18:11.506 I'm gonna take this where you were um floods. So the National Research 00:18:11.539 --> 00:18:13.617 Council 00:18:13.650 --> 00:18:17.226 observed that 00:18:17.259 --> 00:18:25.259 uh reminded us all that any geologic deposit and its status at any time is 00:18:26.108 --> 00:18:29.295 both a result of the history of erosion, but also the history of 00:18:29.328 --> 00:18:36.726 deposition and that river deposits do have to go underwater at some time 00:18:36.759 --> 00:18:44.759 if they're gonna ever be rebuilt. And um 00:18:45.199 --> 00:18:49.486 and in the early nineties, 00:18:49.519 --> 00:18:54.347 the, the um the innovative discussions 00:18:54.380 --> 00:18:58.026 were held in Duncan's offices 00:18:58.059 --> 00:19:02.285 amongst um some key people. 00:19:02.318 --> 00:19:06.097 And um 00:19:06.130 --> 00:19:09.305 those people were 00:19:09.338 --> 00:19:13.246 N Andrews of the US, Gs, 00:19:13.279 --> 00:19:21.279 Jim Smith of the US Gs Dick Marz off of the US GS 00:19:21.439 --> 00:19:25.555 uh Dave Rubin of the US GS. 00:19:25.588 --> 00:19:28.746 Uh And myself 00:19:28.779 --> 00:19:33.575 and I would say that probably at the beginning, Ruben and I were the most 00:19:33.608 --> 00:19:41.206 skeptical and I would say that um Andrews and Smith and Marzo were more um 00:19:41.239 --> 00:19:48.456 strongly advocating for floods from the get go. And um so I'm always 00:19:48.489 --> 00:19:53.565 careful to say, I'm lucky enough to be part of a group of people who 00:19:53.598 --> 00:19:58.986 conceived of this and nobody yet, no one person ever dreams these things 00:19:59.019 --> 00:20:04.617 up. Um I'm not gonna go through the history of all that went on in the 00:20:04.650 --> 00:20:10.857 early nineties. I, are you familiar? There's a book called The Controlled 00:20:10.890 --> 00:20:18.890 Flooding Grand Canyon that uh is an eu monograph that is uh Robert H Webb. 00:20:19.430 --> 00:20:26.535 It's Web Schmidt in Valdez. I think I'm not sure it's something like that 00:20:26.568 --> 00:20:29.575 published in 1999. 00:20:29.608 --> 00:20:32.825 It's an a gu monograph. 00:20:32.858 --> 00:20:38.406 I mean, it's certainly one of the seminal publications of the, the Control 00:20:38.439 --> 00:20:42.906 Flooding Grand Canon. It's certainly one of the seminal publications of 00:20:42.939 --> 00:20:50.939 the program. And um um I wrote a chapter in that book called The History 00:20:52.588 --> 00:20:56.936 of the Control Flood. You know, how it came to be and, and, and 00:20:56.969 --> 00:21:02.236 everybody's a co-author, including Wagner. And so, rather than walk 00:21:02.269 --> 00:21:07.867 through all of that, I mean, that's published and that's gone through peer 00:21:07.900 --> 00:21:15.117 review. Um But what's important there is is that, you know, I tell the 00:21:15.150 --> 00:21:19.857 story. That's an idea that came out as scientists 00:21:19.890 --> 00:21:26.217 and the guys at the US GS in the early nineties would propose that every 00:21:26.250 --> 00:21:33.156 year, uh Larry Stevens was very much against the idea of the flood. Dave 00:21:33.189 --> 00:21:37.266 Wagner was very much against the idea of the flood and they fought it 00:21:37.299 --> 00:21:41.867 behind the scenes relentlessly every year. Is that because they assume 00:21:41.900 --> 00:21:46.637 that floods would only cause erosion and not deposition. Do you think it 00:21:46.670 --> 00:21:54.670 was a mix of, of well intentioned scientific reasons and um who was in 00:21:54.709 --> 00:21:57.516 political control? 00:21:57.549 --> 00:22:05.549 And um when it was proposed as a US GS led science effort, um 00:22:06.680 --> 00:22:13.357 Wagner fought hard against it. And so we were almo and, and we would use 00:22:13.390 --> 00:22:18.686 to, I mean, in the early nineties, we would sort of year after year, we 00:22:18.719 --> 00:22:26.607 would sort of conceive of who was gonna do what. And so, um and the film 00:22:26.640 --> 00:22:31.936 at that time was coming from one, it was helter skelter US GS was 00:22:31.969 --> 00:22:38.585 investing money. Some of the, I mean, uh in, in the late 19 eighties, I 00:22:38.618 --> 00:22:43.416 led to winter research trips to measure sandbar erosion in the late 00:22:43.449 --> 00:22:48.236 eighties funded on the backs of tuition from kids in Middlebury because 00:22:48.269 --> 00:22:54.236 Wagner wouldn't give me a dime because pe, you know, it's a, it's a sad 00:22:54.269 --> 00:22:57.717 thing about Grand Canyon. I mean, everybody fights for the money, the 00:22:57.750 --> 00:23:01.887 agencies all want to be in control. You know, there's a, there's a 00:23:01.920 --> 00:23:07.676 difficulty of who's gonna be, you know, just who, I mean, political 00:23:07.709 --> 00:23:11.967 control is just the big thing. What, whatever the case, I think that I 00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:17.627 write about that in a more politically acceptable way, you know, in this 00:23:17.660 --> 00:23:23.545 article that I wrote, but the reality is after two or three years of 00:23:23.578 --> 00:23:27.627 failed efforts to get the flood implemented because you had to line up all 00:23:27.660 --> 00:23:34.916 the politics and all that. Finally enough people thought it was their idea 00:23:34.949 --> 00:23:41.496 and how do you get anything done in the world? You got to convince other 00:23:41.529 --> 00:23:46.127 people that it's their idea. And if you go around now, I could tell you, 00:23:46.160 --> 00:23:51.206 NGO people who think they dreamed up the flood and different people and 00:23:51.239 --> 00:23:55.147 agencies who used to run agencies for all. I know they think they dreamed 00:23:55.180 --> 00:24:02.246 up the flood and that's all fine. But we're on, we're on record that. I 00:24:02.279 --> 00:24:08.166 mean, that flood idea arose probably in 92 or something and it took us 00:24:08.199 --> 00:24:14.217 four years to get that implemented and, you know, and it occurred in 96. 00:24:14.250 --> 00:24:19.085 So that was the first quote unquote high flow event, 00:24:19.118 --> 00:24:25.006 which is just administrative godly book, it's a controlled flood. But for 00:24:25.039 --> 00:24:30.196 , you know, the one other thing that just in the past that's not written 00:24:30.229 --> 00:24:37.016 about, I should say is that in the late 19 eighties, 00:24:37.049 --> 00:24:42.535 um, on one of those win on the first winter trip when we were down there 00:24:42.568 --> 00:24:47.295 after the high flows of the eighties, we've gone into high hydro peaking 00:24:47.328 --> 00:24:53.266 in the late eighties. Um, I mean, I couldn't get any money out of 00:24:53.299 --> 00:24:56.706 reclamation to work there anymore. So I would go there in the winter 00:24:56.739 --> 00:25:00.315 because I still cared about it. 00:25:00.348 --> 00:25:06.516 Um And uh there was lots of erosion going on. And so one night sitting at 00:25:06.549 --> 00:25:12.246 Eminence break camp in Marble Canyon after days of, you know, a week of 00:25:12.279 --> 00:25:19.065 measuring this stuff we got sitting around the fire, we got, um we got 00:25:19.098 --> 00:25:27.098 worked up and so we sort of conceived of and wrote in my field book, um 00:25:29.489 --> 00:25:35.656 uh the Beach Bill called It To Protect the Beach as the Grand Canyon. And 00:25:35.689 --> 00:25:39.696 that was uh me and my students, 00:25:39.729 --> 00:25:45.387 uh Dave Rubin, Johnny Moore in the University of Montana, Tom Moody, uh 00:25:45.420 --> 00:25:52.315 Dan Dirk, uh both river guides. Um And we sort of collectively wrote this 00:25:52.348 --> 00:25:59.617 thing and why was it like that would have been in uh probably January of 00:25:59.650 --> 00:26:06.186 89? And for how long had you known that the dam operations were leading to 00:26:06.219 --> 00:26:11.026 the loss, the erosion and loss of beaches? Was that just a few years No, 00:26:11.059 --> 00:26:15.035 no, no, no, no, no, no. That's a longer history. I mean, the first 00:26:15.068 --> 00:26:20.506 scientific article that the first scientific article that described that 00:26:20.539 --> 00:26:25.656 erosion was published in 1974. 00:26:25.689 --> 00:26:32.276 So the perception that hydro peaking played a role in that erosion um went 00:26:32.309 --> 00:26:40.309 way back. The issue is now very nuanced in that. Um We now understand that 00:26:40.449 --> 00:26:44.206 hydro peaking plays 00:26:44.239 --> 00:26:51.236 some role. But it's also clear, you know, it's bigger issues, the sediment 00:26:51.269 --> 00:26:55.967 mass balance, the absence of supply, things like that. But ju just to go 00:26:56.000 --> 00:27:01.666 back just cause these pieces of the administrative history are important. 