Season 2/Episode 7: Morgan Snyder on the Future of Water
Morgan Snyder
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In the first of a two-part conversation, John talks with Morgan Snyder, senior program officer in the Walton Family Foundation's Environment Program, about the future of the Colorado River and how to fix the culture of water use in the US West.
Show Notes
Morgan’s bio page at the Walton Family Foundation.
Walton’s Environment Program.
Wikipedia entry on the San Pedro River, one of the last remaining desert rivers in Arizona, endangered by groundwater withdrawal
California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA)
California’s Flood-Managed Aquifer Recharge (Flood-MAR) program
The Stanislaus River, where John talks about traveling earlier this year
Transcript
START (MORGAN SNYDER INTERVIEW PART 2)
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JOHN: Welcome to Audacious Water, the podcast about how to create a world of water abundance for everyone. I'm John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University.
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JOHN: On today's show, the second part of my interview with Morgan Snyder, senior program officer for the foundation's environment program, and the foundation's Colorado River Initiative. Coming up I talk with Morgan about the role of stored water in making up for diminished surface-water supplies, and how the foundation is thinking about fire and forest.
JOHN: You know, you talked about distributed infrastructure, you talked about wetlands, you talked about holding water in a distributed way. And my mind immediately went below ground. So I'd like to say that, you know, instead of thinking of aquafers as tragically empty, they're an opportunity to fill. They're the reservoirs of the future. And like you said, there isn't really that much political will or even site locations to do another Lake Mead or Lake Powell, and we don't have the water to fill it anyway. On the other hand, climate change--and again, there's - you know, in the west, "Aw, we don't have enough water." But in some places we have too much water sometimes. That's certainly true with atmospheric rivers in California. And so I wonder a lot about how we could manage the extremes on the surface to store more underground. Where are we doing things like this while in the west from your perspective?
MORGAN: Yeah. We need to be actively managing our groundwater just like we manage our surface water. And that alone is a big ask in some places. Like in rural Arizona there's no management regime for groundwater. And you're seeing new agriculture coming into areas that are already extremely parched, and drilling a 1000-foot well and forcing neighboring communities or neighboring farms to drill deeper wells as well. So you're just, you know, a race to the bottom. I see there's just a huge - a lot of hope in nature-based solutions, natural infrastructure, to beavers, to different rock-detention structures, to strategically using water that has, you know, gone through our sewers, been treated by a wastewater plant, and the water that's coming out on the end of that can be strategically used to recharge our groundwater. So we can be pulling water up, treating it, drinking it, using it in our homes and in our factories, and then we bring it back to a wastewater treatment plant and recharge it. Where - an example that I've spent a lot of time working on was in the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona. And this is a river that has been slowly disappearing. The last remaining desert rivers in Arizona are in rural Arizona, or in areas where the groundwater isn't managed, and where the explosion of new pumps and new groundwater pumps for residential and industrial uses, and agricultural uses, is happening faster than anyone ever imagined. And we are pumping more water out than we should through leaving the aquafers with less capacity, and we're not managing it as a limited resource that we need not just for today but 100 years from now. So within the San Pedro River we've helped develop this program called the "Cochise Conservation (&) Recharge Network" in direct collaboration with the locals, right? Like, the communities who live there now see the problem better than, you know, me and my office here in Washington D.C. And so we've been working really closely with Cochise County, City of Sierra Vista, also Bureau of Land Management, and the Nature Conservancy, and a host of other partners to be able to better spatially define, like, where are we pumping too much water out? Where would it make sense to recharge water? So let's create recharge points and strategically use, whether it be that effluent form the wastewater treatment plant I mentioned, or flood flows, and be able to take that water, recharge it, and build a base of groundwater underneath that river so that it's protected into the future, while at the same time manage the amount of water we're pumping out in any one year so that it is adapted to the amount of water that is actually going naturally into those aquafers in any one year. So we're balancing out the demands with the supplies while also augmenting the amount of water that is going into the groundwater by creating new recharge points. And these recharge points can be berms that are fairly large and constructed with concrete, or they can be smaller, hand-laid, low-tech, process-based restoration, which is just like rocks that you put into stream beds and you build them up. And you create these bumps for the waters so that they slow down in these bigger rain events, and it gives an opportunity to be recharged. And, you know, groundwater recharge and managing for these types of storm events are going to be, and are already critical opportunities for how we manage flood events, how we manage for balancing out our groundwater demands, how we reduce erosion, how we improve water quality. And all this can be done in a fairly low cost when you're comparing it to the cost of new large dams. And it can be done in a distributed way throughout a watershed so that you are building up water tables, and improving communities' water security, and achieving environmental uplift at the same time.
