Treaties and Compacts

Boundary Waters of Canada and the United States

Source: International Joint Commission

On Wednesday the question was raised "What is the difference between a treaty and a compact?" I did not have a good answer at the time, and having devoted some research effort to the issue since, I still have not found a difference of consequence for most purposes, though there appears to be one of usage in the United States. In the dictionaries I have consulted, including paper ones on my shelves and online ones, there is virtually no difference in definition of the two terms, both being defined as agreements between individuals or states to resolve conflicts.

In the US the word "Compact" seems to be mostly used for agreements between states as in the "Great Lakes--St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact is a legally binding interstate compact among the U.S. states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The compact details how the states manage the use of the Great Lakes Basin's water supply and builds on the 1985 Great Lakes Charter and its 2001 Annex. The compact is the means by which the states implement the governors' commitments under the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement that also includes the Premiers of Ontario and Quebec." (quoted from Wikipedia entry). Of course there is an international component as two Canadian Provinces are also involved, though neither the US Federal Government nor the Government of Canada appear to be direct parties to the Compact.

Treaty, on the other hand, seems to be used in the US to mean an agreement between the Federal Government and a foreign country (or countries). One example is the longstanding Boundary Waters Treaty between the United States and Great Britain (acting for Canada) signed in 1909 and ratified the next year. Creating an International Joint Commission of the two national states, the treaty is an agreement to provide mechanisms for resolution of disputes over the rather numerous water issues that arise between them. A great number of streams cross the boundary, including two huge ones in the West, the Columbia and the Yukon. The Great Lakes - St. Lawrence River Basin is a large share of the boundary waters and the most important watershed for the economies of the Canada and the United States, and it is part of the zone covered by the treaty. The Compact noted above is apparently a response to the Treaty at the level of states and provinces which have great responsibilities for water issues in their respective countries.

This is a none too satisfactory response to the question raised, and the difference between treaties and compacts is one I shall devote some additional effort to leaning about once I have completed a series of projects which are more pressing at the moment.

Dams III - Dam Removal

Aerial view of Elwha River Dam, Washington State

Source: Elwha Watershed Information Resource

As they age, fill with silt, or water resource management priorities change, a large number of dams have been slated for removal. Most of those removed and proposed for removal have been smallish. The Elwha Dam, a decommissioned hydroelectric facility, inside the boundaries of Olympic National Park (the dam was built before the park was created) in the northwest corner of the continental United States is the largest dam to date to be put forth as a candidate for removal, and in September 2011 removal activity is scheduled to begin.

Removing a dam is very nearly as complicated as erecting one. Careful plans are necessary in order not to do great damage downstream. Fortunately the Elwha is a large river in flow but a short one, and the dam is only a few kilometers from its mouth into the Pacific at the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There is not much economic activity or infrastructure subject to damage downstream from the dam, making the removal problem a little less complex than it would be for most dams of comparable size.

Source: USGS

The blog "On Water" from the Water Resources Center Archive at the University of California, Berkeley (my graduate alma mater) is an extremely valuable resource for materials on water issues. Its primary focus is water in California and nearby western states, buts its coverage goes well outside the limits of that state and region. On 28 October it published a listing of links to sources on dam removal.

Related articles

• Elwha Project Expected to Blast Open Nature's Door (kitsapsun.com)
• New Elwha channel part of dam removal project (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

The Arid U.S. West

Grand Canyon & Colorado River, 1987 ©eop

After our meeting today, I got questions from several people about books on the arid west of the United States. In class I commented on three titles:

Webb, Walter Prescott. 1931 (original publication, there were several subsequent editions, the most recent appears to be 1983). The Great Plains. (Austin: University of Texas).  Webb was professor of history at the University of Texas and during his lifetime was a greatly influential voice in the study of American history, especially that of the west. He wrote widely on water related topics, particularly as they related to Texas, and his 1954 work More Water for Texas prompted that state to look more carefully at its use of a scarce resource. A 1957 article in Harper's Magazine "American West: Perpetual Mirage" was one of the seminal works in the formation of the environmentalist movement. He has been dead since the 1960s, and his books are a little dated, but they are immensely readable and recommended to anyone with an interest in water and the American West.

Wallace Stegner, who many consider one of the finest American writers, was best known as a novelist, but he also wrote a fine piece of history Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. It is still in print and also available for Kindle readers. Once again a great read for anyone with an interest in water, American history and the settlement of the west.


John Wesley Powell was a Civil War hero, he lost an arm, and is best known for his epic journey in 1869 through the Grand Canyon. His influence on this country was much greater than that single journey, for he was the effective founder of the profession of geology in the US and of the US Geological Survey (USGS). His Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States published by the USGS has been a touchstone in discussions of the arid regions of the west since it was first published in 1878. He noted that types of agriculture and land management common east of the Mississippi were simply not feasible in the west and made suggestions of possible alternatives. The Report is available in a rather cumbersome form from the American Memory project of the Library of Congress (did not have time to locate other online versions, but I suspect there may be one or more).


There are many, many more good books (not to mention articles) on the arid portions of the U. S. West. A few suggestions:
1. Meinig, Donald. 1968. The Great Columbia Plain. (Seattle: University of Washington Press).
2. Reisner, Marc. 1986. Cadillac Desert. (New York: Viking).
3. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. 2000. Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company).