00:27:01.699 --> 00:27:08.117 We came out of that and I got back to my office in Middlebury. I got on 00:27:08.150 --> 00:27:13.565 the phone to Ed Norton, the head of the Grand Canyon Trust. He told me to 00:27:13.598 --> 00:27:18.335 get lost that they didn't need any legislation that they were gonna work 00:27:18.368 --> 00:27:24.776 with reclamation to get an environmental impact statement produced. So I 00:27:24.809 --> 00:27:29.835 don't take no for an answer. So then I contacted Tom Jensen who was the 00:27:29.868 --> 00:27:36.426 chief of staff for the Senate Natural Resources Committee and said, um you 00:27:36.459 --> 00:27:41.545 know, this is uh this is what's needed. He was sympathetic. I wrote him a 00:27:41.578 --> 00:27:45.117 letter to, you know, typed up the whole thing from my field books 00:27:45.150 --> 00:27:51.835 corresponded with him and then work all of that spring to write a report, 00:27:51.868 --> 00:27:54.946 you know, Middlebury 00:27:54.979 --> 00:27:59.946 College Department of Geology Series number one or something describing 00:27:59.979 --> 00:28:04.545 all that. And then um 00:28:04.578 --> 00:28:09.285 it turned out ironically that Bill Senator Bill Bradley was the 00:28:09.318 --> 00:28:14.426 convocation speaker at Middlebury that spring. So we all waited around, we 00:28:14.459 --> 00:28:17.156 see on the Natural Resources Committee, he was the chairman, he was the 00:28:17.189 --> 00:28:23.006 chairman, he was Jen and Jensen, of course, goes on to become, he leaves 00:28:23.039 --> 00:28:27.607 the Senate that and becomes head of Grand Canyon Trust after. But, but so 00:28:27.640 --> 00:28:32.325 anyway, and, and this was all led out of by Dan Beard and Tom Jensen to 00:28:32.358 --> 00:28:39.006 get the Grand Canyon protection. Anyway. So in May at Middlebury, uh we 00:28:39.039 --> 00:28:45.206 had the glossy report and we, um, and the pre in the university college 00:28:45.239 --> 00:28:49.597 let us do this and I had three students, you know, with me and we stood 00:28:49.630 --> 00:28:54.377 behind the bleachers and Bradley gets out of the limo coming down from the 00:28:54.410 --> 00:28:59.055 Burlington airport and, you know, we all shake hands and he, you know, 00:28:59.088 --> 00:29:03.335 Bill Bradley is a big, imposing basketball player and at some point, you 00:29:03.368 --> 00:29:08.496 know, I just, you know, everybody sort of stammers for a minute and then I 00:29:08.529 --> 00:29:13.585 sort of kick the kid next to me and, well, Senator Bradley, we know you're 00:29:13.618 --> 00:29:16.647 a great friend of the environment and we've been working in the Grand 00:29:16.680 --> 00:29:21.156 Canyon. We wanted to share with you this report in which we describe the 00:29:21.189 --> 00:29:26.026 sandbar erosion in Grand Canyon. We'd like you to be. And so then we said 00:29:26.059 --> 00:29:31.795 a few things and Bradley said, you know, it's some nice things and on, we 00:29:31.828 --> 00:29:37.117 went and little did I know that within the month he flew out to Grand 00:29:37.150 --> 00:29:41.967 Canyon to do a field review with Grand Canyon Trust and he got off the 00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:48.285 plane with our report having been circled and said, what's going on? And I 00:29:48.318 --> 00:29:53.075 have somewhere in my files, a letter of thank you from Tom Jensen telling 00:29:53.108 --> 00:29:59.976 me, you know, I, when the Grand Canyon Protection Act was passed, no one 00:30:00.009 --> 00:30:05.835 that I played a role in getting that going. Now it's like everything else 00:30:05.868 --> 00:30:11.276 , everybody else claims their own credit for it. But I know that in the 00:30:11.309 --> 00:30:17.266 late eighties, I kept the idea alive. 00:30:17.299 --> 00:30:25.299 And that's my style, my style is that I call it the way I see it, but I 00:30:27.098 --> 00:30:32.717 just don't write a science report. I go somewhere with it anyway. So 00:30:32.750 --> 00:30:39.565 that's just that piece of that story. Um 00:30:39.598 --> 00:30:42.097 uh So, 00:30:42.130 --> 00:30:49.486 so um the other thing that went on in the mid 19 nineties as the Adaptive 00:30:49.519 --> 00:30:54.085 Management Program was being created 00:30:54.118 --> 00:31:02.118 was um that um those of us who were senior scientists at that time began 00:31:03.160 --> 00:31:09.897 to realize that the program was pretty aimless and trying to be all things 00:31:09.930 --> 00:31:14.476 to all people. And 00:31:14.509 --> 00:31:20.946 so we got together and wrote what is surely one of the most influential 00:31:20.979 --> 00:31:28.979 papers that guides the program uh called Science and Values 00:31:30.199 --> 00:31:34.956 in the Grand Canyon or Science and Values in restoring the Grand Canyon 00:31:34.989 --> 00:31:40.285 that was published in bioscience in 1998. 00:31:40.318 --> 00:31:45.276 And, and you know that was, it's Schmidt and all, but it's Schmidt and 00:31:45.309 --> 00:31:50.016 Webb and Valdez and Marzo and Stevens. 00:31:50.049 --> 00:31:56.315 Um And it basically says we can give you any kind of Colorado River and 00:31:56.348 --> 00:32:00.857 Grand Canyon that you want. And the problem is in science, you just have 00:32:00.890 --> 00:32:07.617 to decide what you want and we don't think, you know what you want 00:32:07.650 --> 00:32:12.075 and, you know, and that paper is still read that, I mean, that paper is 00:32:12.108 --> 00:32:19.946 read around the country by classes still and that paper is read, um, you 00:32:19.979 --> 00:32:25.776 know, by, by people who understand the history of these issues ever since. 00:32:25.809 --> 00:32:28.916 Um 00:32:28.949 --> 00:32:33.535 So in some ways, 00:32:33.568 --> 00:32:36.325 um 00:32:36.358 --> 00:32:41.637 can I go back to that for a second? Because I had, I read that in, in the 00:32:41.670 --> 00:32:48.976 um memo that you sent me that you wrote in 2014 as you were leaving and I 00:32:49.009 --> 00:32:53.776 was struck by that quote. I think it's really uh uh profound. And I was 00:32:53.809 --> 00:32:58.406 gonna ask you if you would elaborate a little bit on that. Um When, when 00:32:58.439 --> 00:33:04.736 you were there in the early years, what, what did people want from a 00:33:04.769 --> 00:33:11.617 program? And how did that change over time? Did we ever get clarity? Um or 00:33:11.650 --> 00:33:16.585 was it always a model, uh did it change as values or policies change? Well 00:33:16.618 --> 00:33:20.717 , how do you see the evolution of that whole challenge? 00:33:20.750 --> 00:33:24.887 You know, it's interesting when I teach courses in this stuff, I often say 00:33:24.920 --> 00:33:27.585 that um 00:33:27.618 --> 00:33:30.847 when you tell the history of water development in the West. And you tell 00:33:30.880 --> 00:33:35.206 the story about how in the 19 fifties, the key decisions about building 00:33:35.239 --> 00:33:39.436 dams and diversions were made by the technical elite, technical elite of 00:33:39.469 --> 00:33:47.469 engineers, lawyers, civic boosters, corporate agriculture. Isn't this a 00:33:47.809 --> 00:33:53.956 much better world that now everybody's at the table and then you turn it 00:33:53.989 --> 00:33:58.226 on students and say, well, is it really a better world or if we just made 00:33:58.259 --> 00:34:03.266 the world infinitely more model? Um 00:34:03.299 --> 00:34:10.356 uh At the time I I in, in the, in 00:34:10.389 --> 00:34:16.057 Wagner had a clear directive that I think came out of 00:34:16.090 --> 00:34:20.546 uh administrative guidance and maybe even out of court rulings, I'm not 00:34:20.579 --> 00:34:26.577 sure he surely knows this stuff by heart. So the issues were sandbars, 00:34:26.610 --> 00:34:34.610 trout, endangered fish, maybe riparian vegetation. II, I think those are 00:34:34.958 --> 00:34:41.267 the four or no or maybe it's recreation, it's a, you know, maybe ri you 00:34:41.300 --> 00:34:47.845 know, maybe it's four or maybe it's five. It's damn simple. Now, there was 00:34:47.878 --> 00:34:50.517 now, 00:34:50.550 --> 00:34:55.146 you know, probably the G ce S phase one taught us more about what we 00:34:55.179 --> 00:34:58.247 didn't know than what we knew. 00:34:58.280 --> 00:35:00.356 Um 00:35:00.389 --> 00:35:05.316 But whatever the case, we were forced to make little matrices where you 00:35:05.349 --> 00:35:09.365 had some kind of operational decision, some environmental outcome and you 00:35:09.398 --> 00:35:14.706 had pluses and minuses or you don't know. Um And I think that that's where 00:35:14.739 --> 00:35:19.445 the perception that not everything benefited by the same operational 00:35:19.478 --> 00:35:26.747 decision started to like become clear to people, but it wasn't until that 00:35:26.780 --> 00:35:33.635 bioscience article that we made a huge table and systematically put pluses 00:35:33.668 --> 00:35:39.706 and minuses. And then it became clear that there was no operational scheme 00:35:39.739 --> 00:35:43.646 that benefited everything. And if there was no operational scheme that 00:35:43.679 --> 00:35:50.787 benefited everything, then you darn well, better know 00:35:50.820 --> 00:35:57.646 what you wanted. And so then an idea that's in that article that 00:35:57.679 --> 00:36:01.767 I get credit for because I'm the senior author and I've got a lot of 00:36:01.800 --> 00:36:07.945 mileage at it. But the idea was Dick Marzo, not mine was he coined the 00:36:07.978 --> 00:36:15.836 terms relic resources and artifact resources, relics of the past and 00:36:15.869 --> 00:36:22.126 artifacts of dams and, and, and Dick thought this up and then I, you know 00:36:22.159 --> 00:36:25.586 , we all jump, you know how we all reconnected them, right? And I've 00:36:25.619 --> 00:36:31.756 gotten so much mileage out of this and so many slides and so many talks, I 00:36:31.789 --> 00:36:39.557 can't even keep track of them in which you, so we had those ideas, right? 