The Platte: River of dreams or river of dust?

Prairie Fire continues the discussion of Great Plains land and water issues. Paul Johnsgard, an internationally acclaimed author and scholar, has prepared the following essay. His thought-provoking views will undoubtedly kindle a multitude of responses. In this piece, Dr. Johnsgard refers to the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program (PRRIP) as one of the measures developed to bring regional and national resources and attention to the Platte Valley. We have asked the PRRIP to prepare an essay outlining the history and plans for this major environmental and economic effort. That story will be a major feature of the December issue of Prairie Fire. We believe that it is only through the back-and-forth of civil discussion that a consensus can be developed on the best solutions that are necessary to solve complicated problems.

By Paul A. Johnsgard

When I was a graduate student at Cornell in the late 1950s, two of my best friends were doing field research in the Platte Valley of Nebraska on hybridizing bird species pairs found there, such as the orioles, grosbeaks, towhees and flickers. At the end of each summer, they would return to Ithaca with stories of the beauty of the Platte’s riparian woodlands, its birds, and the natural glories of central Nebraska in late spring. I had grown up in eastern North Dakota but had never visited Nebraska, so I listened with quiet jealousy to their descriptions of the clear-flowing, sand-bottomed Platte, mentally comparing it with the sluggish and muddy Red River that was within easy walking distance of my home.

Later, after obtaining my Ph.D. at Cornell, I spent two years on post-doctoral fellowships in England. During my second year there, I happened to learn of a job opening at the University of Nebraska in the zoology department, and my memories of those vivid descriptions of the Platte Valley immediately returned. I knew little else of Nebraska, but had heard that, except for North Dakota, it perhaps had the best waterfowl breeding habitats of any state south of Canada. As a waterfowl specialist, my dreams came true when I was offered the job sight unseen.

Arriving on campus in the fall of 1961, I could scarcely wait to visit the central Platte Valley in spring. In March 1962 I drove out to Elm Creek, then turned south to cross the Platte. Suddenly the fields were alive with endless flocks of sandhill cranes. Like Dorothy landing in Oz, I found myself in a world transformed. From that moment on, I knew I would remain in Nebraska for the rest of my life, and that cranes would become a constant leitmotif for me. I quickly learned that the Platte Valley’s spring crane population had been essentially undocumented and was entirely unrecognized as a major ornithological phenomenon. In addition, the seemingly uncountable numbers of Canada and white-fronted geese, and the endless flocks of ducks that poured into the Platte Valley during March and April, took me back to my days as a teenager, when I had waded through hip-deep marshes to try photograph these beautiful birds as they migrated northward by the millions along the western edge of the Red River Valley.

During the next 25 years I wrote 23 books, including seven on waterfowl and two on cranes, regularly returning to the Platte for inspiration. In the early 1980s I finally decided to write a short book on the Platte River itself. The manuscript started as a rather haphazard collection of natural history observations, but gained some coherence and direction as I realized that the river was increasingly in danger from various sources. Its broad channels were gradually disappearing and being replaced by shrubs and trees, partly as a result of an absence of the prairie fires that once kept the trees in check. More importantly, the smaller and shallower river channels were entirely disappearing; a combined result of dewatering effects of upstream surface diversions and local groundwater extraction for irrigation.

The development of center-pivot technology during the 1950s had resulted in a profusion of center-pivots by the late 1970s, and had made the irrigation of even fairly hilly ground feasible. Planned future irrigation-based diversions in the central Platte Valley, such as a proposed Mid-State project, threatened the Platte, and made me focus the book more directly on the threats facing the river. My concerns for the future of the Platte at that time were expressed as fearing “the very real possibility that only a few decades from now the river, like the vast bison herds that once trod its banks, will exist only as a remnant.” Since then, those fears have to a considerable extent materialized, and a nightmarish scenario for the river’s possible future has emerged.

