And we're rolling. So whenever you're ready to start. All right. So this
is Paul Hertz and Jennifer Sweeney of Arizona State University
interviewing Bruce Babbitt on September 21st, 2018, at nine o'clock in the
morning at a Su Bruce. Thank you so much for agreeing to meet and speak
with us. Good morning. It's great to be back. Great. So, um, I'm gonna
start with a big question. Um, you, your family has a long legacy here in
Arizona. And I just would like to ask you to talk a little bit about your
early life experiences and connections to the Colorado River and the Grand
Canyon. Uh I think it was pretty obvious and natural growing up in
Flagstaff, you know, kind of that is the Grand Canyon. Um It's always
interested in the out of doors, of course. And, uh, it's an incredible
place to uh the outdoors, uh hiking, uh and doing all those related things
, uh, stimulated an interest in geology, of course. And, uh I went on to
do a geology major in college and then do graduate work uh in earth
sciences. So, the Grand Canyon kind of drew me in that way. But the other
piece of, of course was a river because um the river running really
started to come into its own in the 19 sixties when particularly with
Martin Litton, uh and the other legendary Outfitters and I was drawn to
that, uh got acquainted with them, particularly with Martin Litton and uh
spent a lot of time on the river. It was really a terrific part of uh
being up there. How many trips do you think you took over the years? Oh, I
have no idea. I have no idea. It would certainly be more than 10 and less
than 50 but a lot
that, that must be an extraordinary experience. Well, it blended a lot of
things that really served me very well later on uh uh the outdoor interest
, of course, um the science training which I took all the way through
graduate school uh and the interest in um a fluvial geomorphology if you
will.
So, um did you notice when you were taking those trips down the river or
did you talk about um, the impacts of Glen Canyon Dam on the river
ecosystem? Because that's what led to the establishment of the Glen Canyon
Dam Adaptive Management Program. Yeah, I really started a awakening to the
changes along the river, probably, you know, not right away, but certainly
uh by the 19 seventies. So from trip to trip, you could see the way the
sand was being totally stripped away and where a lot of sandy beaches are
now, a lot of piles of boulders and, and rocks. And it came home to me, uh
, in a really interesting way. I was on a trip with, uh Martin Litton,
probably late summer. And Martin said, uh, we can't do hs rapid over
pulling in and making an unscheduled stop. And I said, well, what's that
about it? And he said, well, you wait and see the river is gonna go down
so fast and so quick. Uh that once we get to hands, it will be impassable
and we'll have to camp and wait until the guy up in Glen Canyon dam, turn
the faucet on again and bring the river back up. That was kind of a point
at which I really uh sort of in viscerally started to make the connection
between this incredibly up and down river being manipulated for hydro
demand and what it was doing in terms of all the downstream ecology.
You, um when you became governor uh in the 19 eighties, you must have had
an opportunity to maybe try to um think about how we might solve some of
those problems during that tenure as governor. Um How did you approach of
the issues in the Grand Canyon? Not a lot uh obviously uh spent time out
on the river, but uh my tenure as governor was really intensely focused on
the groundwater issue. So, uh and uh trying uh to bring together the
parties, a lot of contentious parties in Arizona to get what subsidy in
the Ground Order Management Act in 1980. So, uh uh during the governor
years, I was kind of an absentee on, on the river that I had spent so much
time on beforehand. There weren't many voters uh living on those rocky
banks of the Colorado river.
Well, uh that would change then in the 19 nineties when you became
Secretary of Interior under the Clinton administration. Uh can you talk
about the origins of uh the effort under your guidance to try to establish
the Glen Canny Dam Adaptive Management Program? Sure. But I I think it's
important to take a step back and to understand why it is that the
Secretary of the Interior is such a significant player on the Colorado
River because in most of American history and most of the river uh
management uh regimes that you see everywhere else. Uh The federal
government is really an interior sector. It's really not a major player
because of the uh control of water on public lands really was fluffed off
to the States uh with the Desert Land Act clear back in 1880. And there
was uh this kind of sense that water management is not the business of the
federal government. It's a state's rights kind of function. Um The
Colorado River uh is a remarkable exception to that uh that came about as
a result of a really unusual history of litigation and contention which
resulted in uh the decision uh in Arizona versus California, the great
lawsuit of uh that brought it all to a culmination. And the Supreme Court
in that lawsuit uh rendered an incredible decision which uh is without
precedent and has not been repeated. But they, uh the court basically
going through all of this incredible history of quarreling and fighting.