00:36:39.590 --> 00:36:43.606 That, you know, folks, some of the environmental resources down there are 00:36:43.639 --> 00:36:49.017 the relics of the past and other resources are artifacts of dams. The most 00:36:49.050 --> 00:36:54.456 obvious being trout, recreational trout fishery as an artifact. That so 00:36:54.489 --> 00:36:56.845 then 00:36:56.878 --> 00:37:04.836 I will confess um that I got quite f first when the Adaptive Management 00:37:04.869 --> 00:37:10.445 Program was first created, I got from afar. I got quite frustrated by it 00:37:10.478 --> 00:37:16.456 because it just instantly wanted to make everything more complicated. And 00:37:16.489 --> 00:37:22.977 so then, um you have all these stakeholders and all these stakeholders 00:37:23.010 --> 00:37:28.997 have their pet resources, they care about and then 00:37:29.030 --> 00:37:31.155 I 00:37:31.188 --> 00:37:36.026 good. This is all fun. 00:37:36.059 --> 00:37:41.236 Um uh um 00:37:41.269 --> 00:37:44.675 There is a focus in these adaptive management programs and these 00:37:44.708 --> 00:37:50.916 stakeholder processes and people getting along. And I used to flippantly 00:37:50.949 --> 00:37:57.986 criticize the program because I would cynically say that, you know, it 00:37:58.019 --> 00:38:02.557 became this whole trust building exercise and fall backwards into each 00:38:02.590 --> 00:38:07.166 other's arms to learn to trust the other person and all this stuff that 00:38:07.199 --> 00:38:13.727 goes on and nobody would make hard nosed decisions. And so what happened 00:38:13.760 --> 00:38:17.717 was a set of object. And then let's get all the stakeholders to write 00:38:17.750 --> 00:38:23.296 objectives of the program. And they, so this became cannon fodder for me 00:38:23.329 --> 00:38:28.066 giving talks because I would show a slide in which all these objectives 00:38:28.099 --> 00:38:33.827 would be listed, all written by the stakeholders and there was 16 or 20 of 00:38:33.860 --> 00:38:38.807 them or something. I don't know. And then the next slide, I would just 00:38:38.840 --> 00:38:44.146 have the same list except, you know, in one color would be relics of the 00:38:44.179 --> 00:38:48.425 past and the other color would be artifacts of the dam and under artifacts 00:38:48.458 --> 00:38:53.106 , dam would be a recreational trout fishery and maximum hydropower 00:38:53.139 --> 00:38:57.736 production and secure water supply. And, and, and then it was just like, 00:38:57.769 --> 00:39:01.356 and then, you know, well, folks, you can't do this. This is not a hard 00:39:01.389 --> 00:39:06.686 problem. We can do really sophisticated science, but it isn't actually 00:39:06.719 --> 00:39:12.135 that hard a problem for starters. We can't do all this. We need to make a 00:39:12.168 --> 00:39:15.836 tougher decision because you're saying basically you can trade off, you, 00:39:15.869 --> 00:39:19.546 you can't have it all. Somebody's gonna win, somebody's gonna lose and 00:39:19.579 --> 00:39:27.579 what and what? Yeah. And so, so, so where I began to, so I became, I guess 00:39:28.208 --> 00:39:30.256 a critiquer 00:39:30.289 --> 00:39:33.497 of the program 00:39:33.530 --> 00:39:40.327 um to go back is that because you wanted them to start making trade offs 00:39:40.360 --> 00:39:47.236 and making decisions and it was taking too long to establish. I don't, I 00:39:47.269 --> 00:39:54.986 mean, I have, I have my personal biases of what I'd like planet Earth to 00:39:55.019 --> 00:40:00.925 look like, but I don't get to choose how many 00:40:00.958 --> 00:40:05.057 billion people live on the earth's surface or how many 100 millions live 00:40:05.090 --> 00:40:10.396 in the United States. And, and I mean, you can't have this, you know, 00:40:10.429 --> 00:40:14.936 magical natural paradise and have however many people we have. So 00:40:14.969 --> 00:40:20.856 tradeoffs are gonna have to be made. Um I just felt like tough decisions 00:40:20.889 --> 00:40:27.307 weren't the, there was tough thinking that was, we had made such progress 00:40:27.340 --> 00:40:33.296 in the early nineties to get to the idea of the controlled flood and then 00:40:33.329 --> 00:40:37.747 we were losing it because everybody cared about just how they all got 00:40:37.780 --> 00:40:44.336 along and which was delaying decisions. 00:40:44.369 --> 00:40:49.327 I don't know. Uh government moves so slow. I don't know. I just, I just 00:40:49.360 --> 00:40:57.360 wasn't a big fan of that. But um I would say that, you know, my experience 00:40:59.458 --> 00:41:06.717 and the experience the, the early 19 nineties were a unique time. They 00:41:06.750 --> 00:41:10.606 were a unique time because 00:41:10.639 --> 00:41:17.296 um I, I flippantly sometimes refer to that as those were the years when 00:41:17.329 --> 00:41:24.175 the traditional water managers and reclamation lost control of the dam. 00:41:24.208 --> 00:41:29.396 And this small group of scientists sitting in Duncan Patton's office 00:41:29.429 --> 00:41:37.276 actually just sat around and dreamed up. Oh, let's have interim operations. 00:41:37.309 --> 00:41:41.807 Let's reduce the range of fluctuations. And the political force is 00:41:41.840 --> 00:41:48.345 largely set up by Wagner, push those things through and reclamation in the 00:41:48.378 --> 00:41:51.126 traditional stakeholders 00:41:51.159 --> 00:41:58.557 hated it. And so by the time the Adaptive Management Program was created 00:41:58.590 --> 00:42:01.606 in 96 or 97 00:42:01.639 --> 00:42:07.706 um it was like we're doing this as a formal process. This is going to be 00:42:07.739 --> 00:42:12.356 formal, this is a federal advisory committee. We're not going to have this 00:42:12.389 --> 00:42:18.405 tyranny or anarchy of scientists running the show. 00:42:18.438 --> 00:42:24.695 And, you know, if I sat in a room with Rick Gold who was a commissioner, 00:42:24.728 --> 00:42:30.287 then, you know, I mean, the regional director, then I mean, I don't think 00:42:30.320 --> 00:42:33.856 actually that it would be all that. I think everybody would sort of agree 00:42:33.889 --> 00:42:39.195 with that. So there was something the Adaptive Management program 00:42:39.228 --> 00:42:47.228 transformed, what some might call anarchy into a very formalized process. 00:42:49.019 --> 00:42:56.595 Others might say stultify, others might say ossified, you know, and so, 00:42:56.628 --> 00:43:01.086 you know, who am I to, who am I? I mean, this is what happens with any 00:43:01.119 --> 00:43:05.816 government agency. I mean, EPA was a wonderful place. The first couple of 00:43:05.849 --> 00:43:09.736 , you know, then it becomes a more a different kind of a place. The office 00:43:09.769 --> 00:43:13.655 of surface mining, I I had worked the first years, it was organized in the 00:43:13.688 --> 00:43:18.506 Carter Administration. It becomes a much more re, I mean, this is just 00:43:18.539 --> 00:43:23.186 what happens. So the fact that that's what happened when the Adaptive 00:43:23.219 --> 00:43:27.106 Management Program was formalized 00:43:27.139 --> 00:43:34.057 is not, um I don't know that that's good or bad. It's just what happens. 00:43:34.090 --> 00:43:40.557 Um um A and then 00:43:40.590 --> 00:43:44.046 um 00:43:44.079 --> 00:43:51.467 in the legislation that in the record of decision of the EIS what was 00:43:51.500 --> 00:43:57.967 created was a formal adapt. It was formally called an Adaptive Management 00:43:58.000 --> 00:44:06.000 program. And uh after the first hiccup, 00:44:06.239 --> 00:44:12.796 you know, of uh the first head of chief GCMRC, a guy named Dave Garrett 00:44:12.829 --> 00:44:16.477 who wasn't there very long before he had to leave for health problems. 00:44:16.510 --> 00:44:20.517 We're meeting him in August and at his home in Colorado said to my, yeah, 00:44:20.550 --> 00:44:28.550 he runs a winery. Really? Yeah, if you don't, you might do it, stop and go 00:44:28.619 --> 00:44:34.736 here. But for heaven's sakes don't make the same mistake in there. Make 00:44:34.769 --> 00:44:40.017 sure you tell your families you need to spend two full days talking with 00:44:40.050 --> 00:44:45.307 Dave on his back deck, having a glass of rose or whatever. Uh Yeah, don't 00:44:45.340 --> 00:44:52.916 , yeah, don't waste that trip anyway. But then uh but then uh after Dave 00:44:52.949 --> 00:44:58.247 had health problems and had to leave, um 00:44:58.280 --> 00:45:05.916 the second Chief Barry Gold was a real disciple of adaptive management. 00:45:05.949 --> 00:45:09.865 And then they brought in, 00:45:09.898 --> 00:45:16.227 you know, the international expert on adaptive management. What could 00:45:16.260 --> 00:45:24.260 possibly be wrong with that? And So, uh, so they bring in Carl, um, and, 00:45:26.728 --> 00:45:31.905 you know, Carl's a pretty strong headed my way or the highway kind of guy 00:45:31.938 --> 00:45:37.365 doesn't take guff from anybody and he's a real straight shooter. He's 00:45:37.398 --> 00:45:44.195 internationally respected, written books. I mean, he's a, he's, he's, he's 00:45:44.228 --> 00:45:51.727 a force different and he had a vision of how everything was gonna work and 00:45:51.760 --> 00:45:58.546 that vision of how it was gonna work, um, was that they could create 00:45:58.579 --> 00:46:03.467 models of all these trade offs. And then if you made everything 00:46:03.500 --> 00:46:09.666 transparent, of course, stakeholders are going to make the informed 00:46:09.699 --> 00:46:15.356 decision and you can start to evaluate 00:46:15.389 --> 00:46:19.865 the tradeoffs and you can start to evaluate whether you really need to 00:46:19.898 --> 00:46:27.166 know X or Y or Z. And so they went down the path of building a big 00:46:27.199 --> 00:46:30.057 ecosystem model. 