A river and its groundwater, free for the taking

To understand the current state of the Platte River a review of some history is needed. Nebraska’s Natural Resources Districts (NRDs) were established in 1969 by the state legislature in a belated and half-hearted attempt to try to manage the state’s groundwater resources. These multi-county districts were sensibly organized along watershed boundaries. However, it wasn’t until 1975 that they were given authority to regulate groundwater use through the state’s Groundwater Management Act, by controlling well spacing, establishing pumping limits, and proposing controlled-use areas, all being subject to oversight by the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The required oversight by DNR was subsequently removed from the statutes.

By 1982 the NRDs were also independently charged with establishing groundwater management areas without such state-level approval. They could thereby place limits on further local water extractions by declaring their districts to be fully appropriated or even overappropriated. Most NRDs delayed for as many years as possible to fulfill these responsibilities, as their boards were usually dominated by irrigators and, as such, were extremely loath to put controls on their own highly profitable activities.

A 1984 bill (LB 1106) helped set the stage for issuing a surface-water permit to protect instream flow for fish, wildlife or recreation, but this change did nothing to protect existing surface-water rights from the adverse effects of groundwater pumping. In 1991 a group of irrigators formed “Nebraskans First,” an organization dedicated to preserving Nebraska’s groundwaters for use by irrigators. They quickly managed to weaken or defeat several bills that would result in pumping restrictions, including LB 306 in 1992, which would have given state control over pumping near streams. In 1994 the state’s supreme court affirmed the principle that Nebraska’s waters are publicly owned by its citizens (the state constitution’s “public interest” clause), but by then the majority of its groundwater had already been claimed by irrigators.

Finally, in 1996 LB 108 acknowledged for the first time the hydrologic connection between surface water and groundwater, and established a “conjunctive” use policy for the state’s surface and underground water as a matter of settled law. At that time the regional NRDs were given authority to terminate local well drilling at times of drought or when water tables are falling, but they could establish a groundwater moratorium only after all other remedies had proven to be ineffective. By 1998 a substantial part of the upper and central Platte’s surface water was determined to be fully appropriated, but no such designations had been applied to the region’s groundwater. Since more than half of the Platte’s downstream flow comes from groundwater sources, this is comparable to installing fire extinguishers and water sprinklers in the upstairs of a building, but leaving the basement furnace untended.

In 2004, after the initiation of litigation by a surface-water user complaining of damages owing to groundwater pumping, a new state law (LB 962) gave full recognition to the need for the state to conjunctively manage surface water and hydrologically connected groundwater. The law directed the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to annually review all the river basins of the state to determine if they were fully appropriated. If a basin is fully appropriated, the water supplies and uses are balanced so that if any increase of consumptive use of water is allowed, it will be used at the expense of an existing user. There was an immediate temporary stay on the construction of new groundwater wells, the issuance of additional surface-water permits, and the expansion of irrigated acres. The DNR and the affected NRD would have three to five years to implement an integrated management plan for the fully appropriated area with a required goal of sustaining a balance between water supplies and water use for both the near term and the long term.

If the regional water uses already exceed the long-term supply, a river basin is designated as overappropriated. In these basins water uses must be incrementally reduced until the supplies and uses are in balance. Over the first ten-year period of such designation, water uses must be reduced to the 1997 level of development.

In accordance with LB 962, the Platte River and its tributaries upstream of Elm Creek to the state line of Colorado and Wyoming were declared overappropriated in September 2004. But by the time the new law was fully in effect, it was really too late to put, as it were, the water back into the river. By 2006, 94.4 percent of our state’s groundwater extractions (averaging some 7,420 million gallons per day) were being used for irrigation by 17,000 users that represent only about 1 percent of the state’s population.

In 1970, there were about 7,000 pivots operating in Nebraska. By 2002 the 26 counties straddling the Platte River were producing 38 percent of the state’s total crop production. Between 2002 and 2004 the total number of new wells registered in Nebraska exceeded 1,000 each year. In 2005 there were about 72,000 center pivots in the state. By 2006 the Central Platte Natural Resources District had 26,000 registered wells, representing more than 20 percent of all of Nebraska’s registered wells.