Notes III

Carhenge, Alliance, Nebraska

©EOP

In the posting about dams, I failed to note one major issue, the possibility of failure. Well-engineered dams rarely fail, but poor engineering, extreme weather events and lack of proper maintenance can lead to failures. In a few cases so can bad water management as illustrated by the first pages in Powell's Dead Pool, where the author describes what could have been a catastrophic failure of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River.  Under the worst of circumstances, a catastrophic failure can lead to hundreds or even thousands of casualties. The most famous dam failure in the United States was at Johnstown, PA in 1889 when a badly maintained dam broke and killed 2,200 people. (That same benighted city had further floods in 1936 and again in 1977, devastating to property but not nearly as deadly for people, and neither was the consequence of a dam failure but rather of extreme weather.) Two days ago a small dam in Iowa collapsed after torrential rains. Knowing the failure was likely, deaths were apparently avoided, but several downstream towns had to be evacuated, and there was substantial property damage.

The St. Francis Dam, a water supply dam built in the early 1920s and designed by the famed California water engineer William  Mulholland, catastrophically failed on 12 March 1928 due to an engineering error. The ensuing flood killed 450 people and washed away towns and farms in the Santa Clarita Valley NW of Los Angeles.  Another badly engineered dam failure was the collapse of the irrigation retention  Teton Dam in Idaho in 1976 leading to 11 deaths and tremendous property damage downstream (see some pictures of the collapse on the website of a civil engineering faculty member at San Diego State University. Driving through the area later that summer, I stopped in Rexburg, Idaho to witness some of the devastation, but I have not scanned my slides as yet).

Shortly after posting the piece on glaciers yesterday, I read the New York Times (NYT) Sunday 25 July issue. While I am no fan of their regular columnist Thomas Friedmann,  he has an interesting op-ed  on global warming worth a read. This has been one of the hottest summers ever recorded in the eastern United States, and if current trends continue it could be the hottest yet recorded. Despite that heat (which it must be noted may be completely unrelated to climate change) the Senate has killed even the feeble climate legislation pending before it. Perhaps that is all to the well, for sometimes half measures like those in the bill now dead are worse than no action at all, but the lack of attention to the matter of climate change and the overuse of petroleum products in a hot summer with the Gulf oil gusher only temporarily capped is quite disturbing. It would seem those topics should be the subject of a national frenzy and demand for action. This morning's NYT has a good piece by their regular columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman bemoaning the Senate's action, or or more exactly their lack of action placing a substantial share of the blame on the unprincipled ex-presidential candidate McCain and showing how the demands of the coal and petroleum oligopolies have trumped the public interest.

More water woes in the DC area. The drought may have broken for a time with heavy rains and strong winds accompanying a thunderstorm yesterday afternoon. The storm led to numerous electrical supply problems, and one facility loosing power was a major filtration facility of the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission causing it to once again issue mandatory water usage limitations for Montgomery and Prince Georges Counties. While water supply systems are often discussed in the abstract and without reference to other elements of urban infrastructure, storms and other catastrophic events illustrate how interdependent those elements are.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Downstream residents dodge bullet after Lake Delhi dam fails (gazetteonline.com)
• Dam Fails in Eastern Iowa (nytimes.com)

Water and Agriculture: A General Overview

Boh Tea Plantation, Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

©EOP

Agriculture is by a considerable measure the largest single human use of water. Leaving animal husbandry aside for the moment, some of the water used by crop plants is taken up directly from soil moisture created by precipitation in what is often called rain fed agriculture. It has become conventional to call that water from precipitation green water (a somewhat unfortunate usage, for the term is also applied to water seriously contaminated with algae). In the humid zone countries of the northern Hemisphere, including the eastern parts of the United States, green water allows a variety of crops to be grown without supplemental irrigation, and precipitation supplies all of the water for the crop plants. Such is the case in the tea growing area in the tropical highlands of Malaysia where tea is but one of a variety of crops grown dependent on the ample rainfall.

Elsewhere agriculture as presently practiced requires the addition of water beyond that provided by precipitation. Water obtained from streams, lakes and underground aquifers is usually termed blue water (again an unfortunate usage, for blue water has a quite different meaning to sailors). In sub-humid zones  irrigation may provide only small amounts of additional water applied at specific times during the growing season. In truly arid areas little or no crop production is possible without continual irrigation throughout the growing season. An area like the Salt River Valley of Arizona would not be useful for agriculture if not for irrigation.  Many other areas in the western United States can be used for water dependent crops only because of irrigation. Without irrigation in those areas, rain-fed agriculture could only produce grains Like wheat and barley.

The map below illustrates blue water withdrawals from various sources like lakes and reservoirs and underground aquifers for agriculture. It illustrates the great importance of supplemental water in tropical and subtropical areas, particularly in the Middle East and Asia. A very large fraction of the world's population depends on food grown with at least some use of blue water in irrigation, including most of the populations of India and China. The data are averages for usage in whole countries from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a Rome based unit of the United Nations.

Not all water used in agriculture is consumed, that is lost to evapo-transpiration or incorporated in the crop, but a great deal is. The map below composed from remote sensing imagery at the Institut für Physische Geographie (Physical Geographical Institute) of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany shows the consumptive use of blue water by agriculture across the globe. The map is part of a very large project on world irrigation at the institute.