00:46:30.090 --> 00:46:33.517 And um 00:46:33.550 --> 00:46:38.916 you know, and the metaphor uses that, you know, so they invited a whole 00:46:38.949 --> 00:46:43.267 bunch of experts in every different field and they locked them in a room 00:46:43.300 --> 00:46:48.486 and, you know, and Carl, you know, and his crew would say, OK, well, 00:46:48.519 --> 00:46:53.936 what's this relationship between flow and fish populations or sand bars or 00:46:53.969 --> 00:46:58.186 something? And if the scientists would say, well, we can't tell you that 00:46:58.219 --> 00:47:02.296 one, then they'd say, well, OK, well, you know, we're, we're no, we're 00:47:02.329 --> 00:47:06.787 locking in. I don't, I don't care how long it takes you, but you're not 00:47:06.820 --> 00:47:10.925 getting out of the room, you're not getting another hamburger until you 00:47:10.958 --> 00:47:15.396 tell me whether it's going up or down. And so, you know, and so out of 00:47:15.429 --> 00:47:18.845 that, you know, it's just like we're not gonna just let scientists just 00:47:18.878 --> 00:47:22.037 forever, 00:47:22.070 --> 00:47:26.236 you know, study things like damn it, we're gonna get something out of you. 00:47:26.269 --> 00:47:32.066 And so they did it and they built an ecosystem model and, and you could 00:47:32.099 --> 00:47:35.396 run trade ups and do whatever. And as soon as that came out, the 00:47:35.429 --> 00:47:40.675 stakeholders, you know, immediately ignored it and it had no impact on 00:47:40.708 --> 00:47:48.708 decision making. Why, why did they ignore? Because you can't, you cannot 00:47:49.978 --> 00:47:56.717 practice adaptive management in Grand Canyon at in the literature. And I 00:47:56.750 --> 00:48:01.017 wrote about it in one of those memos, I sent you in the literature. The 00:48:01.050 --> 00:48:06.666 circumstances in Grand Canyon are at best 00:48:06.699 --> 00:48:13.425 described literally as adaptive management light, which means you're 00:48:13.458 --> 00:48:18.175 trying to, you're either trying to practice adaptive management or you're 00:48:18.208 --> 00:48:25.135 pretending to practice adaptive management in a context in which there are 00:48:25.168 --> 00:48:33.168 major societal actions that cannot be experimentally adjusted. 00:48:33.458 --> 00:48:41.458 The most fundamental in Grand Canyon is that you must pass 00:48:41.679 --> 00:48:49.445 a large uh an explicit amount of water from the upper basin to the lower 00:48:49.478 --> 00:48:55.695 basin, from Lake Powell to Lake Mead. And you're, you can't tweak that and 00:48:55.728 --> 00:49:03.728 there are large external forces relative to water supply that um 00:49:05.570 --> 00:49:13.570 must be acknowledged and respected and cannot be manipulated. And so, um 00:49:15.500 --> 00:49:22.606 and there are large institutional forces that control those decisions and 00:49:22.639 --> 00:49:30.639 those institutional forces of water supply are never going to let go of 00:49:30.648 --> 00:49:38.086 their control and give it to the issues of Grand K. 00:49:38.119 --> 00:49:42.807 And so you're never going to be able to practice adaptive management 00:49:42.840 --> 00:49:46.095 because that requires experimental research. And there are certain 00:49:46.128 --> 00:49:51.405 experiments that are out of the realm of possibility you're saying. And 00:49:51.438 --> 00:49:58.356 not only that you can't, you can't, um you cannot 00:49:58.389 --> 00:50:02.006 um 00:50:02.039 --> 00:50:05.526 you cannot um 00:50:05.559 --> 00:50:12.486 maintain a fixed experimental program, 00:50:12.519 --> 00:50:17.845 you know, for 10 or 20 years, because the world changes, we go into a 00:50:17.878 --> 00:50:23.595 protracted drought, we have five years of, of wet years in the eight and 00:50:23.628 --> 00:50:30.066 everything goes right out the window. Yeah. But anyway, that's, yeah, so 00:50:30.099 --> 00:50:35.796 that went on and then, you know, the tension 00:50:35.829 --> 00:50:41.787 just finish the thought. I mean, then the um 00:50:41.820 --> 00:50:49.820 there was a focus at Adaptive Management, GCMRC as an agency was viewed as 00:50:50.059 --> 00:50:53.916 its objective was to be a small 00:50:53.949 --> 00:51:01.276 contracting agency that let contracts for academics and consultants to do 00:51:01.309 --> 00:51:09.309 re applied research that the role of GCMRC was to write guidance documents 00:51:10.550 --> 00:51:18.115 in planning and adaptive management. That was certainly the paradigm of 00:51:18.148 --> 00:51:21.577 gold. 00:51:21.610 --> 00:51:26.646 The whole GCMRC gets absorbed into the US GS. There's intrigue with all of 00:51:26.679 --> 00:51:32.336 these things and, and long stories and, 00:51:32.369 --> 00:51:36.865 and then all the way through my predecessor, 00:51:36.898 --> 00:51:44.898 um that was the focus of the agency or that's the focus of GCMRC. And um 00:51:47.349 --> 00:51:52.736 and then I came in and said, well, that's great, but we're not going in 00:51:52.769 --> 00:51:57.405 that direction anymore. We're going in this direction and then in that new 00:51:57.438 --> 00:52:00.885 direction was 00:52:00.918 --> 00:52:04.635 um 00:52:04.668 --> 00:52:07.026 um 00:52:07.059 --> 00:52:14.345 I guess two fold, I said, um the science questions that GCMRC is asking 00:52:14.378 --> 00:52:22.378 that are coming from the stakeholders are um myopic unanswerable, complex 00:52:23.760 --> 00:52:31.577 and intractable. And um 00:52:31.610 --> 00:52:37.155 I, I viewed, I mean, I, I mean, I would, I would go to occasional meetings 00:52:37.188 --> 00:52:42.166 of GCMRC annual reporting meetings of the death of management program in 00:52:42.199 --> 00:52:47.175 the years before I became chief and, and people would come up to me in the 00:52:47.208 --> 00:52:51.066 back of the room and say, you know, Jack, it's great to see you. Yeah. 00:52:51.099 --> 00:52:59.099 Isn't this just crazy what it's become? And it was just a demoralized, 00:52:59.728 --> 00:53:04.296 it was just a demoralized operation which people said, and what was the 00:53:04.329 --> 00:53:08.557 source of that demoralization? Nobody knew what the questions were, nobody 00:53:08.590 --> 00:53:12.336 knew what they were supposed to be working on. Nobody knew where they were 00:53:12.369 --> 00:53:17.807 going. So there's no direction. There is just no, no, no, no, no. This is 00:53:17.840 --> 00:53:22.557 adaptive man. I'm not the science. I'm not talking about, I'm talking 00:53:22.590 --> 00:53:26.445 about the program itself because 00:53:26.478 --> 00:53:34.478 so I just went in and said, we can't articulate, that's not how it can 00:53:34.550 --> 00:53:39.217 work the way it has to work is that 00:53:39.250 --> 00:53:47.250 the job of GCMRC is to re articulate science questions as big simple 00:53:47.989 --> 00:53:54.227 questions so that every stakeholder if asked, what are you studying and 00:53:54.260 --> 00:53:59.686 why do you exist? Every stakeholder will tell you basically the same thing 00:53:59.719 --> 00:54:07.456 because everybody understands it. And um so an example of that kind of 00:54:07.489 --> 00:54:14.276 simple, direct kind of question can we maintain? So I used to put them up 00:54:14.309 --> 00:54:18.276 in all my talks. It was like this is, this program is about answering 00:54:18.309 --> 00:54:22.695 these three questions or these two questions. This is all we're trying to 00:54:22.728 --> 00:54:28.557 do. If it's not relentlessly fixed on this, we, we gotta, we gotta ask 00:54:28.590 --> 00:54:33.686 ourselves, why do we do this? Um Yeah, the two fundamental questions for 00:54:33.719 --> 00:54:41.345 Grand Canyon are, um, is it, I mean, everyone is a nuanced question, but 00:54:41.378 --> 00:54:49.378 the first one is, is it possible? No, what is the s the maximum size of 00:54:51.030 --> 00:54:56.166 sandbars that can be maintained 00:54:56.199 --> 00:55:01.066 with the existing tremendous 00:55:01.099 --> 00:55:09.099 deficit in sand supply and given the operational rules that exist and is 00:55:10.800 --> 00:55:18.247 that size acceptable 00:55:18.280 --> 00:55:21.717 to society? 00:55:21.750 --> 00:55:29.750 And the other question is, um, something like, um, 00:55:32.760 --> 00:55:37.095 what is the maximum population 00:55:37.128 --> 00:55:44.626 of the endangered Humpback chub that can be maintained, given the fact 00:55:44.659 --> 00:55:50.896 that so that we have made a societal decision to also maintain a 00:55:50.929 --> 00:55:55.876 recreational trout fishery 00:55:55.909 --> 00:56:03.909 when those trout eat the endangered fish. Now, there are the, the fish 00:56:04.809 --> 00:56:09.037 horn is much more nuanced. Now, now there's razorback suckers along with 00:56:09.070 --> 00:56:13.756 Humpback chub. Now it's brown trout rather than rainbow trout. Now, it 00:56:13.789 --> 00:56:18.586 might be that operations don't make a hill of beans a difference, but it's 00:56:18.619 --> 00:56:26.619 just that. And, um, and, you know, a and so, you know, we would, you work 00:56:29.530 --> 00:56:37.227 with the administration and, and, and, and you, you get guidance. Well, 00:56:37.260 --> 00:56:41.776 you, what you do is you sort of clue the administra high administration. 00:56:41.809 --> 00:56:48.646 So, like, we'd like to receive a memo that says this and they say, well, 00:56:48.679 --> 00:56:51.787 would you like to share with us any paragraphs that you'd like to, 00:56:51.820 --> 00:56:56.477 wouldn't mind seeing, show up in a letter on this, you know, and that's 00:56:56.510 --> 00:57:01.425 the game you play. But, um, we would get memo and the assistant secretary 00:57:01.458 --> 00:57:05.256 that said, well, we know you have a lot of things to work on. But just to 00:57:05.289 --> 00:57:10.655 be clear, it's sand, fish, fish, fish, 00:57:10.688 --> 00:57:14.546 that's what you're working on. So that effort is simplified. Those would 00:57:14.579 --> 00:57:21.115 come in the time I was there and so on like 2011 to 2000. 00:57:21.148 --> 00:57:28.155 Yeah. And um uh to, to so one thing is make this question, make it simple 00:57:28.188 --> 00:57:36.188 , make it so everyone can articulate it. And that the job of GCMRC 00:57:36.539 --> 00:57:41.256 is to listen in a sensitive and caring 00:57:41.289 --> 00:57:47.477 and careful way to the expression of stakeholders. What they're saying are 00:57:47.510 --> 00:57:54.336 their concerns. And then to be able to be clear enough to tell, talk back 00:57:54.369 --> 00:58:02.369 to a stakeholder and say, OK, I hear your concern and this is the 00:58:02.800 --> 00:58:10.256 scientific question that I think you're asking or to say back to a 00:58:10.289 --> 00:58:14.646 stakeholder. Um 00:58:14.679 --> 00:58:18.146 Well, what you're asking 00:58:18.179 --> 00:58:24.186 is a really hard and nuanced question and any time you're trying to answer 00:58:24.219 --> 00:58:28.905 a hard and nuanced question in science, then it will cost you much much 00:58:28.938 --> 00:58:33.925 more to answer it. That's just how it works. And you need to understand, 00:58:33.958 --> 00:58:38.385 you need to ask yourself whether you really need that question answered 00:58:38.418 --> 00:58:42.405 because what you, what it would, the resources it would take to answer 00:58:42.438 --> 00:58:48.345 that are probably not reasonable or to say to a stakeholder. That's a 00:58:48.378 --> 00:58:54.497 great question. That's exactly tractable. Or to say, I don't think that's 00:58:54.530 --> 00:58:59.037 a question you really wanna ask. Here's a question and this is a trackable 00:58:59.070 --> 00:59:07.070 one or perhaps even just as important. It is to say, I hear your concern, 00:59:07.139 --> 00:59:13.425 but we can't tell you any more than we have told you already. 