JOHN: That's great. And having worked at the San Pedro River mostly on riparian food (webs) for over a decade in my early days I know that area very well. And I know that it's come a long way in terms of sustainability, and certainly in terms of sort of innovation of strategies and partnerships. I mean, Fort Huachuca also being a key player there at DOD, right?
MORGAN: Absolutely.
JOHN: So let's shift over to California, and the context for this is--it's the same question and I'll say it again later--but context for this is Arizona's had the Groundwater Management Act since 1980, really only relevant to five active management areas. As you said, lots of rural Arizona is still not managed for groundwater in a cohesive manner. California's system, much more comprehensive but came thirty years later. Tell me what you think about the potential efficacy of (SGMA) compared to the GMA and Arizona. And second question is, do we need to think about new innovations, so the GMA in Arizona given that (SGMA) is trying something new? Are there lessons to be learned?
MORGAN: No, I think it's fabulous that California took the step that they did with (SGMA) to more seriously manage their groundwater, and tackling groundwater overdrafts, creating whole new governance structures, and new institutions, being able to manage that. And it's just not something that's meant to happen over, you know, a couple years' time. But it (took) decades to be able to adjust to managing our resources in a whole new way. And, you know, I think California's also taking some steps to take some sting out of the types of changes that are necessary. I can't quote the name of the bill or whatever, but they're basically putting public money out there to help areas where they are massively over-drafting, to help them transition from the consumption of water to doing something else. So it's like helping agriculture transition to a lower water-use crop. Just, like, ultimately getting to the point where you have to be able to help people who are either homeowners, landowners, water-right holders, to adjust to this. And it doesn't mean that it is pain-free, right? Like, all of this work we're talking about is not pain-free. It is all about shared pain in order for us to actually get to a point where we need increased security and certainty around our long-term water resources. And we see California putting money behind helping communities at a local level decide how to use those state and also federal resources, help make these shifts locally and adapt to the amount of water that is actually there. It's also incentivizing more recharge projects. It's incentivizing to be able to manage surface water and groundwater together so that we are managing all of our water as one water. And I think the ability of California to implement those throughout their whole state is an enormous challenge that won't - again, it's going to take another ten to twenty years to really see to full fruition. But the Groundwater Management Act in Arizona in 1980, that gave the Phoenix Sun Corridor and central Arizona the certainty they needed to be able to grow the prolific economy that exists there now. And it has done an incredibly good job. And what I fear now is that with the reductions to the Colorado River water that's coming - that is hitting Arizona now and increasing in Arizona, you're going to see a push to undermine the Groundwater Management Act as a solution. And those are not solutions; those digging a deeper hole for ourselves. And we need to continue to protect and reinforce the Groundwater Management Act in Arizona, but we also need to expand the amount of groundwater that's managed in Arizona to take on the whole state, just like California did. And to me, like, those are the biggest things--we need to take on - manage all groundwater, manage it together with surface water, and that's what California is doing. And Arizona is next in my mind. There's 1.5 million people who live in rural Arizona where there is no groundwater-management regime right now. And the risks to people, the risks to, you know, the last remaining desert rivers in our southwest United States, it's just extreme, especially with the impacts to climate change right now. It's something where California is helping address this and focused on not just managing the resource but the impacts of what managing (that) resources mean to communities, and land-owners, and... And back with what I think is really important that California's showing communities there, but also showing a way for Arizona and how they could be doing it.
JOHN: Couple points that I really liked there. One, the notion of shared pain--and maybe we'll call this podcast - this episode "Shared Pain for Thriving by Water Later."
MORGAN: [LAUGHTER] (All right).
JOHN: Let's talk about storage. And not in numbers, but roughly I know that Arizona has put away north of 12-million acre-feet underground over time.
MORGAN: Mm-hm, yeah.
