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July 23, 2004
Pupfish cling to life, scarce water
By PHILLIP GOMEZ
Like everything connected to Southern Nevada's water resources, depth-of-field vision is blurry at best - like a desert mirage - and it heats up in a Las Vegas minute. "The entire Southwest is out of water," said Nye County hydrologist To Buqo. The region is going through a five-year draught. No one can predict how long it will last. Buqo said he asked federal officials at the Devil's Hole conference, "What are you doing to get more water out here?" Buqo said he was told to go speak to the politicians. But any reclamation engineering of the desert would require an act of Congress. Although labeling current weather patterns a "draught" is a dubious proposition in a normally arid land, tree ring studies show the Colorado River region to be in the worst dry period since the end of the 16th century when Spanish conquistadors were wandering the Southwest looking for gold. Global warming is a whole other scientific enigma. But it could explain why the deserts of the West have just gotten hotter. The 10 warmest years in the history of record keeping have been since 1990, according to United Nations data as reported in a recent Los Angeles Times article. Mountain snowpacks have been down an average of 11 percent across the West since the 1970s, according to a Washington state research scientist as reported in the same article. The warming trend may extend back to the 1950s. Some scientists think that humans have so altered the landscape by development, urban paving and rural pumping that the natural reaction of the earth is to grow warmer. Meanwhile, the pupfish hang on for dear life as their water-filled cavern slowly drains. Over 500 feet deep, the cavern has claimed at least two human lives, and no one knows what the bottom looks like. The temperature maintains a constant 92 degrees with stable salinity. In 1967 the Devil's Hole pupfish were officially listed as an endangered species. The fish were threatened with extinction by agricultural pumping in the Amargosa Valley. A Supreme Court decision in 1976 recognized the prior water right of Devil's Hole, but the pumping continued. The injunction only guaranteed sufficient water at a level that ensured the pupfish's survival. Protected further by creation of the wildlife refuge in 1984 and a recovery plan two years later, the pupfish nevertheless continue to struggle for survival. The water level recovered to its maximum level in 1989, but has been dropping ever since. Hydrologists at the Devil's Hole conference believe that water runoff from the Spring Mountains, northeast of Pahrump, feeds into the Pahrump Valley and drains into the springs and seeps of Ash Meadows. The big question is the extent of this drainage. What goes on underground remains mysterious, providing a mother lode of raw data for hydrologists to mine indefinitely. Computer modeling is all the rage now in studies of "Death Valley regional flows." Pahrumping Data The upshot is "a lot of data on water," said Walt Kuver, a retired engineer who presented a paper at the conference on Pahrump's growth and the long-term outlook for available water. Kuver wrote a chapter of the master plan update, completed late last year, on the projected growth of the Pahrump Valley and the long-term options for water engineering. He calls the document the first effort in planning for Pahrump's water use by local government. Kuver was recently appointed to the Pahrump Regional Planning Commission, a body that makes growth-related recommendations to the county commissioners. Already he has put forth an agenda item to amend the new county zoning ordinance through strict conservation measures on new constructions and developments, such as water-hungry golf courses. Without such controls, he fears the day will soon arrive when Pahrump will have to transport its water supply. "We have got to start taking conservation seriously," said Donna Lamm, who shared in making the Devil's Hole conference presentation on Pahrump's growth with the county on the Conservation District of Southern Nevada, Lamm sais, "We are already using more water than is being recharged every year, and more and more people are moving here all the time. We can't raise rates; most (residents) are on wells. We have got to take measures toward conservation of water because we can't tap into the Colorado River." That river is too far away and the water is already over-appropriated, in part to Las Vegas. Because of its legal rights to the Colorado, Las Vegas is able to inject its valley aquifer with river water for storage when supply runs high. Artificial recharge is something that will never be available to Pahrump. "Our only option is ground water, and it isn't being recharged like it normally is (at a rate of) 19-to 22 acre feet per year." Lamm despairs of "people moving here putting in lawns - it's not natural. This is not Illinois." Southern Nevada studies show that 90 percent of residential potable water is used outdoors in the summer; approximately a third of outdoor water use is wasted. The average family of four uses approximately 100,000 gallons of water per day. Almost half of all residential indoor use comes from toilets and washing machines. "We have got to wake up and be more responsible," Lamm said. A Microcosm at 2,000 Feet But what about the brave little pupfish, you may ask? The have certainly done their part, cleverly adapting to harsh conditions all these millennia. And that's just to survive. They're not asking for much. For 10,000 years the four species of endangered pupfish have been adapting to changing conditions. More recently, humans introduced predator bass to Ash Meadows, decimating some pupfish species. With the removal of the bass, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report a 90-percent comeback in pupfish numbers in some springs. At Devil's Hole, the cavern remains that species' last refuge, the only natural habitat where they can be found in the nation. So who cares? Well, the nation for one, if you understand the term as more encompassing than the present generation. Allowing a species to deliberately disappear goes against the Endangered Species Act of 1973. But the moral claim for preservation is stronger still. As environmental ethicist Holmes Rolston III said, "Extinction shuts down the generative processes. The wrong that humans are doing, or allowing to happen through carelessness, is stopping the historical flow in which the vitality of life is laid. Every extinction is an incremental decay in stopping life processes - no small thing." Rolston compares species destruction to "tearing pages out of an unread book," of an unknown place, "written in a language humans hardly know how to read." Lamm's view is more pragmatic. "I think of them as the canaries in the mine shaft," she said, recalling the old industrial miners' birds that served to give warning of depleted oxygen underground. She takes a more utilitarian measure of the pupfish, seeing them as an early-warning indicator of what may lie in store for us higher mammals. As ecologist Paul Ehrlich's metaphor puts it, species are "rivets in the Earthship." Similarly, the National Science Foundation advocated saving the Devil's Hole pupfish because of its tenacity, its ability to thrive in extreme circumstances. The foundation's 1977 report said that the species "can serve as useful biological models for future research on the human kidney - and on survival in a seemingly hostile environment." "Devil's Hole is a small piece of the big picture of our water resource situation in the desert," Lamm concludes. Just like the pupfish, we humans don't have the water resources in the Pahrump Valley, she said. "If they die off, we're going to die off." Expensive computer and biological models aside, the unknown consequences of "blowing a rivet" may be as good a model for water and its conservation as we're likely to get. |