Uh said we hold that the Congress has delegated the management of the
Colorado River of the lower river to the federal government in the form of
the Secretary of the Interior. And the secretary is by virtue of that
court decision vested with, he becomes effectively the the the water
manager of, of the of lower Colorado River. Uh It's a remarkable
transformation, a lot of controversy at the time. Uh that is in fact, and
we can discuss that more if you wish uh resulted in a quite interesting
precarious and, and kind of really very productive balance between uh
state uh and uh national interest in the river and the role of the
secretary. So I arrive in Washington and all of a sudden, I'm suited up as
the water manager of the Colorado river. Oh, yeah. You know, that was like
a, like a sardine to a cat. And I grabbed at that and said, uh this is
really gonna be interesting and of course, um the issue at the time uh was
increasingly the management of, of Glen Canyon. They were surplus years.
There's a lot of water in the river and the question was uh how are we
gonna manage it? And the hydropower uh issue became uh more and more
important as the river damage uh uh becomes equally apparent as I've
described. Um Well, the bottom line of that is,
it's complex. It not clear what the answers are. There are a lot of
serious contending interests at stake. Uh And the only conclusion you
could draw from that was it's time to get the scientists involved. Uh And
to get really serious about the water management. Uh The second part of
that was how do you do that? And the answer is you got to get all the
contending parties together. You can't just go say uh I decree here's a
science program. You got a lot of people out there, the Universities of
State Federal Agencies. And so that's kind of a platform on which we got
into the, the Glen Canyon and river Management issues. You mentioned a lot
of contending interests. Some of those are within the Department of
Interior itself. You know, you've got the US Fish and Wildlife Service. On
the one hand with the wildlife and fish mandate, you've got the Bureau of
reclamation with, with a dam and irrigation and Idr Power mandate. How did
you find um that? I mean, how was it trying to orchestrate and integrate
all of these contending interests even under your wing in the. Well, the
department is a house divided in terms of, of all of the agencies and
frankly, the bureau of reclamation uh historically uh was a, you know,
kingdom unto itself. Um The great years of Floyd doin as the uh manager of
the bureau who spoke only to the president of the Congress, who didn't
even bother to talk to the Secretary of the Interior, he ran an empire all
of his own. And uh the, the bureau uh has still got particularly in those
times, much of that kind of legacy uh kind of in its DNA. Uh There were
two things that I think really gave me the leverage to say, folks, we're
gonna get together and it's no longer, you know, unilateral decision
making. One of course was the Grand Canyon, you know, a national icon.
It's not like you're gonna go out and say, well, here's the big muddy
river. We'd like to see some nice science uh with no constituency. This is
the Grand Canyon and uh there had been some legislation moving in that
direction. Um The second one was Endangered Species Act. Uh I rapidly came
to realize the incredible power of that act of the, the it strongly
drafted and the Supreme Court had consistently interpreted the act to say
it is that in the case of conflict, the Endangered Species Act rules. And
uh that meant that um the Humpback shrub and the warm water adapted
species um in the junction of Little Colorado River particularly uh were
at risk and that the fish and Wildlife Service uh was now gonna be
somewhat to the surprise of Bureau of reclamation, a really big player. Uh
And that gave us the chance to bring it together.
So, do you remember um when, so I guess it was the record of decision in
1996 while you were secretary um that uh kind of mandated the creation of
the Adaptive Management Program and the implementation of that 1992 Grand
Canyon Protection Act. You wanna talk a little bit about the Grand Canyon
Protection Act and then that record of decision that led to the creation
of the program.
