As the River Runs Dry: What can Peru tell us about the future of Arizona's water supply?

HUARAZ, Peru — The dripping glacial meltwater in an Andean ice cave pounds out the faintest echoes of an ancient culture’s sinking hopes.

Vanishing mountain snow and ice endanger Peru’s vital rivers.

Glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca, the world’s highest tropical mountains, have receded by at least a quarter since 1987, down to 186 square miles. Their substantial contribution to the water that makes life possible on the hillsides and desert plains below is waning.

The ice’s rapid retreat has put rural Peruvians on edge over expected urban demands on their water. It’s a preview of the pressures many western U.S. farmers fear if the Colorado River snowpack and reservoirs keep plunging.

The worst is yet to come to the Andes, but local subsistence farmers — they whose Incan ancestors brought the world cultivated potatoes and quinoa — already say the warming climate has limited their options. Some glacier-fed alpine streams have peaked with the increased ice melt and are now draining in an apparently terminal spiral.

“Like the word of God says,” Andean farmer Wilder Lopez warned, “in the end days, water will vanish.”

Lopez, 38, farms quinoa in the highlands above Huaraz. The streams originating there feed the Rio Santa, which rushes past water-gulping mines and plunges toward sugar cane and asparagus export farms on the desert coast.

A team of scientists including Ohio State University geographer Bryan Mark published a 2012 study showing that seven of nine headwater streams there had passed “peak” runoff – the time when waters temporarily crest because of a rush of melting.

Mark and colleagues projected a 30 percent decline in upper Rio Santa flows during Peru’s dry season once the glaciers are mostly gone in the next few decades. That represents the loss of ice that formerly accumulated during wet-season snows and then melted little by little.

Meanwhile people are moving from mountains to cities — many of them to coastal Lima, a city of 10 million where measurable rain rarely falls. Just as Los Angeles looms as a political power potentially at odds with U.S. farmers, the new Lima residents increase the urban tug at waters used for centuries but not legally owned by traditional highland farmers.

“People are going to have to make some big adaptations to the way that they conduct their lives,” said Mark, who has studied the region since his graduate research in the 1990s. “A big part of adaptation for a lot of these people is migration.”

There are lessons here for the American West. Declines in the Andean snow and ice noted early in the 20th century gained momentum a generation ago. Now a region that gets nearly every drop of rain between October and April is counting down the years until it has little or no dry-season help from the glaciers.

After 15 years of drought in the Colorado River’s Rocky Mountain headwaters — where tree-deep snowfields always provided natural reservoirs — Mark sees clear parallels.

“If we lose the snowpack in the West,” he said, “we will probably still have precipitation. But if it changes to be more (rain) and if that snowpack melts quicker, we are going to have more variable flow and we are going to have less water at the time that we need it.”

Most Americans are used to turning on the tap and having water come out, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee water policy Professor Jenny Kehl said. They can’t see disaster brewing.

On a global scale, she said, water scarcity threatens to destabilize regions by sending tens of millions of refugees in motion. This could entangle the U.S. in foreign conflicts.

Though richer and blessed with more options, the American Southwest is not immune to the gathering hardship, Kehl said. She thinks some crop production — and maybe some migrants — will shift from the dry region to the Great Lakes.

“Energy and water will get more expensive,” she predicted.

Canadians Wayne Lamphier and Diana Morris settled in the Cordillera Blanca 12 years ago, opening a tourist retreat, the Lazy Dog Inn, in the mountains that Lamphier first visited in the 1980s as a consultant on a Peruvian national park plan. They had lived and worked elsewhere in the Andes since the 1990s, and though their grown children are in Canada they decided to build the Lazy Dog Inn instead of accepting an energy company’s plan to transfer Lamphier north.

They founded the non-profit Andean Alliance to help locals adapt to a changing climate and economy. It employs their neighbors as café workers and guides, and teaches preschool, summer school and English to a people increasingly in contact with North American vacationers.

“The choice was going back,” Morris said, “or doing something that’s soul-enriching.”

Now, though, some of the changes are demoralizing. “You can physically see less snow every year,” she said, nodding toward the peaks.

Peru registers all highland water users but does not control how much they take. This essentially unregulated use could lead to a hard crash in future dry seasons. For now, the couple say, it merely causes conflict when a farmer from one village piles rocks into a ditch to direct the flow his way, and away from another village.

Things will have to change nationwide.

“It’s a matter of just how you work with the water you have,” Morris said, “conserving and reusing it. And that’s not something that’s being conscientiously looked at.”

The Lazy Dog’s gardens are in effect test plots for curious local farmers. Lamphier walked through six plastic-lined hoop houses, each 40 feet long, showing off produce otherwise not easily grown at this elevation.

These simple greenhouses contain broccoli, cauliflower and varieties of beans and chiles normally grown in Arizona, which has similar hours of summer sunlight. Carefully recorded measurements track temperatures, drip-line water use and vegetable yield.