00:59:13.458 --> 00:59:17.037 You need to make a decision. 00:59:17.070 --> 00:59:25.070 We're past the point because what happens in these programs is that 00:59:25.820 --> 00:59:28.646 OK? 00:59:28.679 --> 00:59:33.115 You know, I keep going on these segues. OK. So one big one big thing is 00:59:33.148 --> 00:59:36.646 the resources that people care about in Grand Canyon. Their artifacts are 00:59:36.679 --> 00:59:41.155 relics, right? Another big categorization is the categorization of the 00:59:41.188 --> 00:59:46.796 stakeholders, the stakeholders, some of the stakeholders represent 00:59:46.829 --> 00:59:49.287 institutions 00:59:49.320 --> 00:59:51.945 and perspectives 00:59:51.978 --> 00:59:59.978 for whom they agendas and goals are met if radical and big change occurs 01:00:02.478 --> 01:00:08.095 in operating rules. And the other group is those institutions and groups 01:00:08.128 --> 01:00:15.546 who benefit because the status quo is maintained. And so when you have a 01:00:15.579 --> 01:00:21.865 program that has two fundamental groups and the groups for whom this, if 01:00:21.898 --> 01:00:26.115 the status quo is maintain, they benefit happen to also be the most 01:00:26.148 --> 01:00:30.776 politically powerful people sitting around the table. And those are the 01:00:30.809 --> 01:00:38.809 people who are paid real salaries to sit there at the table. Right. Then. 01:00:40.219 --> 01:00:42.219 What's the game you play? Well, I'm not convinced. I think we need to 01:00:45.849 --> 01:00:52.146 study that some more. Here's another alternative that might be plausible. 01:00:52.179 --> 01:00:59.006 We really should study this other possibility before we take an action and 01:00:59.039 --> 01:01:05.736 you endlessly delay decisions because you can always come up with some 01:01:05.769 --> 01:01:11.977 other question or some other nuance. And the problem in Grand Canyon is 01:01:12.010 --> 01:01:20.010 that um there's always some young hungry academic or some young hungry 01:01:20.599 --> 01:01:27.526 agency person who will say, you bet I'll go, I'll take that on. Yeah, more 01:01:27.559 --> 01:01:33.095 research. Uh I mean, I have colleagues, I mean, I'm an old guy. I have 01:01:33.128 --> 01:01:38.816 colleagues who are my ilk who would look at me in years past and say 01:01:38.849 --> 01:01:42.146 Schmidt, I can't believe you're still work in Grand Canyon. You've figured 01:01:42.179 --> 01:01:45.787 it out, you know what the solutions are. There's not a societal will to 01:01:45.820 --> 01:01:50.146 solve the problems. Why do you take their money? Can't you? Are you 01:01:50.179 --> 01:01:55.856 incapable of coming up with anything else to work on? 01:01:55.889 --> 01:01:59.885 You know, just have enough nerve to walk away and go studying something 01:01:59.918 --> 01:02:05.925 else. And one of the dilemmas in Grand Canyon is that the game of 01:02:05.958 --> 01:02:11.497 stakeholders asking ever more nuanced silly questions 01:02:11.530 --> 01:02:18.376 is perpetuated and in a world in which research money is hard to come by 01:02:18.409 --> 01:02:24.816 or just maintaining, you know, GCMRC is an institution. You know, somebody 01:02:24.849 --> 01:02:28.595 say, oh, I'll take that question. Huh? 01:02:28.628 --> 01:02:32.977 So anyway, this whole, so my agenda at GC, that's one thing with big 01:02:33.010 --> 01:02:37.537 questions. And then um 01:02:37.570 --> 01:02:45.570 the other one was internal, the GCMRC. I said, um GCMRC cannot be an 01:02:46.559 --> 01:02:48.546 agency 01:02:48.579 --> 01:02:56.247 staffed by people who write contracts that if that's what you do, you, you 01:02:56.280 --> 01:03:02.756 can't manage excellent science unless you are yourself an excellent 01:03:02.789 --> 01:03:07.126 scientist. And so, 01:03:07.159 --> 01:03:13.416 um I, I remember one of my former students who is down there now, um when 01:03:13.449 --> 01:03:18.956 he was hired down there, I was a prov, he left here to go down there and 01:03:18.989 --> 01:03:24.276 he was a finalist for the job. And at the time, um 01:03:24.309 --> 01:03:28.247 you know, the biggest concern within GCMRC about whether to hire that guy 01:03:28.280 --> 01:03:31.747 is they were concerned that he might be too much of a scientist and he 01:03:31.780 --> 01:03:35.967 might want to actually do science and he needed to understand that. No, 01:03:36.000 --> 01:03:40.376 he's coming down to run a program and write contracts, contracts for 01:03:40.409 --> 01:03:44.977 research. Yeah, for someone else to do it. And so I just said we're not 01:03:45.010 --> 01:03:50.166 doing that. And so the other big change that I made at GCMRC was uh saying 01:03:50.199 --> 01:03:56.695 , no, we're gonna convert all these people to um what are called RGE 01:03:56.728 --> 01:04:02.236 scientists. They're basically within the US GS your research grade 01:04:02.269 --> 01:04:07.747 evaluation scientists. I would not as chief control, whether you get a 01:04:07.780 --> 01:04:14.046 promotion, you are evaluated for promotion by an external national uh 01:04:14.079 --> 01:04:18.675 committee of your peers and they could care less what you do in your day 01:04:18.708 --> 01:04:23.405 to day work, you're either producing at the rate at which you would 01:04:23.438 --> 01:04:30.155 justify tenure or promotion in an academic arena or you're not. And so I 01:04:30.188 --> 01:04:34.385 took it out of my hands and then I just said, well, you're on your own now 01:04:34.418 --> 01:04:38.905 , you better produce. And then the other one is that, you know, when GCMR 01:04:38.938 --> 01:04:41.356 , 01:04:41.389 --> 01:04:46.997 so there are multiple people who come up to me and thank me for having 01:04:47.030 --> 01:04:53.396 their words, save their career. Put them on a path of research 01:04:53.429 --> 01:05:01.429 at, at GCNG and C two. And the other one was that I happened to be chief 01:05:02.800 --> 01:05:06.146 at a time of financial 01:05:06.179 --> 01:05:14.179 relative abundance. Uh Anybody looks good in the top, right? Rising time 01:05:14.550 --> 01:05:19.666 floats all boats. So my job was a hell of a lot easier than the job now. 01:05:19.699 --> 01:05:25.807 Um But because of that, I was able to hire a number of postdocs because 01:05:25.840 --> 01:05:31.336 that was based on the F I had my philosophy was, you know, it's hard to re 01:05:31.369 --> 01:05:37.405 you, you, you know, I was trying to inspire people. I couldn't inspire 01:05:37.438 --> 01:05:39.807 everybody. 01:05:39.840 --> 01:05:43.586 You can only pull that off. So they're federal employees, you can't fire 01:05:43.619 --> 01:05:48.717 them, you know, all that sort of stuff. And so in an effort to inspire the 01:05:48.750 --> 01:05:52.396 place I filled it with postdocs 01:05:52.429 --> 01:05:58.436 young hungry and it was just like, ok, get, get some people, get some 01:05:58.469 --> 01:06:05.756 people um swimming fast and then maybe other people will swim fast and you 01:06:05.789 --> 01:06:09.376 know, and anyway, So those are the two, I mean, those are the two big 01:06:09.409 --> 01:06:14.646 changes that I'm proud of. Um It was easier because there was money 01:06:14.679 --> 01:06:22.679 available to do it. Yeah. So it sounds to me a little bit like um you 01:06:23.699 --> 01:06:31.699 very aware of and concerned about the uh tension between um administrators 01:06:32.309 --> 01:06:36.836 needing to make important decisions about dam operations, tradeoffs 01:06:36.869 --> 01:06:42.006 between resources while at the same time attempting to be collaborative 01:06:42.039 --> 01:06:47.175 and democratic and participatory that there's a tension between those two 01:06:47.208 --> 01:06:51.077 and that you feel that maybe we need to bite the bullet a little more 01:06:51.110 --> 01:06:57.646 often, be less like conflict diverse and be more willing to just say, OK, 01:06:57.679 --> 01:07:02.217 this is what we want. These are the decisions we're gonna make and, and 01:07:02.250 --> 01:07:07.885 not like sort of endlessly worry about all stakeholders being represented 01:07:07.918 --> 01:07:15.918 and satisfied. Is that to some, yes, to some extent. Yes. And 01:07:19.550 --> 01:07:24.747 um 01:07:24.780 --> 01:07:31.646 it's a universal challenge in every age. No, I'm trying to, I 01:07:31.679 --> 01:07:38.307 there are big real estate. Um M 01:07:38.340 --> 01:07:46.340 there are big realizations of that I came to in that position. 01:07:47.070 --> 01:07:54.595 One of them was the realization that Grand Canyon as a segment of the 01:07:54.628 --> 01:07:59.646 river is trapped. 