Well, uh I'm gonna talk only a little bit because uh I don't have a lot of
detailed memory about that. Uh What
I had in mind at the time, of course was we've got to get out this problem.
We need the science. Um We are awakening to this concept of adaptive
management which I can uh uh describe in more length. Uh And it's clear
that we've got to get people moving in the same direction and not only
within the department, but in terms of the scientific resources outside
the department, in the universities and elsewhere. Now, that's basically
my role. I mean, I said, do it uh signed a document and went on to other
things. So I, I don't claim paternity for all of the detail that went in
into all of that. I, I really watched it from afar but of course, went to
the great event when the first big flood is generated out of uh out of
Glen Canyon. Pretty exciting. Standing up there on a ramp, opening a valve
and watching this Niagara of water cascading down into the river. Uh
That's kind of the keystone of the adaptive approach, which is we're gonna
stir that sediment up, uh get something going on those beaches and uh see
how it goes and adjust. And interesting enough, we're still doing that 25
years later, we still haven't learned everything.
I think that's one of the foundations of adaptive management science is
that you're always learning and you always need to be adaptable um to what
it is that you learn by monitoring the effects of your actions. Well, it
was interesting because um I came to my perhaps limited understanding of
adaptive management uh through forest management and that got started uh
at Northern Arizona University where on a summer day in 1993 I spent a
morning with Wally Covington uh in his uh forest lab uh and got deeply
engaged in that. And uh while they took me up to Mount Trumbull, which was
a forest administered not by the Forest Service uh but by the Bureau of
Land Management, uh where I could basically run the joint and uh spent a
day with Wally up there and then started uh giving him grants uh to manage
that tract up there in an adaptive way. This was um you know, the entire
issue of fire, the history of fire suppression and fire restoration uh
which at the time, uh with one and largely unknown and secondly, really
controversial among the forest professionals who had been brought up in
this uh uh what do they call it? The 10 a.m. theory, any, any fire spotted
on day X has gotta be out by 10 a.m. the next morning. And, and here's why
we said no, no, no. Uh we're gonna use fire. Uh And that really brought me
into this kind of adaptive management understanding and we did uh some
similar kinds of things in the long leaf pine forests of the South. That
sort of got me into this kind of iterative kind of process in the way you
design things and make adjustments. So sure that background that I brought
very quickly a year or two later into an understanding of what we were
gonna try to do uh at Glen Canyon, you've mentioned um the importance of
science and decision making for land management a couple of times. You,
you made a strong effort to strengthen uh scientific research in the
Department of Interior. When you were secretary at one point, you proposed
establishing a National Biological Survey to try to coordinate scientific
research across federal agencies. Can you talk a little bit about that
effort.
Sure. The, the the basic issue is kind of simple what I as we get into all
of this forest management um uh river geomorphology, uh endangered species
, uh looking around it becomes clear that the biological science, uh what
there was was embedded in kind of silos in each agency and was uh you know
, very much kind of oriented toward what am I gonna do tomorrow for a
particular issue in my agency in my region? And my jurisdiction is
scattered all over the place, the Bureau of Reclamation Bureau of Land
Management of Fish and Wildlife Service. So the obvious thing to do was to
say, wait a minute, science has got to be one comprehensive. And secondly
, at a remove from day to day decision making, you've really got to kind
of use the knowledge and the needs of the managers, but uh sort of
integrate that into a larger concept of what the issues are, how it is,
what kind of information you needed in it, ec ecological kind of uh sense.