Outside, hummingbirds flitted among seedy red quinoa stalks, kale, onions, Arizona sweetcorn and a patch of white wheat whose seeds originated in a part of New Mexico with familiar hot days and cold nights.

All of these were destined for the lodge’s mostly vegetarian table, but they were also a learning tool for the subsistence potato growers nearby.

“We do our own thing here, (but) they live here,” Lamphier said. “If they’re interested they come up and say, ‘How much is the plastic? Where can I get it?’”

Ultimately the mountain village residents may need to diversify and improvise to make the most of their water.

“The farms aren’t going to be productive enough for them to stay on them,” Lamphier said.

Already a large cohort of 20- and 30-somethings has moved to the miles of dusty shantytowns around Lima looking for work. “The community starts to die,” he said.

Yesenia Lazaro wants to buck the trend. The 23-year-old from a nearby village works at the Andean Alliance’s center and is training to be an English teacher, where many children’s first language is the native Quechua that preceded Spanish settlement. She wants to help them prepare for tourist jobs or other interactions with foreigners.

She walked along a rocky trail used by families who carry crop bundles for miles to sell at market in Huaraz, a city of about 100,000. Translating roughly from a mix of Quechua and Spanish, she asked her older neighbors, their hands gnarled from decades in the dirt, whether there’s enough water for the future.

Universally, they said there is not. Most said children or grandchildren had moved on.

“Agua es para vida,” said Cirilo Reyes, chin blackened from the coca leaves he chewed for energy while walking cows up the trail to pasture.

“Water is for life.”

“Yacum kawe,” Julian Morales said in Quechua while digging in a patch of potatoes and pumpkins.

“Water is life.”

“El sufrimiento para todos,” predicted Lopez, the 38-year-old quinoa farmer who invoked the biblical end times.

“Suffering for all.”

Lopez paced his field of sprouting quinoa, pumping a lever and waving a sprayer attached to a pesticide tank that he wore on his back.

Elsewhere in his sloped field two men and two women hunkered down in the dark but rocky soil, hacking weeds with short-handled hoes.

Eucalyptus trees — Australian imports providing fuel and roof beams but sapping groundwater – ringed the field.

Rains have become unpredictable, and the village’s rock-lined canals sometimes undependable, Lopez said. There’s not enough to go around late in the dry season, he said, and he appealed for help from the United States in building reservoirs.

The Peruvian government is considering dam construction in the Andes, but it’s potentially a perilous undertaking in the seismically unstable region. A 1970 earthquake and landslide killed about 70,000 people. The toll could have been worse had reservoir water been waiting to break loose.

Lopez declined to blame Americans or other foreigners for carbon emissions. Asked if he thought fossil fuels were responsible for the glaciers’ disappearance, he pointed instead to “El Senor” above and envisioned global drought.

“From that suffering we will pass,” he said.

Pastoruri Glacier has long been a tourist attraction for its thin-air grandeur near Peru’s highest peak. Now, though, tourists from around the world huff up the trail to its melting edge to see the face of climate change.

The glacier is a centerpiece attraction for Huascaran National Park, which contains Peru’s highest peak and a mountain of visual evidence for the effects of the high-country climate on the lowlands. The ice above 16,000 feet pours water down streams and into the ground, nourishing rolling brushlands and wetland gullies with pothole lakes.

Chattering shorebirds wade along the valley’s waters, and herders who live in rock huts move sheep and alpacas among the lush grasslands.

All are threatened by the glacier’s quickening decay. It has receded 2,000 feet since 1980, national park Director Jesus Ricardo Gomez said.

“I feel pity because I see the glaciers regress more and more,” he said, “and when they regress it means a lot less water supply.”

The ice’s departure unveils a view deep into the past, when the Andes were far warmer. Shale fossils of fern leaves – in a zone far above today’s tree line – prove that Earth’s climate has long oscillated. But changes written in the geologic record happened over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, Ohio State glacier researcher Mark said, and not in the mere decades that most scientists agree humans have altered the atmosphere’s heat retention.

Species including humans have had more time to adapt to past swings.

“Of course climate always changes,” Mark said, “but of course we can also be a major cause of change.”

“We’ve become the predominant geological force on the planet.”

Park chief Gomez ducked under a caution tape strung from sticks across the freshly exposed glacial gravel, a barrier meant to protect tourists from a potential ice fall at the glacier’s edge. He paced off about 50 feet where the glacier had retreated since last year.

Entering a small cave in the ice edge, he pointed out the rapid drips that drain away water that was frozen in the glacier for centuries. He stood beneath it, catching drops in his cupped hands and drinking.

Around a rock outcrop dividing the glacier’s footprint, a sprawling and growing lake lapped at the ice. Here was the spot where all those drips and more were flowing from under the glacier. But also, here was a pooling source of warmth to accelerate the glacier’s melt.