01:07:59.679 --> 01:08:04.445 It is prisoner of the fact that if you think of the big map of the 01:08:04.478 --> 01:08:11.115 Colorado River watershed, you essentially have 01:08:11.148 --> 01:08:16.416 everything, the upper basin, the land where the water comes from and then 01:08:16.449 --> 01:08:20.996 everything below Hoover is the land where the water goes, the land where 01:08:21.029 --> 01:08:25.536 the water is used and connecting 01:08:25.569 --> 01:08:32.166 those two is the bottleneck. Every drop of water from the land where the 01:08:32.199 --> 01:08:35.836 water comes from to the land where the water is used must pass through 01:08:35.869 --> 01:08:41.265 Grand King. And 01:08:41.298 --> 01:08:48.805 um and so your management options in Grand Canyon are, are tiny, very 01:08:48.838 --> 01:08:55.496 constrained, tiny. And that all became clear to me in the development of 01:08:55.529 --> 01:09:03.529 the long term experiment management program. EIS the Ltmeis when well 01:09:03.939 --> 01:09:06.076 intentioned 01:09:06.109 --> 01:09:13.765 personal friends of mine, who I like and, and remain friends with today 01:09:13.798 --> 01:09:20.486 and who were my bosses in Washington DC, right? Just completely took off 01:09:20.519 --> 01:09:26.929 the table. Every fundamental decision that would really affect the place. 01:09:27.019 --> 01:09:29.019 You're not gonna mess with the compact, you're not gonna mess, you know, 01:09:30.929 --> 01:09:35.686 with any law, the river Administrative agreements, you're not gonna touch 01:09:35.719 --> 01:09:41.965 the 2007 interim shortage guidelines, you're not, you know, and so every 01:09:41.998 --> 01:09:45.696 water supply, 01:09:45.729 --> 01:09:53.515 every water supply agreement that is in place is untouchable then for good 01:09:53.548 --> 01:09:57.666 measure, they said, and you're not going to touch sediment augmentation. 01:09:57.699 --> 01:10:01.357 We we would never get that. You're not going to touch temperature 01:10:01.390 --> 01:10:07.086 manipulation, you would never achieve that. Now make the best of it. So 01:10:07.119 --> 01:10:11.555 what happened? So I did let you mess with hydropower generation, of course. 01:10:11.588 --> 01:10:15.456 So that is so that so, 01:10:15.489 --> 01:10:23.489 so the irony is that in the in the in the long arc of this issue, this 01:10:23.588 --> 01:10:31.116 issue started with a focus on hydropower because nobody understood it to 01:10:31.149 --> 01:10:37.036 be anything other than hydropower. We then came to realize no, it's 01:10:37.069 --> 01:10:41.805 sediment supply. It's a lack of sediment supply. It's the absence of 01:10:41.838 --> 01:10:47.046 floods. It's the absence of rebuilding of the deposits. Hydro peaking is 01:10:47.079 --> 01:10:54.446 one part of it, but it's a small piece of a bigger harder puzzle. But then 01:10:54.479 --> 01:10:59.976 it turns out that every other piece of the puzzle. 01:11:00.009 --> 01:11:05.626 Water supply, routing sediment trapping in Lake Powell temperature 01:11:05.659 --> 01:11:13.567 modification are all off limits. And so the only whipping boy you're left 01:11:13.600 --> 01:11:21.055 with is hydropower is everybody's whipping boy. And so ironically, no one 01:11:21.088 --> 01:11:29.088 , no one who knew me would ever perceive me as an apologist for hydropower. 01:11:29.168 --> 01:11:31.168 And yet I actually believe that hydropower now always has to take, make 01:11:37.779 --> 01:11:44.546 the compromise because they're the easy fall guy for much bigger problems. 01:11:44.579 --> 01:11:50.336 And that's the crazy. So my big thing now, what I work on and work on 01:11:50.369 --> 01:11:55.906 with trying to do grants and writing articles and stuff is a and I've 01:11:55.939 --> 01:12:00.515 given these talks in lots of places in which I sort of talk about. What 01:12:00.548 --> 01:12:03.527 are the big changes we're willing to make, what are the big changes we're 01:12:03.560 --> 01:12:08.906 not willing to make. The problem in Grand Canyon is we're stuck on hydro 01:12:08.939 --> 01:12:16.939 ping. And so that's a problem. And so I'm focused now in my work at trying 01:12:20.069 --> 01:12:24.476 to make sure that when the interim shortage guidelines are reopened for, 01:12:24.509 --> 01:12:32.305 for um renegotiation in 2020 the river and the river environment is on the 01:12:32.338 --> 01:12:38.015 table. It is the a clear piece of the conversation because the way things 01:12:38.048 --> 01:12:43.226 have worked over the last 20 years is every deal is cut amongst the water 01:12:43.259 --> 01:12:46.696 supply players. 01:12:46.729 --> 01:12:51.496 And then after you cut all the deals, then you get on the phone to GCMRC 01:12:51.529 --> 01:12:57.046 and say, OK, we cut all the deals now, make the best of this, but you 01:12:57.079 --> 01:13:04.107 can't touch the deal. We just cut now. So what do you think we want for 01:13:04.140 --> 01:13:09.456 the river and the river ecosystem? So that's a great idea. Yeah. Ok. Yeah. 01:13:09.489 --> 01:13:16.607 OK. So given that, given the fact that we're locked in right then, um 01:13:16.640 --> 01:13:24.640 uh what do we want? Um Oh God. Um 01:13:34.289 --> 01:13:38.786 I, well, I still do things that different stakeholders want different 01:13:38.819 --> 01:13:44.437 things. I think the National Park Service just wants control. I'm not even 01:13:44.470 --> 01:13:48.406 sure they care what they want. They just want to feel like they're in 01:13:48.439 --> 01:13:54.527 control and they're never going to be in control because it's the state's 01:13:54.560 --> 01:13:59.326 water managed by the national government to allocate for 40 million people. 01:13:59.359 --> 01:14:04.647 And so they just want some say so that's sort of, but they just are 01:14:04.680 --> 01:14:10.946 insulted by the fact that, you know, they manage the, you know, the sides 01:14:10.979 --> 01:14:15.576 of the ditch and the bottleneck. Um 01:14:15.609 --> 01:14:23.609 It's clearly understandable how um the, the, the most important thing that 01:14:23.649 --> 01:14:29.946 the stakeholders almost universally agree on is they can't allow any 01:14:29.979 --> 01:14:35.897 endangered species to blink out because that would bring compliance from 01:14:35.930 --> 01:14:43.706 um uh that would bring on court ordered environmental compliance. So there 01:14:43.739 --> 01:14:50.906 is so, um one more reduction of flexibility. So there's, that is 01:14:50.939 --> 01:14:56.437 myopically first among equals. So, ironically, you might have thought it 01:14:56.470 --> 01:15:02.055 was sand or something. It's the population of Humpback chub. And now it's 01:15:02.088 --> 01:15:07.175 also potentially, you know, this population of razor back suckers, but 01:15:07.208 --> 01:15:13.586 it's es a compliance species that is head and shoulders above anything 01:15:13.619 --> 01:15:21.619 else. It's not about it. Well, that's it then. Um I think it's arguable 01:15:22.009 --> 01:15:24.376 whether 01:15:24.409 --> 01:15:32.409 the next tier down is sandbars for camping 01:15:32.628 --> 01:15:39.546 or it's just whatever kind of a river ecosystem, make sure that those 01:15:39.579 --> 01:15:43.567 species don't blink out. 01:15:43.600 --> 01:15:47.175 But 01:15:47.208 --> 01:15:51.536 to me, 01:15:51.569 --> 01:15:59.569 what's not on that list is a natural native river ecosystem. That's nobody 01:16:01.479 --> 01:16:08.196 does that come automatically. The irony is it doesn't come on. The Grand 01:16:08.229 --> 01:16:13.536 Canyon ecosystem is a fundamentally damaged, 01:16:13.569 --> 01:16:16.607 fundamentally 01:16:16.640 --> 01:16:24.640 um screwed up artificial Disneyland ecosystem. And for me to say that 01:16:26.069 --> 01:16:31.305 after spending 30 years of my life, there is tragic and it is 01:16:31.338 --> 01:16:38.925 heartbreaking for me to say that. Um But it's not a real river. You go to 01:16:38.958 --> 01:16:43.946 the Yampa River. If you want to see a real river, you go to desolation in 01:16:43.979 --> 01:16:49.067 Great Canyon. If you want to see a real river. Grand Canyon is this 01:16:49.100 --> 01:16:57.100 fundamentally screwed up river ecosystem, which is still life's greatest 01:16:57.359 --> 01:17:04.345 recreational experience where people's lives are transformed 01:17:04.378 --> 01:17:09.317 just because they go through what they perceive as death defying rapids in 01:17:09.350 --> 01:17:16.055 the most awesome landscape on earth and they're alone with their friends 01:17:16.088 --> 01:17:22.095 for seven or 18 days and they do whatever screwy stuff goes on on river, 01:17:22.128 --> 01:17:28.515 you know, and all of that. But it's, it's got a screwed up temperature and 01:17:28.548 --> 01:17:34.616 empty, empty eddies from sand and riparian vegetation that doesn't look 01:17:34.649 --> 01:17:40.916 anything like what it should and the whole thing is screwed up. And I 01:17:40.949 --> 01:17:48.949 believe that in the eyes of most people that's just fine. Just so because 01:17:50.418 --> 01:17:58.317 ironically, the Humpback Chub had figured out a life history 01:17:58.350 --> 01:18:06.350 in which they can exploit this one natural place, the little Colorado 01:18:06.588 --> 01:18:13.437 River, if it. And as one GCMRC scientist said to me years ago, you know, 01:18:13.470 --> 01:18:18.187 it really, we can't really tell him this, but it really doesn't matter 01:18:18.220 --> 01:18:22.425 what we do with the dam. I mean, so long as the little Colorado River is 01:18:22.458 --> 01:18:28.357 there and it's viable and all of that, it's gonna be ok. Now, the reality 01:18:28.390 --> 01:18:32.717 is the little Colorado River is subject to lots of development pressures 01:18:32.750 --> 01:18:36.647 itself. What if the monsoons are failing? We don't have floods. There's a 01:18:36.680 --> 01:18:43.555 lot of bad things can happen there. But um so, so I, I honestly believe 01:18:43.588 --> 01:18:50.206 I'm being e exp or particular with my words, whatever kind of a river 01:18:50.239 --> 01:18:52.796 ecosystem, 01:18:52.829 --> 01:18:59.067 however artificial it is, who cares just so long as these target 01:18:59.100 --> 01:19:04.265 populations of endangered species don't blink out. And that's what you're 01:19:04.298 --> 