By 2005 there were 7.2 million Nebraska acres irrigated by groundwater, and another million irrigated by surface water. By then Nebraska was leading the nation in irrigated corn acres, and corn had become the most heavily federally subsidized of all U.S. crops. The state of Nebraska was fourth in the nation in total federal crop subsidies received, with most of them going into the pockets of the largest farm operations. Over 70 percent of Nebraska’s 2005 bumper corn crop (12.7 billion bushels) resulted from irrigation, in spite of an ongoing statewide drought. This occurred as a combined result of massive irrigation and high levels of fertilizer and pesticide use. An additional price that will probably be paid well into the future is that farmers in counties of heaviest corn production, such as the central Platte Valley, have suffered significantly increased mortality levels from leukemia associated with pesticide exposure (American Journal of Epidemiology 110, pp. 264–273, 1979).

In 2007 the U.S. Department of Energy proposed replacing 30 percent of the nation’s petroleum use with ethanol by 2030. Up to about a fourth of this might theoretically be provided by using corn to produce ethanol, without cutting into basic food and livestock needs. About 60 billion gallons of ethanol per year would be needed to replace 30 percent of the nation’s annual gasoline consumption of about 150 billion gallons, since ethanol generates only two-thirds the energy content of gasoline. Additionally, there is a high energy cost to producing ethanol from corn, not even considering associated pesticide and fertilizer costs.

Adding to these ecological and economic disadvantages, burning ethanol reduces greenhouse gases by only 12 percent as compared with fossil fuels, and has to be trucked to market rather than being transported inexpensively by underground pipes. Furthermore, Mitch Paine reported in a recent Prairie Fire (vol. 1, no. 4, p. 12) that the “dead zone” of lifeless ocean in the Gulf of Mexico is the result of runoff from agricultural sources, mostly originating in the Great Plains. As ecologists have long preached, everything is connected to everything else, and there is no such thing as a free ear of corn.

To achieve even a fraction of the government’s 2030 ethanol target (60 billion gallons) would require massive federal subsidies to agriculture and ethanol plant construction, since in 2007 only about 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol were produced. Spurred by the prospect of new federal support, corn reached record-high prices by early 2007. As a result, Nebraska farmers planted about nine million acres of corn in 2007, the most since 1936. The average dollar value of irrigated land in Nebraska reached $2,150 per acre by 2006, up 36 percent from 2000. All told, about 17,000 farms in Nebraska were irrigating about 8.2 million acres in 2006. Two-thirds of all the irrigated lands were represented by the state’s 7,000 largest farms, some of them larger than 10,000 acres and often controlled by out-of-state interests. Who said water couldn’t be turned into gold?

Water flows and drought

The onset of a prolonged drought in the Great Plains during 1999, along with associated increases in well drilling and surface-water extractions, progressively began to affect water flows in the Platte River. By 1993 Nebraska’s Depart­ment of Natural Resources (DNR) had prohibited any new uses of Platte River surface water from Columbus west. This decree didn’t stop groundwater pumping, since groundwater extraction rates are largely regulated by the regional Natural Resources Districts (NRDs). Nevertheless, drilling moratoriums began to take effect in some or all parts of eight of the state’s 23 NRDs between 2002 and 2004. The Central Platte NRD, an 11-county region stretching from Dawson County east to Platte County, also announced a forthcoming moratorium on new irrigation wells. Their substantial advance warning simply caused a frantic surge in new drilling activity that lasted until the moratorium finally took effect in 2004. An excellent history of instream flow rights and legislation on surface and groundwater usage by Gene Zuerlein appeared in a recent issue of Prairie Fire (vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 12–16).

Between 1999 and 2006, groundwater levels declined an average of nearly six feet in the Central Platte NRD. Not only did state groundwater levels begin to decline seriously at this time over broad regions, but Nebraska’s largest reservoir, Lake McConaughy, also began to suffer. This huge reservoir was built during the 1930s to serve for irrigation needs and hydroelectric power. It has a maximum 1.9-million acre-feet capacity, and is the largest reservoir in the entire Platte River system.

