8001

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8001
• Author: Western Regional Instream Flow Conference.
• Title: Proceedings, Western Regional Instream Flow Conference.
• USFW Year: 1992.
• USFW - Doc Type: Oct. 2-3, 1992.
• Copyright Material: NO

and figure out what kind of value that added. Well, it takes
about 50,000 pounds of water to raise one pound of cow,
because a cow is a very metabolically inefficient beast.
Which means, in order to raise a 900-pound cow, you're
talking about 45 million pounds of water applied to
irrigated pasture or alfalfa (or as Amory Lovins says, a
football field about 11 feet deep in water).
A stream where you are taking out a consumptive use of
100 cfs can produce about 4,000 cows. Those 4,000 cows
are worth almost exactly, and this is a generous estimate,
what the electricity would have been worth that could have
been produced if you hadn't taken the water out to grow
the cows. So, we're talking a wash right there, but then you
add the other benefits of leaving the water in the river.
First of all, you have whitewater recreation, which on a
lot of rivers is worth hundreds of thousands or millions of
dollars. In central Colorado, I remember in the late `60s or
`70s, the first time I went through there, there were great
big billboards, and they were advertising Wayne Aspinall's
candidacy for Congress. And about 10 years later, when I
went through there again, the same billboards were
advertising oil-shale development. The last two or three
years, they've been advertising whitewater-rafting compa-
nies, which shows you how the politics, not to mention the
economics, of that region have changed.
Whitewater recreation, as those of you know who are in
it, is a very poorly paid, therefore labor-intensive business,
and it's environmentally benign. Now, on a lot of rivers-a
100 or 200 or 300 cfs is the difference between a successful
rafting season and one where the water is simply too low.
On the Yuba River in California, there is wonderful rafting
until about April, when suddenly virtually all the river goes
into the Bear River next door because of a senior water
right, and the flow drops from maybe 2,000 to 3,000 cfs to
around 15 or 20 cfs, and that's the end of the rafting
season.
Now, fishing. I saw more Orvis bags come off the
airplane yesterday than I've ever seen in my life, so I guess a
lot of you are fishermen here. Fishing, again, is an industry
that is worth a lot of money. Millions of dollars are spent in
the bars alone. Millions more are spent on the right flies
and tippet. Yesterday, I spent $125 in a tackle shop because
I went to Colorado and forgot my fly reel. So, of course, I
had to buy another one in order to fish for four hours on
the Frying Pan and get skunked. So, now I have more fly
reels than I know what to do with and still very little fishing
talent. But fishing is a business in many regions and it adds
to the local economy.
What you're also buying by leaving that water in the river
is endangered-species protection. Now, as Dennis can
attest, endangered-species protection can get very, very
expensive. What we're doing now in California is by-
passing turbines at Shasta Dam, which could be producing
millions and millions of dollars worth of hydroelectricity, in
order to get cold water into the river for the fish. What
they're talking about doing on the Columbia River is
foregoing hundreds of millions of dollars of hydroelectricity
in order to mimic the ancestral flows of the river when it
was actually a big river that flushed 15 million salmon
down, rather than a series of stagnant pools waiting to be
run through hydroelectric turbines, which is what it is
today. By leaving more water in the river, any river, you're
always giving yourself greater flexibility. So, that's another
potential benefit, and we have, as you know, endangered
species all over the West and even in the East too.
Municipal water supply. You know, my home state of
California is turning into an awful place to live. It's gone
from paradise to nightmare almost overnight, it seems. So a
lot of people are leaving. And where are they coming?
Mostly they are relocating to states like Utah, Colorado
where you have a nice stable work force, low crime rate,
and all of these things you miss in California, but what you
don't often have is a reliable water supply. So people are
leaving California and coming to places like Wyoming and
the one of the first things they ask is, "Where's my reliable
water supply",
Well, municipal water users, whether they are industrial
or urban, generally return about 75 percent of what they
take out, and in the cases of some industries, as much as 95
percent, almost 100 percent. So, it's a far less consumptive
use of water. If you leave more water in the river, you are
creating downstream opportunities for companies that not
only use less water consumptively but employ a lot more
people.
Now, this is one of the most interesting and in a way,
painful, arguments for me, this whole business about jobs
versus jobs. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California, which you know is Los Angeles's big super
agency, which wants water from anywhere they can get it-
anywhere-is now using any argument they can conceive to
realize their goal of getting more water from anywhere, and
the latest one has been an economic argument.
According to the chairman of MWD, if you take 1,000
acre feet of water and give it to a high-tech industry like
computer chips, it's worth anywhere from 12,000 to
16,000 jobs if that water is reliably there every year-12,000
to 16,000 jobs based on a 1,000 acre feet of water. You take
that same 1,000 acre feet and give it to an alfalfa farm,
you've got eight jobs.
The economic activity of the high-tech industry is in the
tens of millions of dollars. The economic activity of the
alfalfa farm is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So
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