Now, interestingly enough on the Earth Science side, that's exactly the
way the department is always run since 1880 when John Wesley Powell came
off the river and established uh the the Geological Survey as an
independent agency uh with data and results available to everyone. So the
idea was to try to get the biology out of all this scattershot stuff into
something resembling of what's done on the earth science side. And uh how
far did you make it with that? Well, it's a, it was a typical kind of uh
Washington political story. I put this, um, fresh face newcomer. Uh It was
a great idea, uh invoke the name of John Wesley Powell. We've got to
finish his task on the biological side. I gather up all the science stuff
, put it in a combined budget and say, well, you got a US geological
survey. Now we're gonna have a biological survey. Uh And of course, uh in
the spirit of the Times Congress kind of shot it all down, uh blasted it
to pieces. And in one of these odd kind of throw me in the briar patch
kind of sequences uh out of all that wreckage. Well, I said, well, why
don't you just throw all these remnants into the geological survey? It's
already there. We won't create anything new. And of course, that was the
perfect result. I didn't have the courage to propose that in the first,
that is a complete integration of natural science and that's what we've
got today uh uh through all of its ups and downs, it's clearly a correct
model. So, um at a uh very specific level, um you were able to establish a
new um science organization for uh Grand Canyon and the Glen Canyon Dam
Adaptive Management Program. There's an organization called the Grand
Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. Now, GCMRC. Um I think it was your
effort to create an independent science body that led to the creation of
that separate Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. Uh Yeah, a a
again, uh I'm not the father of all the detail, although I'm happy to
claim paternity for the idea. Um But the important thinking behind that
was that even as we consolidate biological science at the national level
in order to get political support, uh we're gonna have to look across the
landscape and see how we can integrate science and scientists around kind
of nodes uh on the landscape of mutual interest and mutual problems. Uh
And interestingly enough, uh my thinking ran particularly to how it is we
were gonna activate universities and uh not only for their science but for
their political clout. Scientists may not realize this but uh universities
uh have a have a pretty big constituency among elected officials. And I'm
thinking if we can draw these circles of interest, get all these
university constituencies in and give them a reason to be lobbyists with
their congressmen, uh we'll generate some support and you know, that
support right now is is much at risk, but in the longer run over decades,
I think it's worked pretty well. Um I'm thinking back to uh who are the
designated stakeholders in the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program.
And there's no designated university representative is that I think Dave
Garrett told us that uh that uh you and, and uh the secretary's designee
who participated, felt that because he had been Dean of the Forestry
School and represented uh academic science that it was probably uh covered.
Do you remember talking about whether there should be a designated
university representative on the team? No, I don't specifically remember
that. But the important point was that he was a university leader and by
whatever name he was there. And in each one of these, uh the particular
combination of how you put all of the different people together. Uh It was
pretty ad hoc. Well, you did insist that there, that this whole program be
, um, uh, report directly to the secretary's office, which was an
important innovation. Uh And that there would always be a secretary's
designated representative. Um Can you talk about why that's important and
how you think it worked out during the years that you were there? Look,
that's just uh politics, 101. You want to get something done, you better
not delegate it out through all the existing bureaucratic channels. You
better say one, here's what I want done. And secondly, report to me. Uh
and that simply sends a message, uh that kind of awakens people to the
fact that this is a priority and better get with it. Uh And there's
nothing unusual about that. I mean, I mean, that, that's tried and true.
Uh, um, political administration 101, it always tends to drift a little
bit with time. Uh And uh you can say this is my project report to me, the
next secretary may or may not see it quite so clearly and there may be uh
some kind of geological drift if you will out into the various strata of
bureaucracy. Uh But it's the right approach. Uh One of the uh persons we
interviewed was Ann Castle who was Assistant Secretary for Water and
Science under, I guess the Obama administration. And she talked about how
, when she got there, there was no unified voice among the interior
agencies on the, you know, that were participants in the program. And she
had to sort of uh convince them all to try to talk and caucus together and
come up with a common department of interior position on various decisions.