JOHN: Some of that's been happening for a long time in Tucson. More of it has been happening in Phoenix. So lots of progress has been made. And that's, you know, water borrowed from the surface water system in a lot of cases, right?
MORGAN: Yeah.
JOHN: So putting that issue aside--and I definitely was thinking about that while I was on Lake Powell--do you think that that insurance policy, that stored water, is going to come into play as we go into these big surface-water cuts? And what's your feeling on how important it's going to be?
MORGAN: Yeah, it's coming into play already. And you're seeing that slug of water--you know, like you said, 12-million acre-feet--it's a huge amount of water that Arizona proactively stored underground because they knew this day was coming. And some of the challenges to that, they actually haven't built all the infrastructure needed to be able to pull it all out, like the groundwater pumps that are necessary to pull it all out. And they're not completely certain about the quality of all that water that has been stored. Some of that is to be figured out. But it's going to allow Arizona and a lot of metropolitan areas in Arizona to continue to thrive for, you know, the next ten-plus years while we have to go through this massive reduction in water use. And really a cultural mindset-shift where we're using less water, and less water, and we're sort of just tightening our water belts, while at the same time allowing us to continue to have thriving communities. And so I think Arizona saw us coming. They've been planning for it. It's not surprise. Climate change is not a surprise. The amount of impact that we're seeing to our water systems, not necessarily a surprise to the water-management community either. Like, we've been thinking about this for decades in advance and we're now finally here where that groundwater resource that Arizona has stored is - we should be celebrating all the water managers who thought to do that for the last, you know, couple of decades. But we also know that it is extremely limited. And so our approach too using that water needs to be aligned with the scarcity of that water.
JOHN: Right. Just to give a visual, that quantity of water stored underground is equivalent to approximately a third of one of the two big lakes.
MORGAN: Yeah.
JOHN: And so it's a lot but it's not a ten-year supply.
MORGAN: What I hear people saying in, like, the central Arizona area is, like, it'll help us help the central Arizona area, give them the ten-year buffer window that is needed to actually do a lot of the infrastructure changes, or consumptive-water-use changes that are needed. So it is a - you're right, probably not totally equating to a ten-year supply, but it gives them that next ten years to be able to adapt to the fundamental reductions in water use that - or water availability coming from the Colorado River.
JOHN: Right. One last question on the groundwater topic. Let's go back to California. You talked about atmospheric rivers a couple of times. I think one of the intervention strategies that California is taking with (SGMA) that's really interesting and I think has a lot of promise, is Flood-MAR--the capture of floodwater and often use of it in agricultural land that's not currently producing as a makeshift storage basin, you know, "recharge basin" if you will. And so capturing this hard-to-predict but extremely high-quantity events on the surface-water side of things and putting it underground. Are there places you think that could work outside of California? I mean, I think California has been pretty innovative but...
MORGAN: Yeah, I think with monsoons in the southwest it's fairly similar, right? So you've got huge rain events that are also hard to predict, but are opportunities, right? That is water coming in a significant quantity over a short period of time. And we would be smart to be able to help capture that. And it's not necessarily possible or realistic to have physical concrete dams everywhere. So going ahead and capturing in that, and recharging it underground, that is the best available reservoir that we have and we don't really have to pay for, right? It is already there and it's just waiting for us to be able to manage better. And so I think this is both - you brought up the example of, you know, using some agricultural land in a smart way for a recharge. It is also investing in, like, the wet meadows, investing in, you know, beavers and wetlands, because they also do a lot of this groundwater recharge, but do it in a much more distributed way, which allows you to kind of meet the water where it hits the land when it hits the land. And you don’t have to be guessing it's in - it's going to come down on this little tributary of a river, or that little tributary two valleys over. And I think that's going to be a critical component of how we are ultimately capturing the benefit of monsoons or atmospheric rivers, and using that water that comes down for long-term benefit. And also managing--(inaudible) said this before--but managing erosion, managing water quality. You get so many co-benefits from being able to capture these high-flow events, slow it down, and let it infiltrate into the ground, build up groundwater levels, so that you can - you have water to use when we need it.
JOHN: Coming up I ask Morgan about what lessons from the west and water apply to the Mississippi. And is farmland natural infrastructure? Stay tuned.