Lake McConaughy is also the source of nearly all of central Nebraska’s surface irrigation. The reservoir reached near-record high water levels during the relatively wet years of the mid-1990s, but the drought that began in 1999 would bring it down to equally historic lows within five years. Smaller-than-normal snowpacks in the mountains of Wyoming and Colo­rado have produced greatly reduced runoffs into the headwaters of the South Platte and North Platte rivers for most years since about 2000.

By 2004 Lake McConaughy was at a historic low level of 20 percent capacity, and 2005 was the fifth consecutive year in which the amount of water flowing into the lake was less than half its normal inflow. Irrigation restrictions put in place during the summers of 2005 and 2006 brought the reservoir up to about 27 percent of its maximum capacity by late 2007, when lake inflow rates were about one-third the normal.

As a result of continued drought problems, Nebraska’s DNR banned further well drilling in the central Platte Valley as of September 2004. In 2005, for the first time in its 65-year history, the Central Nebraska Pubic Power and Irrigation District (CNPPID) reduced the amount of water its customers could receive, and shortened the summer irrigation period by four weeks. Allocations in the district were reduced varying amounts from a full allotment of 18 inches of water per year, with a proposed 2008 allotment of 6.7 inches for 2008.

However, most CNPPID customers also have groundwater wells, and these users have not yet had limits placed on how much groundwater they may additionally extract from their own wells, nor have they been required to help pay for groundwater recharge. Nearly 90 percent of the 530,000 irrigated acres in Gosper, Phelps and Kearney counties irrigate exclusively with groundwater, but these farmers so far are unwilling to pay fees for groundwater recharge resulting from surface irrigation.

Considering all these factors, namely the extended drought, increased upstream surface-water diversions, and the largely uncontrolled and unreplenished groundwater extractions, it is not surprising that even the Platte River has proved to have its limits. For several weeks during the summer of 2002 the river completely dried up along a 70-mile stretch between Grand Island and Columbus, leaving uncountable thousands of dead fish and other aquatic life rotting on the drying sand channels. Comparable channel drying has occurred every summer along this stretch from 2002 through at least 2006, although flows were later restored after nearby irrigation wells were turned off.

What is the future of the Platte?

Although its current situation is precarious, the future of the Platte River need not blindly follow the path to near-oblivion that has been the apparent fate of the Republican River. In 1994 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to impose certain restrictions on Platte water use in order to protect four nationally threatened or endangered species that use the basin’s natural resources. It required all large water users, primarily irrigators, to assure that sufficient water is available to protect the habitats of the whooping crane, least tern, piping plover and pallid sturgeon. The habitats of three of these rare or endangered species, all but the pallid sturgeon, are mostly concentrated in the central Platte Valley, while the sturgeon uses only the downstream stretch close to the Missouri confluence.

As a result, a consortium of persons representing diverse interests in the Platte Basin’s water and natural environments came together to try find a way to equitably share the Platte’s waters among a host of competing interests. The result was a much-debated compromise. The Platte River Cooperative Agreement, or Platte River Recovery Plan, was initially approved in 1997 as a three-year planning guide. As a part of a related and long-negotiated relicensing agreement for Kingsley Dam in 1998, the reservoir’s operators agreed to set aside 10 percent of the storable inflows of Lake McConaughy (averaging about 100,000 acre-feet in normal years) as an Environmental Account. This water would be released for maintaining wetland habitats of the central Platte Valley when needed.

Parties involved in developing the cooperative agreement for managing the overall Platte River basin included representatives of the federal government, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, in-state natural resources districts and irrigation districts, and various national and state environmental groups.

In 2003 the National Academy of Sciences was asked to review the 1997 Platte River Recovery Plan. The academy judged that the plan addressed the needs of the four threatened species as required by the Endangered Species Act. More importantly, the academy’s approval basically undercut the many objections of irrigation interests, who had claimed in part that the central Platte Valley does not actually constitute critical habitat for the whooping crane, owing to habitat degradation that they themselves had largely caused.