Did you, how did you uh attempt to coordinate and integrate the different
voices and interests of the different agencies? Well, the bureaucratic
answer to that is, that's why you have all these uh agency heads next
layer up is assistant secretaries who have beneath them, two or three
agencies who in turn, report to a deputy secretary who kind of up the
pyramid. Uh and hopefully kind of uh enforces that. Um ironic
coordinations,
Aden, get much out of that. I, I mean, I basically spend my time on the
phone talking directly to agency head. So, I mean, there's a coordinating
problem, I'm gonna tell you I'd call up the head of the Fish and Wildlife
Service. I'd call up the head of the GS and, oh, I'm not sure that in the
long run that's the right way to do it. But I'm confessing is, I really
ran sort of wild across all the bureaucratic co ordination and said, oh, I
don't have time for that. I'm just gonna deal with people and tell them
what to do and tell them to talk to each other. Uh, that's a, if you will
a personal admission, I'm not sure that that's good government. Bye. Do
you, uh, what were you, do you remember what you were trying to accomplish
? Um, when you were calling up these individual agencies, uh, I suspect
you were probably trying to get over some obstacles or get some direct
communication going. Well. Well, there, there were of course
specific issues I remember, um, an early conversation that I had with the
president. Um, uh, I don't remember. There's a third party who there are
just three of us and I was asked in the presence of the president, what is
the legacy you want to leave for? Bill Clinton? Well, and I kept thinking
about that again and again and again, because there are just scores of
decisions and directions and all that stuff. But ultimately, you gotta say
, what is it that really needs redirection in the most intense way? Huh?
Now what that meant in my case, I spent it hugely disproportionate amount
of time, sufficient wildlife service because uh getting the Endangered
Species Act in motion and in play uh was a huge task and I spent enormous
amounts of time out in the field all over the country with people kinda
saying we gotta make this act work. It's, it's powerful, it hasn't been
deployed, but it is the ultimate ecological management tool, whether it's
the old growth forests of the Northwest, uh whether it's reregulate the
Colorado River, endless kind of stuff like that. So, uh I'm bonded with
fish and my service. But the second orphan uh during my time there, I
think was uh the Bureau of Land Management. Uh Park Service is a mature
organization. It needs attention, but it doesn't need a bear hug because
it's got its spirit, its cabra its support. BLM was a real orphan. Uh So I
picked them up out off the street and brought them in and said, look the
BLM,
you guys have got an inferiority complex, understand it what people think
of it as a bureau of, of Livestock and mining. Uh And everybody wants to
take away all of your beautiful assets and give them to the Park Service.
And BOM is just a dumping ground for the other 200 million acres of land.
Well, and I said we're gonna leave a legacy for BLM in which it becomes a
conservation agency and we're gonna do that from, you know, root and
branch. We're gonna start giving you national monuments. There weren't any
national monuments in the BLM system because whenever something, uh was
thought to be of a place of special interest, uh it would go up to the
President and he sign an Antiquities Act Declaration and give it to the
National Park Service. Thereby deepening the despair among the few
environmentalists that you could find in the BLM. I said, stop. I went to
the president with the first big monument uh proposal that grant staircase
esca landing, we drew it all up, put it all together, did all the
bureaucratic stuff. The Park service is looking over my shoulder, uh
licking their chops at the newest unit of the National Park System. Uh And
I said to the president, I want you to do something different. I want you
to give this monument, keep it uh uh in the administration of the Bureau
of Land Management. That's just one example of a lot of issues of the BLM
played a big part uh in the Northwest Forest Plan. Uh Yeah, I would say
those are two examples of what I would say. Uh kind of the 8020 management
rule which is uh in any organization uh as a kind of rule of thumb, you
have to spend at least 80% of your time on no more than 20% of, of the
institutions, agencies or whatever you're doing that. And those are the
examples so that you could actually not spread yourself too thin but
concentrate on getting something big done. Yeah, look at where the
opportunities are and we, there's not been enough attention and there's
some real gain, uh, involved and, you know, put your time there. So one of
the other legacies of, uh, your time and the Clinton administration is
getting adaptive management science integrated more into land management
decision making by various agencies. You mentioned the Northwest Forest
Plan. That's kind of where adaptive management science uh grew up was in
the Pacific Northwest. Um Do you feel like you were successful in getting
in helping to sort of usher in a new kind of a management paradigm?