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JOHN: I'm glad you made the connect back to natural infrastructure, because that ties a ribbon around those first two topics. And so let's turn to fire. You know, this year for the most part, although this is not true everywhere - certainly not everywhere, has been better than previous years, especially in the year during the pandemic - when the pandemic started. But everything was on fire...
MORGAN: Yeah - yeah.
JOHN: ...in general And I wonder sometimes out loud whether any of the forests that we have today are going to be here, you know, after my lifetime. And so - and tell me about projects that you all are doing at the Walton Family Foundation in this realm. Like what kind of strategies are you incentivizing and what innovations are coming out of the work that you're doing there?
MORGAN: I grew up out west. I grew up in California - Santa Cruz, California. You know, redwoods, the beach. And was it two years ago that - a year and a half ago - where I was spending some time and the Santa Cruz Mountains were on fire. And it's like the doomsday scenario, you know, your forests are on fire and that's also where your water supply is coming from. And, I mean, after this magical moment that was just so sad and also beautiful where it's, like, the forest was on fire and then you saw the embers from that forest fire land in the ocean, and then, like, a few days later coming to the beach in the morning and you could see the high-tide mark on the beach where there's just a black pencil mark of coal. Or not coal, it'd be ashes. And so you've seen, like, the forest that used to be up in those mountains is now sitting in a line at the high-tide mark on the beach. And so the fire out west - the fires out west are a significant problem that we have to get under control. And a lot of that is, like, how are we managing our (forests)? And how are we making sure that fire is a part of our landscape but isn't running out of control? So some of this is, like, work that we're not deeply investing in ourselves. Like, we're not deeply investing in forest management and fire management. There is a whole slew of folks who are investing deeply in that and are more well-suited to invest in that. But we see the opportunity to manage our forests better in a way that protects the long-term health of our water supply. And so that can be things like targeted forest-thinning, investing in not just the forest itself but the meadows, wet meadows, the investing in the wetlands that become fire breaks - natural fire breaks for fires, to help slow down fires to keep them from going out of control. I have the same worries you do. Like, are all of our forests going to just eventually burn at some point, out west anyway? I'm hopeful that we are going to get to a point where we're able to, like, take the necessary management actions to be able to keep that from becoming a reality. But it isn't a - it isn't something that is a significant part of our portfolio.
JOHN: Yeah, and so maybe just to wrap that up - that topic I think, I'm not a doomsday-sayer, but I worry, just like you articulated, about what the future of forests is going to look like in thirty years. And I think that one thing that's probably not well-articulated or put into action in a systematic way--it might be done in some locations--is asking the question, "Which ones are definitely going to be gone, and which ones are not?" and prioritizing, again, creating pipelines of projects that are meaningful over the long haul. But it's a pivot back to something that might be more in the realm of Walton Family Foundation. Like, I was on a backpacking trip this summer in the Stanislaus Basin. Stanislaus is a place where Flood-MAR is being piloted. It also is right next to Yosemite, which was on fire. And, you know, I would say a third of the upper basin was burned down in the last five years. Like, it was just impressive how much forest was lost there. And it made me think about the connectivity between these issues, right? I mean, you've got forest burning, you've got increased erosion, which goes into the reservoirs and limits your ability to capture that floodwater that you're going to be able to use for Flood-MAR. What do you see in terms of not programmatic initiatives, but more like how do you incentivize the connection of these issues so that we can get to more wholesome water resource-management? You know, I don't want to use "integrated" there.
MORGAN: In a lot of our forests out west a lot of our - a lot of the land base out west is owned by the public, right? Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, two really big ones. And those agencies--and I would call out Bureau of Land Management as well. Like, they are seeing this problem differently now than they did, you know, ten years ago, where they are looking at it in terms of managing the risk of wildfire and trying to get ahead of that. And you see, like, BLM has a new, like, five-year (inaudible) strategy; I can't remember the full title of it. But it's just, like, reflecting that these agency leaders are beginning to say, "We have to take a different approach because what we're doing isn't working. And they see the same sort of interconnectivity that you just mentioned. And I think that's where leadership from the federal agencies, but also the state-based, you know, chapters, or leaders from those agencies working in collaboration with the water utilities who are incredibly invested in their watersheds to collaboratively solve for these, you know, landscape-scale challenges. And while it's getting, you know, hotter and drier, and we've allowed these forests to overgrow and not be subjected to intermittent fires, controlled burns, you know, we've put ourselves into this scenario. And we now need to get ourselves out of it. And it's going to take years of different management actions and different approaches, but it takes getting that kind of land base of Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, those water utilities who care about their watersheds. And also a big part of the land base is the tribal nations who have huge interests in managing their land and their watersheds just as much as anyone else.
