From: John Horning
Subject: Re: The River and Mr. Thornburg
Date: June 7, 2007
To: George Johnson

George,

As a proponent of the municipal check-off programs I decided to
share my disappointment in your dismissal of them as a useful
tool in re-shaping western water policy on a local scale to make
policies more environmentally friendly. First of all, let me
explain the broader strategy. We are working to get every major
municipality in the Rio Grande watershed to adopt a check-off
program on municipal water bills. Albuquerque has already
committed to one and it will be implemented in late 2007 or early
2008. We are also working with 5 other cities in the Rio Grande
watershed in New Mexico to get those cities to adopt similar
check-offs. By trying to work at scale across a large western
watershed we are trying to demonstrate that there is a
constituency for restoring one of the West's iconic rivers. The
mere establishment of a Living River check-off in every community
in the watershed says that people care. Thenif we can then get
each city and even the state to match contributions perhaps we do
begin to operate at scale.

But even if these efforts are largely symbolic and we don't
create adequate financial capital to address the problem, -which
wouldn't surprise me- we're doing something else very important.

In a world in which most people don't know where their water
comes from I believe that these check offs can be one vehicle
that reminds people of our connection to and dependence on our
rivers. The ethical dilemna as I see it is: as we rely on our
rivers to sustain us so what can we do as urban dwellers to
sustain them? Obviously there is a whole lot more. The next step
in this grand strategy is to build on the constituency
established through the check-off to ask and then demand that
water saved through efficiencies be re-allocated to environmental
purposes and not simply to save water to subsidize the next bit
of sprawl. If we can be successful on that front, we will have
another point of leverage to demand the restoration of flows to
our rivers.

Of course, the greatest opportunity to reclaim a western river's
rights to its own water is to focus on agriculture, given that
agriculture diverts 75% of the Rio Grande's flow and that's about
the average for most western rivers. And then uses that water
largely quite inefficiently. We have been working for over a
decade now to bring some greater accountability to how the Rio
Grande's flows are managed by powerful agricultural interests. We
are now working with the Albuquerque Water Utility Authority to
create a political mandate for agricultural water leasing. In
fact, in the next few days we'll be sending a joint request from
Mayor Martin Chavez and myself and others to the New Mexico
Interstate Stream Commission to provide $750,000 in funding for a
pilot agricultural forbearance program. The City of Albuquerque
and environmental groups have already established a $250,000
Living River fund that we intend to use to leverage this and
other state and federal commitments to establish a pilot
agricultural water leasing program.

Of course the next frontier on agricultural water is also
efficiencies. Currently there is not framework for reallocating
saved water to the river or requiring that when water is
transferred from agricultural uses to urban uses that a
percentage of that water be allocated to the river. Those
policies need to be put in place as well and I hope they will be
in the years ahead.

Having worked on river protection efforts in the West now for
more than a decade I can tell you there is no silver bullet to
restoring flows to a western river whose water is completely
overallocated and overappropriated. River die a death of a
thousand cuts and they won't be restored through any single
action but rather a suite of actions all built towards reclaiming
their flow.

Which is why I return the river check-off. A panacea; hardly. A
little misleading, maybe. A path to providing some flow in a
too-long forgotten stretch of river- hopefully and possibly. And
in a now drying and warming Southwest in which we're constantly
swimming upstream against institutional and cultural biases
against river flows sometimes hope and possibility are a good
start.

With respect and warm regards,

John C. Horning
Executive Director
Forest Guardians