In essence, the recovery plan would fulfill the basic requirements of the Endangered Species Act. Its primary function would add and restore 29,000 acres of additional wetland habitats in the central Platte Valley. Some 10,000 acres are scheduled for such acquisition in this region during the first 13 years of the agreement. Properties already owned by the conservation groups would be added last, but there is still disagreement as to the total amount of conservation-group acreage that will be included in the program.

The Platte’s 80-mile “Big Bend” stretch between Lexington and Chapman is historically the single most important spring and fall staging area for migrating whooping cranes. Besides its importance to whooping cranes, the Platte’s Big Bend stretch is also the single most important segment for seasonal use by waterfowl, shorebirds and other migratory birds, and an important breeding area for both the least tern and piping plover. Although not endangered, sandhill cranes will also benefit greatly from increased habitat protection and restoration along this stretch of the Platte Valley. Since the 1980s sandhill crane numbers have gradually leveled off at 500,000–600,000 birds using the central Platte Valley each spring, making it by far the largest congregation of cranes anywhere in the world. The whooping crane population reached an all-time high by 2006, and an influx of some two million snow geese has only increased the spring migration spectacle for birds, and has attracted 20,000–30,000 bird-watchers from around the world. By 2006 expanded ecotourism in the Platte Valley was generating an estimated $50–100 million in annual total economic benefits.

In addition to its basic habitat goal of acquiring 10,000 new acres of crane and wetland habitats, the Platte River Recovery Plan would also manage, lease or secure an additional 19,000 acres of open channels or other riverine habitats in the same region. These would include lands already owned by the Platte River Whooping Crane Habitat Maintenance Trust, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, The Nature Conservancy and the National Audubon Society. Lands thus acquired would be managed in such a way as to minimize harm to neighboring landowners. Further­more, annual shortages to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service target flow rates in the Platte River would be reduced by 130,000–140,000 acre-feet through enhanced upstream storage in several reservoirs, such as Lake McConaughy, with the water to be released as needed.

Lastly, land would be leased or acquired only from willing sellers, and acquisitions will not result in losses from the local tax bases. Water projects built prior to 1997 would be given “grandfather” protection so as not to conflict with provisions of the Endangered Species Act.

To cover associated costs, the federal government will pay for as much as half of the approximate $320 million program, with the three states contributing the remainder through a combination of cash, land or water. Nebraska’s share of the total cost is to be provided by land and water contributed by the Nebraska Public Power District and the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District. However, Nebraska will be also required to reduce existing stream flow depletions to the 1997 level in order to offset water “depletions” resulting from irrigation wells drilled between the initial 1997 preliminary agreement and the final multi-state approval of the Platte River Recovery Plan a decade later.

Irrigation interests offered endless objections to the Platte River recovery plan, with four of Nebraska’s NRDs firmly opposed to it. The Central Platte NRD even considered initiating a lawsuit that would attempt to remove the whooping crane from the list of federally endangered species. However, it was made clear to all the irrigation interests that, should they fail to agree to its terms, any number of federally funded projects such as dams, reservoirs and hydroelectric plants would receive close scrutiny to make certain that current activities did not jeopardize any endangered species or their habitats.

With the threat of expensive environmental surveys looming and potentially crippling alterations possibly required of their activities, the irrigation interests finally reluctantly agreed to comply. In the fall of 2006 all three governors signed on, and the secretary of interior also added his approval a few weeks later. After the first 13 years, the entire Platte River Recovery Implementation Program will be evaluated for renewal. Additionally, the governors of any of the three cooperating states can unilaterally withdraw from the program at any time.

The future of the Platte River lies primarily in the hands of Nebraskans. It would be a permanent stain on our society’s values to let it literally be sucked dry. The resulting silence of the cranes and waterfowl, and the sullied spirit of the hardy pioneers who followed the Platte westward, drank from its waters, and used its fertile soils and abundant water to become a prosperous and modern state, would represent the actualization of a vision that should ever haunt us.

All photos in this article are courtesy of the author.

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