JOHN: And their water rights.
MORGAN: And most importantly, yes, their water rights. And exerting their sovereignty and self-determination.
JOHN: Okay, let's see. Fire gets us closer to my home but not quite being at Tulane, so I've got to pull this back to the Mississippi a little bit. And it's related to the Walton Family Foundation portfolio so I think it's relevant. Let's start with the fact that plus or minus, half of the Mississippi is in the west, the basin, right?
MORGAN: Yep.
JOHN: If you put some arrow bars around the hundredth meridian, right?
MORGAN: Mm-hm.
JOHN: What kinds of things that work in the rest are relevant to the Mississippi? This is probably the hardest question of this section because I think most people don't think of the Mississippi as being west. But when you think about, you know, the Yellowstone River floods, for example, are a Mississippi basin problem, right?
MORGAN: Yeah. Yeah, and we look at the Mississippi from a - we have an excess of water. We have flood events, water-quality problems, we have this gigantic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. But, I mean, I also did help lead a lot of our work in the Mississippi Alluvial Valleys--so this is, like, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, just north of where you are--and we were implementing a lot of, you know, natural infrastructure, reforestation of frequently flooded agricultural land for the benefit of water quality, for the benefit of habitat, but also for the benefit of recreation, you know, people who want to use that land for hunting or fishing. And the biggest surprise I had as a westerner working in the Arkansas Delta there was there was--I'd say there still is--a nine-million acre-foot groundwater hole on the eastern side of Arkansas, because irrigation has increased so much in this Alluvial Valley that all - the majority of that water is being pumped from the ground and put on those crops. And it's not getting back into that aquafer. And so I was really surprised a few years ago--this is probably, like, eight years - six or seven years ago--where Arkansas's water plan, their state water plan, the number-one issue for them was groundwater overdraft. And it's, like, that's not something that you think about at all. But you see groundwater overdraft in a national problem, right, just like you see it out west. And finding ways to conjunctively manage our water - groundwater and our surface water together, and taking them as two critical resources that are supplying the same thing, water, that we all need, and using flood events to recharge groundwater, to build (inaudible) structure needed, to also invest in not just grey infrastructure but also natural infrastructure so that we're rebuilding these natural processes to most efficiently solve our problems. Now that to me is, like, one of the things that I took away from working in the Mississippi River basin is we - our water problems are said to be, like, vastly different. But they're really very similar in some ways, like you're getting at. Like you've got, you know, overuse of water at least in localized areas and in the Mississippi. But we've been managing our water for a need to get benefit from the land to supply water for communities. But it requires us to be able to, like, have better insight into the resource itself and to be more closely managing it as a collective. And that's always the hardest challenge for all of us is, like, how do we take this public shared resource and ensure that we have it into the future for future generations as well as the security we need (for it) so that we have it when we need it?
JOHN: You mentioned - I mean, that's a great example, the Arkansas example, and I'm sure we could noodle on that for fifteen or twenty minutes. But you mentioned the dead zone, and the dead zone is an issue that I certainly want to take on at the ByWater Institute and try to think about new ways to tackle it. You know, it's a problem we don’t have in the west except for in very localized areas, right? You could think of the San Joaquin for example, and there are some places where quality is really a big deal. But what do you see as kind of the hurdles that we need to jump in order to do better on the dead zone? Like, what's the stack?