01:19:10.946 saying is the current sort of core I that is the, I I believe that is the 01:19:10.979 --> 01:19:14.607 consensus now. 01:19:14.640 --> 01:19:18.836 And would you like to see a much broader vision for river restoration? Do 01:19:18.869 --> 01:19:23.286 you think it's even possible? No, I don't think it's possible. No. II, I 01:19:23.319 --> 01:19:29.166 believe that the, 01:19:29.199 --> 01:19:35.476 what should we want? No, no, here's what I, I believe that that may be all 01:19:35.509 --> 01:19:40.425 that's possible in Grand Canyon. What I believe 01:19:40.458 --> 01:19:47.595 deep down inside is that we do the American public a disservice by not 01:19:47.628 --> 01:19:53.826 telling them how screwed up it is. I believe that they're given false hope. 01:19:53.859 --> 01:20:01.357 Exactly. No. Simply that I believe that where we have made the mistake is 01:20:01.390 --> 01:20:06.425 that we fail to tell the American people, we fail to tell the citizens of 01:20:06.458 --> 01:20:08.897 Arizona, 01:20:08.930 --> 01:20:15.925 the Grand Canyon State that um there was an irreversible 01:20:15.958 --> 01:20:22.467 cost to the construction of Glen Canyon did and there's an irreversible 01:20:22.500 --> 01:20:30.500 cost to large scale water development, the Colorado river. And um 01:20:32.369 --> 01:20:35.826 and we're never gonna get that back. 01:20:35.859 --> 01:20:42.046 And therefore, as we proceed into the future, we should be very careful 01:20:42.079 --> 01:20:47.086 about what new developments we make on the, on the river. We should be 01:20:47.119 --> 01:20:53.135 very careful about which places we do want to protect and that the 01:20:53.168 --> 01:20:59.857 disservice that we pay to the American public is that we pretend that 01:20:59.890 --> 01:21:07.890 Grand Canyon is restorable and that, that is, that is wrong. And that then 01:21:07.958 --> 01:21:13.006 what do we do now? We just absorb $10 million a year of a budget as the 01:21:13.039 --> 01:21:16.925 cost of doing business. And we never just say, you know what, this place 01:21:16.958 --> 01:21:21.305 is really completely artificial and screwed up now and we're going to 01:21:21.338 --> 01:21:27.416 continue to make it the best we can. You're not saying we should, we have 01:21:27.449 --> 01:21:33.305 a, we have a moral obligation. It's one of the greatest places on planet 01:21:33.338 --> 01:21:41.076 earth, but we're also not going to decommission Glen Canyon Dam. 01:21:41.109 --> 01:21:46.595 So never say never. Well, that, that's a different topic. I mean, I've 01:21:46.628 --> 01:21:51.706 written, I've written on that as well, but the point is I don't, I think 01:21:51.739 --> 01:21:58.147 that we have fuzzy logic or fuzzy headed thinking, whatever it is and we 01:21:58.180 --> 01:22:03.067 don't talk about the real issues in front of us and we just pretend this 01:22:03.100 --> 01:22:08.576 feel good. We're gonna make everything a little bit better and we're gonna 01:22:08.609 --> 01:22:13.726 spend this much of our budget to study how much the wind blows up and 01:22:13.759 --> 01:22:18.067 buries archaeological sites and hillsides and we're gonna, you know, and 01:22:18.100 --> 01:22:21.946 stuff that's completely intractable 01:22:21.979 --> 01:22:28.076 and that's crazy. Um No, I don't. 01:22:28.109 --> 01:22:30.175 Uh 01:22:30.208 --> 01:22:36.836 um I would say that the brave new world of climate change and the brave 01:22:36.869 --> 01:22:44.869 new world of um decrease runoff in the Colorado river system will force 01:22:45.680 --> 01:22:51.515 our um, forces are hit. 01:22:51.548 --> 01:22:56.476 That's how I end my talks. As I show those graphs. And I say, OK, so we 01:22:56.509 --> 01:23:01.027 got to think big. We gotta think like maybe, 01:23:01.060 --> 01:23:03.326 um 01:23:03.359 --> 01:23:08.555 it doesn't make sense to equalize the storage contents of pal of mead. 01:23:08.588 --> 01:23:16.076 Maybe it makes sense that we ought to redd out the river diversion tunnels 01:23:16.109 --> 01:23:24.109 around Glen Canyon Dam. So that, um you know, we you 01:23:25.619 --> 01:23:32.437 that there's a, that maybe it's better to fully drain Pell and, and keep 01:23:32.470 --> 01:23:38.595 me full. But, but I will also recognize that one can make utterly rational 01:23:38.628 --> 01:23:43.656 and reasonable statements about why it makes more sense to keep needful or 01:23:43.689 --> 01:23:49.987 powerful and need empty. I, I mean, well intentioned smart people make 01:23:50.020 --> 01:23:54.456 those arguments and, and I'm not gonna, but we need to increase 01:23:54.489 --> 01:24:01.126 operational flexibility. So that's the other big, 01:24:01.159 --> 01:24:05.116 that's the other big enormous 01:24:05.149 --> 01:24:09.675 issue that this is so wandering. That's the, this is the other big 01:24:09.708 --> 01:24:15.067 enormous issue that the Adaptive Management Program and GCMRC are not 01:24:15.100 --> 01:24:21.196 doing now. They um 01:24:21.229 --> 01:24:25.607 you know, the, the, the, you know, the signpost saying, you know, we got a 01:24:25.640 --> 01:24:31.015 crisis coming are just all, you know, they're all blazing, right? And the 01:24:31.048 --> 01:24:36.166 , the interim shortage guidelines are coming in 2020. I mean that, that 01:24:36.199 --> 01:24:39.675 this is what I'm working on. I've got a, I've got collaborators who are 01:24:39.708 --> 01:24:43.376 working on this now and, 01:24:43.409 --> 01:24:46.696 and so 01:24:46.729 --> 01:24:53.256 instead, so the stakeholders in the program sort of pushed GCMRC to 01:24:53.289 --> 01:24:58.647 develop an annual work plan that they're in now. That's all about how to 01:24:58.680 --> 01:25:05.857 implement the L TB is when you know, it's like, how do you ski? You ski 01:25:05.890 --> 01:25:09.256 through the slalom gates as soon as you know, you're past the gate, you're 01:25:09.289 --> 01:25:14.885 looking where the hell is the next gate down the slope and you know, 01:25:14.918 --> 01:25:19.166 focusing the adapted the work plan on how to implement L temp is like 01:25:19.199 --> 01:25:23.616 focusing on the gate, you just passed. The next gate is climate change and 01:25:23.649 --> 01:25:31.166 decreased runoff and changing water temperatures released from a much 01:25:31.199 --> 01:25:37.406 lower lake pal. And that's the big sector. And the science questions that 01:25:37.439 --> 01:25:43.425 are gonna be asked by G of GCMRC. 01:25:43.458 --> 01:25:49.135 Two years from now are gonna be all about that brave new world and the 01:25:49.168 --> 01:25:57.168 science program needs to be focused on answering those questions. And um 01:25:57.470 --> 01:26:03.717 that's a a and that's all gonna be about questions like 01:26:03.750 --> 01:26:10.336 um OK, we're now in the 20th year of drought. 01:26:10.369 --> 01:26:13.175 Um 01:26:13.208 --> 01:26:19.845 Maybe we wanna selectively store all of our water and need to preserve 01:26:19.878 --> 01:26:25.866 vegas' water quality. I'm, I'm just making things up. OK? If we do that, 01:26:25.899 --> 01:26:30.805 then the water released out of P is gonna be really, really warm. If the 01:26:30.838 --> 01:26:36.376 water coming out of Pell is really, really warm, is that going to 01:26:36.409 --> 01:26:40.237 constitute a 01:26:40.270 --> 01:26:48.270 short term, easily reversible, temporary inconvenience to the ecosystem or 01:26:50.329 --> 01:26:56.217 is it going to cause an irreversible tipping point that will change the 01:26:56.250 --> 01:27:02.076 ecosystem forever after such that everything that we've done in the 01:27:02.109 --> 01:27:07.635 Adaptive Management Program for the last 20 years is irrelevant. Would we 01:27:07.668 --> 01:27:12.116 get more of a river like it used to be? Well, so the arguments you're 01:27:12.149 --> 01:27:16.116 gonna get from different people. I, well, the answer is people will say to 01:27:16.149 --> 01:27:20.656 you, we don't know the answer to that. And so I would submit, we need to, 01:27:20.689 --> 01:27:23.826 we need to get our essence in gear to be doing the science to figure this 01:27:23.859 --> 01:27:31.859 out because, um, we, we just, so we finally, so I, I'll just take partial 01:27:32.970 --> 01:27:37.437 credit. You know, we all are, you know, I'm not unique in figuring this 01:27:37.470 --> 01:27:43.777 out. And so we working with three of my old staff, three people who work 01:27:43.810 --> 01:27:47.317 at GCMRC right now, 01:27:47.350 --> 01:27:54.437 they figured out the models. We got three GCMRC staff, me and a, and a 01:27:54.470 --> 01:27:58.976 fish biologist in the upper basin. And we get an article that's in review 01:27:59.009 --> 01:28:05.406 and bioscience that says how we make decisions about water storage will 01:28:05.439 --> 01:28:09.796 set the fate of all these river ecosystems. And we better be thinking 01:28:09.829 --> 01:28:15.015 about that. And if we don't have the science ready to go, we better get 01:28:15.048 --> 01:28:22.987 because here's the, here are the arguments you might say 01:28:23.020 --> 01:28:29.456 the envi the most environmentally oriented among us would say, 01:28:29.489 --> 01:28:35.265 oh, no warm water coming out of Grand Canyon. That, that, that's just like 01:28:35.298 --> 01:28:39.626 it was in the old days. That's just the river of the 19 fifties. That's 01:28:39.659 --> 01:28:44.666 wonderful. That's what we want with sediment in it. And OK, and let's put 01:28:44.699 --> 01:28:48.237 sediment in. They would say that's the most wonderful thing. That's what 01:28:48.270 --> 01:28:56.270 we want. And ironically, every fish biologist at GCMRC 01:28:57.418 --> 01:29:02.866 plus 01:29:02.899 --> 01:29:06.756 a whole bunch of other people in Flagstaff who I don't need to make any 01:29:06.789 --> 01:29:13.326 more enemies on this tape, you know, are all, would