On this face, according to Peruvian glaciologist Benjamin Morales, the glacier shrank back 240 feet last year. He recommends a pipe to drain the lake so it won’t continue to speed the melt.

Morales has been a pioneer in glacier studies here since his training with Swiss researchers in the 1960s.

He has experimented with piling grass clippings and sawdust on the glacier to block the sun. In the course of a year he found that the protected patch remained thicker than its surroundings – protection measured in yards rather than inches.

Such engineering isn’t practical to protect ice across the Andes, he said, because it requires constant maintenance. But it could work for rural communities who take it on themselves to protect smaller glaciers.

He doubts the world will curb fossil fuel use in time to slow the warming that’s eating at glaciers. So when it comes to saving Peru’s water, he said, it will take everything from efficiency upgrades to snatching coastal fog from the air with mesh — as some in the barrios above Lima already do because they lack any piped water.

“We don’t have much water,” he said between sips of beer in his Lima backyard. “You must use any kind of technology.”

In the mountains above Huancayo, a city around which a few hundred thousand people live, Jose Javier Valdez Arancibia prepared a small group of hikers to ascend to a vista above a glacial lake.

“This is not our house,” he said. “We are visitors.”

Following ancient Andean traditions that he has studied and followed, Valdez Arancibia burned coca leaves in a rock pit and asked the mountain’s permission to come up. He was demonstrating the reverence that many Peruvians feel for the place that provides their water.

The fate of that source is an increasingly sore topic in Huancayo.

“Twenty years ago this was all snow,” Valdez Arancibia said, “and the rivers were fuller and Huancayo had more water.”

Now many neighborhoods in his hometown get running tap water only five hours a day. Plastic storage tanks atop the brick apartments are one sign of how residents have coped.

Valdez Arancibia ascended to a cliff where others had poured out and left wine bottles in tribute to the mountain. Fog intermittently obscured the view of ice on an adjacent peak. He poured his own bottle on the rocks.

“Everything you give comes back to you,” he said. “Life is a circle.”

Elvira Huali Garcia, 52, farms corn, potatoes, barley and beans with canal water at the base of the mountain. She and others in the Cullpa Baja community have pooled their money to dam a glacier-fed stream and share the water through the dry season.

“Little by little it will get worse,” she said. The government has discussed privatizing this water and selling it downstream to Lima residents.

Other downstream pressures are building on the farms that supply the U.S. with many winter fruits and vegetables. The acreage dedicated to asparagus in the district around the Rio Santa roughly doubled since the 1990s, according to a study on water use that Ohio State geographer Mark helped write last year.

The water is flowing toward the coastal money in Peru, same as the Colorado does toward Los Angeles , said Lamphier, the Lazy Dog Inn owner and Andean Alliance founder.

“If you have a city of 10 million people demanding water,” he said, “and you have 10 (headwaters) cities at 100,00 apiece, the political power’s going to fall with the big populations.”

“The community essentially is on the path to dying.”

That fear — of a powerful population center draining the hinterlands — translates in any language and on any continent. It is precisely what farmers and ranchers clinging to water in the American West fear will happen as big cities press the limits of their supplies.

The threat is especially familiar to American ranchers in the Colorado River headwaters, who wonder how long their rights to water will hold out against declining snows and the fast-growing demands downstream.

It was on Phillip Rossi’s mind this spring when he rode a four-wheeler through mud and snow south of Steamboat Springs, Colo., to muck out the opening to hillside ditches. He was directing snowmelt runoff onto his alfalfa fields and on a detour from the Colorado River tributary below.

“I just don’t want to get steamrolled,” he said.

The 47-year-old rancher has a 9-year-old daughter, Olivia, who shadows him, opening and closing gates to move cattle. He wants to leave her the ranch when it’s her turn, but he worries that Los Angeles, Phoenix and Denver all will come calling.

“I just hope we don’t get to the point where we have to sell water to survive, but we can’t ranch.”

At least Rossi and other American farmers have legal water rights.

The lack of historic water regulation and legal protections for traditional Peruvian irrigators will worsen their plight, said Kehl, the global water policy expert. Old cultures including those in the Andes don’t think of anyone “owning” water that they’ve always simply used as a course of nature.

Lamphier said losing what’s left of the Andean culture will be like the world’s library losing a unique book.

“You are talking about a civilization of people who to this day speak a language that was the pre-European language that existed for thousands of years,” he said. They cultivate thousands of genetic varieties of potatoes that no one else is likely to maintain if they leave for Lima.

“Maybe the ideal situation is that they all walk around with a MasterCard and become consumers of bank loans,” Lamphier scoffed. “I don’t know who is going to be responsible for what people eat, and the quality of what people eat, or retaining the practices that are necessary to understand how and why things grow at certain times of year.

“That’s the way these people have lived for thousands of years, and (they) are losing that.”