MORGAN: Yeah. The management of nutrients is a big thing, like agriculture. So another - you know, another gigantic water challenge and agriculture is at the center of it, just like it is out west. And working with - in partnership with agriculture to better manage the nutrients that we put on our crops to be able to continue to be as productive as possible, and grow the food that - in a quantity and quality that is needed for the population that we have. And, you know, I think the biggest opportunity in the Mississippi is soil health. Like, the next bump in our agricultural productivity is going to come from improved management of soil health down to the microbe level. Like, we are going to invest in the health of our soil because that's what produces the food we need, that's what also helps filter and process the nutrients that we put on that land in order for it to be as productive as possible. So I think soil health is the most important thing and working with agriculture, but also finding ways to take... You know, as I mentioned, like, there's marginal agricultural lands that end up being bigger contributors to the problem and the dead zone than they are in productivity for agricultural production, right? And so you're seeing some marginal land come out of production because it was being flooded once, or once every two years, or every three years. And you saw the landowners saying, "You know what, I - this is becoming a problem. I don’t want to have to manage a problem piece of my land every two or three years, but I could go ahead and put it into a reforestation program like the Wetlands Reserve Easement Program and give myself a chance to do something else on my property while still having some income (strain) from those payments from the easement programs, while also growing a forest and having the benefits of having a forest coming back. So soil health, targeted reforestation, and finding ways for us to, like, further filter out and use less nutrients. And, you know, there's a big term for a lot of this, which, you know, like, "regenerative agriculture," which there's no real definition about. But it's just an idea of, like, how do we go ahead and grow crops that allow the land to be - the quality of that land, the quality of that soil, to improve over time so that we're also improving the amount of output that we get from it?
JOHN: Makes total sense, and consistent with the way - the basin-scale way that I like to think about these problems.
MORGAN: Yeah. And, you know, the other thing is, like, the Colorado River basin, like, we've got this network of people--water managers, states, tribes, the feds--like, they've all been brought together through, like, the Compact and other - the Law of the River. And it's really easy to be able to, like, tap into how are we taking this on at the scale of the basin? But the Mississippi doesn't have that, right? The Mississippi doesn't have this unified group of managers or practitioners who all come together around that one shared issue. And I think that's something that would be really helpful to see the kind of change necessary at the scale necessary for a river like the Mississippi.
JOHN: Couldn't agree more. I'm going to toss out a question--this could be, like, a debate and I want you to take the pro side and then we'll turn to the negative side - con side. But is - in the context of the Mississippi--we don't need to go to the Colorado for this question--is farmland natural infrastructure?
MORGAN: Yeah, I would say so. Farmland is a big part of the ability to go ahead and, you know, capture water, you know, and soil health is again what I'm thinking of here. It's, like, the amount of--I think (NRCS)--but, like, if you just increase, you know, the soil organic matter by, like, one percent then your ability to, you know, manage the amount of nutrients that are, like, coming off your land is just, like, increased by 50%, right? Like, the ability to invest in the soil health leads to the direct ability to reduce the amount of loss that you have and the nutrients that, you know, are existing in the soil or added through the production of the products.
JOHN: Makes a lot of sense given... I mean, I'm a stream ecologist so I don't have a lot of soil ecology background, but I have enough to understand how important that is, especially in a three-dimensional context, right?
MORGAN: Mm-hm.
JOHN: Last question on Mississippi, and on nutrient management, and on infrastructure. What do you see as the private sector role in stimulating progress towards shrinking the dead zone?
MORGAN: Yeah, I think the private sector, just sort of thinking of, like, people or companies that are purchasing a lot of the commodities or the agricultural products that are coming off those lands, they have a significant role to be able to play to help work with their supply chains, within their supply chains, to shift the way that our food is being produced so that it is, you know, regenerative. It's more sustainable. It is leading to less externalities, less impact to our environment. And that is a leverage point that is - we're just beginning to see grow to a point where it's beginning to get the attention of some of the agricultural producers. But it's also very much at the beginning of its growth and we think it has a long buildout. But, you know, if you are an (ADM) or, you know, a cereal - you know, you're producing cereal for the breakfast table, like, you're buying ingredients that you are selling to a consumer, and a lot of consumers today want to see sustainability and they want to see that where their money's going is going to benefit people now and into the future. And that kind of demand signal is critical to be able to help agriculture move in the direction that we think is necessary. And it's not just - right now predominantly it's just a government incentives program for agriculture, and that's clearly not enough. And, you know, having actors - critical, like, keystone actors within the supply chain--like the consumer-packaged products industry--to be able to say, "We want regenerative agricultural practices, and we want our base of farmers to be able to demonstrate that they are managing their nutrients in a certain way, they're managing their agriculture in a certain way," that is a really important tool in the toolbox that is just beginning to grow. But it's also not easy, because a lot of these products, like soy and corn, they're grown at such a massive scale. It's even hard to even track where - when you're buying soy where is that soy actually from? And so building out not just demand from the corporate actors but building out the supply-chain solution tracking and the on-the-ground practices, all of that is something that needs to be built out together so that it isn't just a new demand on agriculture without the kind of support necessary to help them get there.