Because before that in the 19 seventies, it was all this linear um you
know, plan and manage, you know, you look out 50 years, decide what
sources you want to have and, and you manage toward that. And there's none
of this sort of collaborative decision making, none of this incremental
manage, monitor and adapt. Do you feel like you were able to change that
management paradigm toward adaptive management? Look, look, you can never
claim credit for a complete victory. Uh Everything uh is a process in
motion, I guess uh what you need to do is think of it across time. And um
what I would think is go back to 1990 where it was just you and a few
other, you know, wooly headed academics out there saying adaptive
management please uh hear what we have to say. It's really out there on
the, on the French. Well, it's now front and center uh and everything. Uh
but it, but it is a uh a continuing process because in a way adaptive
management kind of uh even as, as you have success integrated, it tends to
degenerate into a slogan. And rather than saying, here's adaptive
management, it instructs us to do something but you get this kind of
degeneration in which it becomes inverted. People do what they wanna do
and say this is adaptive management. Nobody will ever know the difference
so that there's gotta be this kind of, you know, really strong incessant
kind of look at what's going on commitment to that. Yeah, that was my next
question is, how do you feel? I mean, there's a difference between an
academic theory or model and how it plays out in the real world when you
try to implement it. Um Talk a little bit about your feelings about how
the idea of adaptive management actually played out.
Well, I think maybe I should get off of the main track and talk a little
bit about what I'm doing in California now where uh adaptive management is
really being put together uh in a really strong way. This is the whole
issue of water management up in the Bay Delta uh system of Northern
California. And it involves uh water coming off the Sierra, uh the huge
reclamation projects running down the Mexican border, the decline of the
salmon runs uh uh for lack of water in all of the uh streams running into
the delta, a whole variety of endangered species issues. And uh nine or 10
regulatory agencies with direct power, three or four federal agencies,
three or four state agencies, a huge scientific establishment. Uh
California doesn't lack for science. Uh They've got the best university
system in the world uh and a huge amount of resources. If there's a
scientist sitting uh uh you know, on every stream in the whole state, uh
they're all over the place. Uh And the, the the problem now demands
integration and experimentation because the difficulty of these issues uh
in terms of trying to find the right water balance against all of the
demands and the obvious degradation of the natural systems uh calls uh for
really moving the science effort up and putting the money into adaptive uh
research base. The basic problem uh in a really complex biological fluvial
system like uh the San Francisco Delta is no one really knows what's going
on and what it is that how it is resources can be altered or managed to
make a difference. There is so much noise in the system from 100 years of
gold mining uh exports contamination ocean conditions and all of that. But
uh the idea that, you know, anyone can come in and just say, well, here's
a lot of science. Let's do X is doomed from the start uh without an
intensive effort to define what it is that to, to set up the hypothesis of
what are the variables. Um And that in a really complex system AAA very
iffy job, but you gotta do it and then to get the scientists together and
say, OK, um we're gonna use this intervention uh and measure the results
and be honest enough, honest enough to admit failure, the kind of null
hypothesis, we have put up a hypothesis, put resources into this and it
made no difference at all. It's a hugely important part of science, but it
, it's kind of bypassed by the politicians who hate that kind of uh
conclusion as valuable as it is.
You're uh underscoring the importance of uh recognizing uncertainty both
in the natural world uh and in our ability to, you know, the kinds of
decisions we make the funding amounts that are appropriated, the, the
science that we do, everything is uncertain yet for so many generations,
we kind of we Americans and we policymakers kind of assumed that we could
know enough and eventually perfectly know nature and how it would respond
to our management actions. Um Can you talk a little bit more about how
uncertainty, challenges, decision making at an administrative level for
someone like you? Well, the, the most dramatic example I think is um when
I came to interior uh and 2001, the Colorado River system was full to
overflowing. Uh We had spent some time uh a year or two before uh up at
Glen Canyon, uh in which the water was up against the free boards. The uh
spillways were running 100% and it wasn't an immediate emergency, but we
were beginning a discussion of what's, what happens if the system is no
longer containing uh uh the, the input, it's really quite close,
underscoring the fact that all of the decisions we are making in those
days, uh were based on kind of, you know, a short term assumption of that.
