John Fleck is NOT Marc Reisner

I stumbled across his blog about two years ago while Googling for information about Colorado River annual precipitation, basin snowpacks and related material.

While I recognized that he had good information about those numbers, I saw more and more that his "framing" was horrible. Like a junior president Obama, he thought all problems within water allocations could be — and had been, in cases already solved — fixed by "Kumbaya."

Along with this, he, and even more, a second-level co-blogger, slammed Marc Reisner, along with newspaper journalists and others, for promoting "conflict narratives." The co-blogger on the site was worse, claiming Reisner was out of date and other things.

Well, this summer, Fleck started touting his own new book, and how it would build on his previous book of years ago. So, I decided to make an interlibrary loan request for said first book.

I got it.

It was horrible.

I gleefully savaged it.

Here you go.

Intellectually dishonest, in my opinion.

I have Fleck’s blog (with some coauthors, mainly Eric Kuhn, the coauthor of his new book, but it’s primarily his) on my blogroll.

He knows the numbers stuff, or has friends and blog coauthors that do.

But, he’s Kumbaya on Colorado River stuff, as in like Preznit Kumbaya, aka Obama. And, on his blog, he sneered about Marc Reisner. And, yes, IMO, sneered is the right word. Look for yourself.

 So, knowing Fleck had written this book, and that he had a new one coming out, I wanted to see what he was like in more than blogging depth.

Answer?

Worse than on the blog.

Let’s start with the most egregious issue. A 2016 book about Colorado River water issues doesn’t even use the words “climate change” until page 199? UNACCEPTABLE.

Second, and the point behind the header?

Much of the “Kumbaya” that Fleck mentions was only achieved with the threat of a legal mailed fist behind it. Kumbaya by force of law is hardly Kumbaya.

Other issues that pop up early on?

More dissing of Reisner. After initial mention, simply ignoring James Powell, author of “Dead Pool.” I have re-read “Cadillac Desert” half a dozen times and “Dead Pool” twice. Both are in my small “keepers” library.

Next? More Kumbaya, even as places like today’s Aral Sea basin, Jordan River, Tigris-Euphrates and Nile show that Kumbaya ain’t working so well as we speak.

We don't even need to go outside the Colorado Basin! The fate of the Hohokam should indicate that Kumbaya doesn't always win.

Next next? Ignoring that Colorado River water usage has been mitigated by ever-heavier drawdowns of groundwater, both in groundwater basins connected to the Colorado (Arizona) and in those not (California), though there it’s more to reduce Sacramento-San Joaquin water u se in the Central Valley.

Next next next? Ignoring the connection between groundwater basins and river recharge. Anybody who knows the godawful state of southern Arizona tributaries of the Gila also knows why.

And, we’ll keep going. In supporting growing alfalfa as a flexible crop, he ignores that the methane farts of the cows it feeds contribute to the climate change that is making the Colorado ever drier. But, since he doesn't mention climate change until the end of the book ...

A lot of the Kumbaya cooperation Fleck cites, like in SoCal, has the fist of threatened legal power behind it, in specific, just as has most Colorado River stuff. Doesn’t matter if the threat is rarely invoked; it exists. That’s “forced Kumbaya,” not Kumbaya.

Also, it comes off as a bit cherry-picking to discuss a couple of small Southland water districts and never discuss the massive water headaches in the Central Valley, which were a large part of Reisner’s book.

One other reviewer notes water fights in the Central Valley (speaking of) are even worse than in the Colorado, and large scale corporate farms have no problems putting their thumb on the scales.

Back inside the Colorado basin, and after the date of this book, Arizona’s state Speaker of the House Bowers nearly gutted a needed agreement for new water use reductions earlier this year with a proposed rider on the bill. Only the threat of the Maricopa affiliation of Indian tribes forced his hand. Fleck made light of it.

Speaking of that, that water agreement was required because of Lake Mead hitting 1.075 elevation. Fleck, near the end of the book, notes that a previous agreement didn’t directly address 1,075, but appears to believe there that this point wouldn’t hit until after 2020.

Well, Fleck, it hit before then, and it hit before then in spite of a record Rockies snowpack in 2019. Did you talk about climate change in your new book?

One other point vis-à-vis the Anglo water world in the Southwest in general, American Indian water rights are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Fleck does eventually discuss them – for half a dozen pages or so in the last 10 percent of the book. But he doesn’t go into detail.

Next, he never considers whether a “moon shoot” shouldn’t overhaul the current Upper / Lower Basin divisions. (I say it should; I’d put the Virgin River in the lower basin and the Little Colorado in the upper.) Related to that, on his blog, Fleck appears wedded to giving the Upper Basin just as much water despite its lesser population and its agricultural challenges.

Something almost as inexcusable as not mentioning climate change until the end of the book? Talking early on about the Mormons and the amount of water management ideas they spread around the West while ignoring that they got much of that, in turn, by learning from the majordomos who ran (and still run, in many cases) acequias in New Mexico. It’s doubly inexcusable not to mention this since Fleck is a long term reporter at the Albuquerque Journal.

(Update: It now becomes triply inexcusable. New research from the U.S. Geological Survey shows the river has lost 20 percent or more of its flow since 1913 and more than half of that is definitely attributable to climate change. More information from that study shows that, in just 30 more years, it will lose another one-quarter of its flow. Maybe more. So, Fleck is not only "criminal" for not discussing climate change in his first book, he's also "criminal" for its effects playing out, and he's criminally stupid in his Kumbaya belief if he things the future's going to be addressed without elbow-throwing lawyering.)

That’s even though he mentions it in his blog. While, at the same time, it's a throwaway line.

Look, some "gloom and doom"  newspaper reporting and books over the state of the Colorado may have been too much. BUT, they were reasonable extrapolations from the status quo at the time they were written. Killing a perhaps sometimes overdone angle the way Fleck has done is proverbial gnat meeting sledgehammer.

Of course, a sledgehammer can't be swung quickly and accurately enough to actually kill a gnat.

Finally, beyond the thumb-on-scales slant, I just don't think the book is that well written. The throwaway nature of the Mormon comment would be one example.

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Update, Feb. 5, 2020: Apparently I've been ghosted out of commenting on his blog. I could just use a new email address, but he's not worth it.