JOHN: Yeah, that's a really good point. That's something that's an issue that comes up day in and day out working with companies--and I work with a lot of big companies on water stewardship--is this notion of, "Well, you know, if we're a food producer sometimes we don't know exactly where those ingredients come from. We know generally but not specifically." And at the end of the day the solutions are that specific. You know, you need to know the location in a much more specific way than California, for example, or India, right?
MORGAN: The other - I mean, I - the other thing that comes to mind, too, is just, like, you know, John Deere or other companies who are (investing) a lot in technology to be able to help ag figure out what's going on with their soil, what's going on with their - the amount of water, or the amount of nutrients that are on a land. And so, like, (inaudible) remote (fencing), or drones, or the ability to know more about what's going on with your land, and your production, and your farm at a micro-level is going to also lead to giving - you know, in part giving the farmers, the producers, the tools they need to meet these new demands from corporate actors.
JOHN: All right, last question to wrap up. You know, one of the themes of this conversation at least early was shared pain. Another one was the concept of thriving. And I think you - we're contrasting it in a way to growing. Talk about thrive versus grow in the Colorado and the Mississippi and how those might be different. I mean, I think it's pretty clear in the Colorado.
MORGAN: I don't know if I see it as, like, thriving versus growing. Like, I am not, and nor is the Walton Family Foundation, an anti-growth entity. I think that it's thrown a lot of - a solution, right? Like, we just need to stop growing. And I don't think that's realistic, and I just flat out don't agree with it. But - and I'm not saying that that's what you were implying, but I just want to make that clear, right?
JOHN: That's fine, yeah. That wasn't one of the - yeah.
MORGAN: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Growth without long-term certainty means you cannot thrive, right? Like, maybe that's the way I would connect it is, like, if you're just growing and you have no certainty around the long-term supplies of your food or your water, is going to mean that you're always at a point of uncertainty and insecurity, that you won't have the basic needs to enable you to thrive. And in both contexts of the Colorado and the Mississippi River basin we have this added-on layer of climate change impacts. And it's - and the ground underneath us is shifting, right? Like, and the Colorado is, like, the amount of water we have is actually a lot less than we thought we did. And in the Mississippi the amount of flooding events, the 100-year flooding events, are happening on a cadence that is, like, every few years now. And we're needing to adapt to changing climate while also reducing our water use in the context of the Colorado, or better managing our nutrients in the Mississippi. And it's just an incredibly complex challenge, but we're beginning to sort of knit together - it's, like, well, what are the different solutions...? Because there's not just one thing; it's, like, a multitude of different actions we need to be able to take to meet this challenge. And that to me is, like, how we get from just a growth mindset to, like, a thriving-concept mindset. And it's going to allow us to be able to have thriving communities in the places that we love, and for generations to come. And that is the kind of management of our natural resources that we're, you know, we're centered around and we're committed to.
JOHN: Love that answer, I think it really concisely summarizes a mindset that's not anti-growth, as you said, but that introduces this concept which to me feels more human than the word "sustainability" itself, which is "thriving," right?
MORGAN: Yeah.
JOHN: And so I appreciate that. And I really appreciate having you on the show and putting up with a litany of questions. That was a really fun conversation.
MORGAN: I really appreciate it, John. It's great to spend this time with you and be a part of your ongoing water empire you're growing. It's really wonderful to see.
JOHN: Well, thank you Morgan.
JOHN: That's it for this episode of Audacious Water. If you liked the show please rate or review us and tell your colleagues and friends. For more information about Audacious water visit our website at AudaciousWater.org/podcast. Until next time I'm John Sabo.
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END (MORGAN SNYDER INTERVIEW PART 2)