We have a, a system in which there was plenty of capacity to deal with
all, all of the demands. And we were actually uh running scenarios about
how we would portion surplus. This is the great issue uh that came out in
19 eighties. That was that El Nino year in 1983 I think you're talking
about. Yeah. Yeah. How are we gonna portion all that surplus? Let's get
together. Uh But we've got to make discretionary decisions. How do we do
it? And it was precisely that point that the 19 year drought that is
extended from 2001 to the present time began. And all of the assumptions
that were being made quite understandably about uh the uh hydrology of the
system based on our own life experience and our, and our own short time uh
in charge, uh has just been upended and it seems to me that's kind of a
morality tale about. Let's be careful about the assumptions we're making.
No, no, we are appropriately locked into a lot of planning on the river in
terms of drought scenarios, prolonged, uh seemingly permanent droughts
driven by climate change. And that's important. But let's not get too
certain about any of our models and do the best we can. But let's always
be looking uh kind of at the what if question
uh You talked about the importance of getting better communication and co
ordination between interior agencies. Another aspect of adaptive
management and the Glen Canyon project itself is getting different
stakeholders beyond the federal agencies, people who have an interest and
a stake in the resource to come together to talk to each other, to
collaborate on decision making. Um Can you talk about why you think that
was important to integrate into the program and how you, what its unique
challenges are and how you think it works out well. Look, the need to get
people together is self evident. You know, there's no, no reason to go on
about how important it is. It's, it's important and it's self evident. The
question is uh how do you get it done? Well, I think all of us in this
business have been through endless kind of Kumbaya stuff. We're gonna have
another conference and we're all gonna get together and agree to do X. Uh
And uh, you know, human nature tends to prevail who was there some
enforcing mechanism in terms of a predictably better outcome that you can
have a piece of or more money or a stick of Cooper operation.
Is this a nice song? Mhm. Yeah. So, yeah, money is the obvious one. But
there are others, uh, there are nice lessons in the administration of the
Interior Secretary's administration of the Colorado River because, uh when
the court set the Secretary up as Water Master with all of these
unilateral unprecedented overriding powers of, there was a lot of fear
that this was, you know, some sort of giant federal takeover. Uh It didn't
happen, what happened was it became the incentive for a lot of really
great collaborative decision making. Th this example is just state Federal
uh because uh through successive administrations, um it has evolved a
pattern in which collaboration is encouraged and there have been, there's
been no big time litigation on the Colorado River for 50 years. Uh since
the decision, uh the States have slowly at times, uh not quickly enough,
but have continually worked out all these incredible uh differences and
they done it not just out of goodwill but out of the knowledge that if
things get out of hand, the secretary steps up and says it will be done
this way. And so you create a balance of kind of, you know, incentives,
all of the soft incentives plus some kind of real incentive, uh which is,
you don't do it, it'll be done to you. So, uh it, it is important to kind
of think those through in terms of how they apply to day to day
collaboration and uh what goes on. I am, I've spent the last two years in
California, uh advising Governor Brown trying to get parties together uh
statewide into a management plan. Uh It's been very difficult because we
don't have quite enough sticks. Um I not infrequently tell my audiences
when we're doing all this sort of negotiation stuff. Uh I wish I were back
doing this in Arizona because the reason we got uh the Groundwater
Management Act of 1980 done is because I was in office and I had the power
but to do something really bad if they didn't get together. So you got to
kind of work all this stuff through in a context of, of realistically
what's available. Um You're not the first interviewee to mention the
importance of funding in the success of these Adaptive Management programs.
Um The funding mechanism for the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management
Program is pretty unique. It's a kind of an earmark of higher power
revenues. Do you remember how that was arranged?