all say no, no, the 01:29:13.359 --> 01:29:17.777 devil, you know, is much better than the devil. You don't. We know that 01:29:17.810 --> 01:29:24.147 Humpback Chub are the largest population of Humpback chub on earth is in 01:29:24.180 --> 01:29:29.246 Grand Canyon and it might be the most screwed up ecosystem, but that 01:29:29.279 --> 01:29:34.416 screwed up ecosystem keeps the warm water predators away from the Humpback 01:29:34.449 --> 01:29:40.506 chub. And it would be worse if the river was warm because then the river 01:29:40.539 --> 01:29:45.107 is not only good for natives, it's good for non natives 01:29:45.140 --> 01:29:50.095 and the non natives will eat the natives. No, it is being trout or 01:29:50.128 --> 01:29:56.796 something. No, the trout or cold water, small mouth bass, large mouth 01:29:56.829 --> 01:30:02.366 stripe or stuff like that. So that's the problem and they could move in if 01:30:02.399 --> 01:30:09.246 the water always. Now there's, there's different ways to argue this. And 01:30:09.279 --> 01:30:17.279 so the point is when you put like minded people, as of, we've, I've had a 01:30:17.509 --> 01:30:21.586 couple of these wonderful experiences in which we would write a scientific 01:30:21.619 --> 01:30:28.595 article. And then so for us, it was like, I mean, those guys did great 01:30:28.628 --> 01:30:32.777 modeling. I helped them with the sort of. So what of it? And how do you 01:30:32.810 --> 01:30:38.055 write the discussion and all? And we had to nuance the discussion to not 01:30:38.088 --> 01:30:43.126 say the potential they cause their original draft of the article was the 01:30:43.159 --> 01:30:47.126 rivers are gonna get warmer and that's terrible. And I'm saying, well, you 01:30:47.159 --> 01:30:51.196 can't say that because that's like what it was, you know, you at least got 01:30:51.229 --> 01:30:55.607 to say, we don't know and we better get better science. Same way when 01:30:55.640 --> 01:30:58.826 Larry Stevens and I wrote an article back in the late nineties and we 01:30:58.859 --> 01:31:04.126 wrote it about marshes in Grand Canyon and as the most biologically 01:31:04.159 --> 01:31:10.006 diverse place in Grand Canyon where the freshwater marshes, except that 01:31:10.039 --> 01:31:15.817 they're an artifact of, of the absence of floods. And so we wrote in the 01:31:15.850 --> 01:31:20.376 discussion, well, the authors of this article actually disagree with 01:31:20.409 --> 01:31:24.845 whether this, whether this article is a big deal or not, because you can 01:31:24.878 --> 01:31:28.616 either argue that this is the most biologically diverse and wonderful part 01:31:28.649 --> 01:31:32.376 of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon or it actually shouldn't even be 01:31:32.409 --> 01:31:37.126 there because they never were there before. They only are artifacts of the 01:31:37.159 --> 01:31:40.336 dam and who the hell cares about. 01:31:40.369 --> 01:31:45.576 So it's fun. Those are fun. Those are fun when you do that. But no, I 01:31:45.609 --> 01:31:50.076 would say that, I mean, I know we're at a time but 01:31:50.109 --> 01:31:56.196 I think that what I'm my mission is all about making decisions transparent. 01:31:56.229 --> 01:32:01.086 I mean, I, I mean, I personally 01:32:01.119 --> 01:32:04.906 would love a world that there wasn't a Glen Canyon dam and I could float a 01:32:04.939 --> 01:32:09.805 boat all the way through. And, but that's not a world that I'm gonna, I've 01:32:09.838 --> 01:32:14.897 never, you know, that that's that my mission is not to get that back. My 01:32:14.930 --> 01:32:18.326 mission is to 01:32:18.359 --> 01:32:23.967 try to make all these decisions transparent in a democracy 01:32:24.000 --> 01:32:28.696 so that people make intelligent decisions about them And, and yeah. So 01:32:28.729 --> 01:32:34.067 anyway, yeah, what else? You, well, we gotta, you gotta go more minutes. 01:32:34.100 --> 01:32:37.976 So you did say um one last question that I want to follow up on, you said 01:32:38.009 --> 01:32:46.009 earlier that uh there's a whole set of um um factors that go into 01:32:47.458 --> 01:32:52.586 influencing the ecosystems through the Grand Canyon that are off limits. 01:32:52.619 --> 01:32:56.527 So basically, hydropower is a whipping boy because it's the only thing 01:32:56.560 --> 01:33:01.296 that you can actually modify but that there are other more important 01:33:01.329 --> 01:33:06.687 things that you can't modify. Could you could you total flow? Yeah, total 01:33:06.720 --> 01:33:12.737 monthly flow, sediment supply temperature. 01:33:12.770 --> 01:33:17.786 And the new one that nobody had thought of that might be is nutrients. And 01:33:17.819 --> 01:33:21.576 if and if somebody said to you, you know what, we're going to rethink 01:33:21.609 --> 01:33:29.107 everything, you can adjust any of those factors in order to get more of 01:33:29.140 --> 01:33:33.317 what we want for the Colorado River ecosystem, which, which of those 01:33:33.350 --> 01:33:37.626 factors would you go and adjust and what would be the effect on the river 01:33:37.659 --> 01:33:44.126 ? Well, so OK, see I always go back to the very practical thing. The first 01:33:44.159 --> 01:33:51.607 thing that I would do is we need to have a preliminary 01:33:51.640 --> 01:33:59.640 engineering, a formal pre preliminary engineering analysis of what it 01:34:00.000 --> 01:34:05.515 would cost to red drill out the river diversion tunnels. So we at least 01:34:05.548 --> 01:34:11.317 know what the hell is. The number is the number $7 billion or it's $7 01:34:11.350 --> 01:34:17.845 million. It'd be nice to know. For instance, we know what sediment bypass 01:34:17.878 --> 01:34:22.366 with an existing reservoir would cost, there is a preliminary engineering 01:34:22.399 --> 01:34:25.246 analysis done by reclamation. 01:34:25.279 --> 01:34:32.555 It's a number like 10 or 15 million. It's 250 or 400 million depending on 01:34:32.588 --> 01:34:38.746 how you design it. I mean, it's a big number but it's not billions. And 01:34:38.779 --> 01:34:46.226 the annual operating cost for that pipeline is essentially the same as the 01:34:46.259 --> 01:34:52.076 budget of GCMR of the that management program. Right. So, right. So it's a 01:34:52.109 --> 01:34:58.406 big number but you know. Right. So, ok, so that's so I would, I would 01:34:58.439 --> 01:35:06.439 create operational flexibility. Um I would um I would somehow get the 01:35:07.430 --> 01:35:15.430 brightest minds on the planet to figure out whether it really is true that 01:35:15.548 --> 01:35:21.576 it would be terrible to reinstitute a natural temperature regime and a 01:35:21.609 --> 01:35:26.317 natural sediment regime in Grand Canyon 01:35:26.350 --> 01:35:32.226 because I want to sound stubborn, but I just don't want to take that as 01:35:32.259 --> 01:35:38.147 the answer. It seems like a ludicrous answer. And yet I understand why so 01:35:38.180 --> 01:35:43.506 many aquatic ecologists and bio and fish biologists say that I understand 01:35:43.539 --> 01:35:47.206 there are not just the ones that want to preserve non native trout fish. 01:35:47.239 --> 01:35:50.647 No, no, no, no. These are well intentioned people who care about 01:35:50.680 --> 01:35:55.527 endangered species. It's kind of crazy. And I understand their argument. I 01:35:55.560 --> 01:36:03.560 just keep saying really, how can that be? Because no, deep down inside, 01:36:04.149 --> 01:36:09.746 I would like to see the Grand in an imaginary world. I'd like to know 01:36:09.779 --> 01:36:15.416 whether it's possible that we can meet society's needs for water supply 01:36:15.449 --> 01:36:23.226 allocated to the most economically important places in the watershed and 01:36:23.259 --> 01:36:28.946 have a more natural Grand Canyon. But what that would take would be the 01:36:28.979 --> 01:36:36.979 ability to bypass sediment and bigger floods uh in drilled out diversion 01:36:38.208 --> 01:36:45.055 tunnels short of that, you can't do it. But I'd like to believe that's 01:36:45.088 --> 01:36:51.626 possible. And I think that a declining water supply 01:36:51.659 --> 01:36:57.326 might give us the opportunity. But at the same time, I recognize that you 01:36:57.359 --> 01:37:01.916 might do all that science and you might conclude that the thing that is 01:37:01.949 --> 01:37:06.805 the best public policy decision is the one that in my heart I don't really 01:37:06.838 --> 01:37:13.647 want, which is, you know, keeping powerful and me. But I, if it comes to 01:37:13.680 --> 01:37:17.296 that, I mean, you have to make decisions with your head. You, I mean, so 01:37:17.329 --> 01:37:22.446 I'm willing to let the chips fall where they may, but I just don't think 01:37:22.479 --> 01:37:28.586 we're working on enough. So, so getting bigger flows of the right 01:37:28.619 --> 01:37:34.946 temperature with an abundant sediment supply is the ultimate is what you 01:37:34.979 --> 01:37:39.976 need. And all this tweaking with all this other stuff is largely just 01:37:40.009 --> 01:37:43.147 going through the motions. 01:37:43.180 --> 01:37:49.376 That seems like a great place to end. I'll never be. Yeah. Yeah. Thank God. 01:37:49.409 --> 01:37:54.635 I'm 67. I've been looking for another job. 01:37:54.668 --> 01:37:58.786 Uh I think it'd be great if we could follow up with you a little bit later. 01:37:58.819 --> 01:38:04.885 Um uh And uh maybe see if uh we can drill down a little deeper on some of 01:38:04.918 --> 01:38:08.406 these issues that we touched on. But, uh, I, I think this is a good place 01:38:08.439 --> 01:38:13.737 to end. We've covered almost everything on the list and I apologize if I 01:38:13.770 --> 01:38:19.206 talk too long. If this isn't, I don't know how you make sense of this are 01:38:19.239 --> 01:38:21.668 going to turn it off.