Not in any detail. Uh But uh that the, what I do remember really is it was
an obvious cash cow. I, I mean, it was just sitting there the source of
the problem and the source of the revenue are one and the same. And the
other thing that they made pretty easy is, you know, it's kind of, that's
the Willie Sutton rule. You know, uh, the, the reason you robbed banks is
because that's where the money is. Uh, and the other thing that made it
easy is it's such a vast amount of revenue that, uh, in the budget process
, uh,
where you're dealing with these huge billion dollar figures, it's awfully
easy to come in and say, look, we just want a few pennies, you know, $13
million a year is nothing. It's a rounding error in the budget of the
Western area Power administration. So there wasn't any real uh opposition
but the reason it's so important and that we must get that back into the
budget. But if I've always been impressed with the importance of making
modest grants to bring people into alignment, you don't have to, you know
, give out rivers of money. Uh There is something about just the reality
of some support which generates more support. Uh And it'd be a shame to
lose that and given this reality, we really got go after that and, and
hopefully they'll keep it alive. It's been tremendously successful. I, I
mean, the, the record, 00, work that has been done in terms of the
understanding of these fluvial systems. I see that the, the fruits of that
work or what I'm doing in California now. Um where you know much of the
travail of, of all of these issues in California is generated in an
interesting way, not by Glen Canyon Dam, but by Shasta Dam, which is the
lynchpin, the storage lynchpin of the Bureau reclamation facility on the
upper Sacramento river. And remarkably, uh the operation of that dam poses
analogous issues all the way down the river in terms of the fisheries, the
food chains, the seasonal hydra and how it spreads across the land and on
and on and on. And all of this work that's been done uh in Glen Canyon is
directly applicable to kind of defining uh how you go out uh addressing
some of those issues in a totally different uh river system. So it's a
model that can be applied in the region a few minutes ago. You were, you
seem to be in um uh obliquely referring to the fact that the Trump
administration in the last few months has swept the funds that used to
support the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program requiring that all the
hydro power revenue go back to the Treasury, I guess. Have you any
knowledge of that having ever happened before when a dedicated funding
stream established, you know, in one decade um gets swept or in the case
of the Glen Canyon Dam program, do you know if it's ever been taken away?
Look, I'm sure this is not the first time of the budget process in the
United States Congress is not a tidy admirable uh process. All sorts of
weird things happen. So, undoubtedly it has happened. Well, and that's
just a statement that you gotta, you can't take it for granted. You gotta
keep the constituencies actively engaged in making the case, excuse me,
for, of maintaining the fun. I don't think it's happened before in the
Glen Canyon, uh sort of context over the last 20 years, but
it's, it ain't the first time and it won't be the last, uh generally these
things happen. So some people may wonder,
should every funded Adaptive management program be continued indefinitely.
Um You know, maybe we should evaluate whether we're getting enough bang
for our buck. Uh Do you have any opinions about this particular Adaptive
Management program? Has it served a useful lifespan or do you think it
should be continued and why? Look, I'm not close enough, you know, to draw
a rational conclusion. But I do think it's important to periodically in,
in any kind of ongoing program uh to think carefully about the direction
and the cost benefit and the results and whether this function, excuse me
to now be internalized uh into other uh parts of other programs. So that's
a fair question. But in, in this particular context, obviously, um, can't
tell you exactly what I think because I don't have the facts.
Well, uh we're just about to wrap up. Is there anything uh that we didn't
cover that? You'd like to say uh about adaptive management, about science
and the federal government, about the Glen Candy Dam program specifically.
Uh I have a feeling I've said too much already, some of this is likely to
be quoted back at me in ways that uh I will uh be quick to say. No, no, I
didn't mean that it was entirely out of context. I was led into that
deliberately by an overreaching uh uh uh questioner. No, I think, I, I
think it has been terrific and uh I understand the importance of this.
I've always been a, a little shy about looking back and sort of going into
this uh sort of, well, in the old days, we did it this way to an audience
which is saying, come on, the old days are gone. Uh Let's talk about the
future, but the past does inform the future and um what's happened uh in
all of this program really does inform what it is we're doing elsewhere.
Uh And what it is we've achieved and what more needs to be done. So, um I
it's been a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. Thanks. Well, thank you very much,
Bruce.
We can. Uh
Yeah.