This author's science fiction predicts a dark end for Phoenix. He hopes it won't all come true

Recent news about the Colorado River has been — not great. Less water. Missed deadlines. Disagreement between Upper and Lower Basin states. Threats to Lakes Mead and Powell.

And if all of that isn’t enough to cause concern or worse, this writer has penned a piece of fiction based on that data and published science.

Len Necefer lives in Tucson and is the owner and founder of a media company called Natives Outdoors. His piece, called “The Colorado River Does Not Reach 2030,” is at times a difficult read.

It starts with the following sentence: “The storm that killed Phoenix arrived on the evening of July 14, 2027, dragging a wall of dust 3,000 feet high.”

The Show spoke with Necefer about the piece, and he began with what prompted him to want to write it.

Len Necefer

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Handout

Full conversation

LEN NECEFER: So I've been working on issues in and around the Colorado River probably for the past, I would say five to six years. I was taken on my, one of my first river trips was walking down the Yampa River in August of 2021. And so the Yampa River is the largest undammed tributary of the Colorado [River] in the state of Colorado.

And I walked down that river in August of 2021, which was his lowest recorded levels in human history. Did this with the trip with a well known photographer, storyteller around the river, Pete McBride. And you know, that story just sort of grounded me in the seriousness of what, what was coming with the river.

And now we're in a similar state that we were around that time with lake levels at Lake Powell. We're looking at one of the lowest recorded runoffs from snowpack in Colorado, and that's going to affect us down here. And so I've been seeing, you know, there's a lot of things going on in the news.

And I was trying to figure out, how do we bring this to the forefront of tying together all these separate ideas around climate impacts and drought and infrastructure? And I haven't been able to find an answer. And I think this struck a chord.

MARK BRODIE: Do you consider this science fiction? I mean, as you say, sort of in the introduction that, you know, all the elements in this story are drawn from published science and that the chain of events is plausible. So how do you classify what you've written here?

NECEFER: I mean, I would call it near-term science fiction. There's a lot of things here that the way that I lined it out sort of assumed a certain series of events and certain triggers. But as we're all aware, there can be black swan events, there can be a whole host of other things that can occur.

So I would say that this gives us a sketch of one possibility of how things could play out. But by no means am I trying to predict the future here. I think one of the pieces that I was trying to do is really tie a lot of these threads together and to give us sort of a range of ideas of what's possible.

And definitely here, it's, it's scary. But a lot of these events may happen in sort of very discrete parts of a timeline. And I think in terms of bundling those all together and showing them how they connect, I think that's really that sort of system level analysis that I want to provide to people and give them an understanding, at least where my brain's been living for the past five to six years.

BRODIE: Yeah. What was it like for you to write this? And I mostly ask because I found myself kind of gasping every so often as I was reading it. It was terrifying.

NECEFER: I think for me this was a little bit of a cathartic process, at least in trying to put some of my own generalized anxiety around these issues and what we may face into writing. You know, I get to see an incredible things and meet incredible people. And I think one of the real parts of the story that I just felt was so important, at least for my work, was to tie a thread through all of these different peoples and these different scenarios that I've been encountering.

BRODIE; So you mentioned trying to tie a bunch of maybe disparate things together. Could I ask you to read a paragraph from this piece? It is toward the end, but not quite at the end, which I think kind of illustrates the point that you're trying to make there.

NECEFER: Yeah.

BRODIE: So one of the things that stood out to me about this piece was that so many of us have heard so much about the Colorado River and we've heard about climate change and some of the big factors.

But — and this paragraph you just read kind of points to that, and the piece really talks about this — a lot of sort of the smaller things that are going on that most of us don't notice. Or if we do notice, we don't kind of think about them as something that could be significant in how this part of the world is changing.

NECEFER: One hundred percent. And I think my training and graduate work was largely in the realm of risk perception and how do we perceive risk as humans. And one of the challenges that we face is that we're wired to respond to immediate risks and not ones 100 years in the future. And I think very much we're in the analogy of the frog in the boiling pot of water, is apt here.

But I think these sort of tools that we have to sort of elicit imaginations or futures that don't exist through things like fictional writing, I think is one of the tools of the arts to basically explain the sciences. And I just hope that people read this and feel like that there is still room to address this and that this is not a future that is written in stone and is very much changeable.

BRODIE: OK, so I want to ask you about that, because one of the things that you wrote again in the introduction is, "The unsettling part is how little I had to invent" — sort of the fiction part of the science fiction. It sounds like you don't think that this is necessarily inevitable, that the ship has not sailed on all this.

NECEFER: Yeah, you know, I mean, I think with one of the quotes that I pull from one of my graduate advisors was, "All models are wrong, but some are useful."

And so, you know, and what I provided here was just like a model output of what a potential future could look like. And ... maybe one or two of these things happen, but I don't think the whole host of things will happen exactly how I lay out. There's a whole range of possibilities.

And of course, human societies are complex, and things can change very quickly. And I think one of the pieces that I really wanted to highlight was just how complex and how interdependent and also just how much this is not in the forefront of our thinking, especially comes up here in Arizona but it is not the major talking point I see throughout the state.

And I think that might change if some of these things happen, especially with CAP water and other things upriver.

BRODIE: So I'm curious: What gives you optimism when you look around?

NECEFER: What I see and what I constantly return to is that there are incredibly smart people, there are incredibly smart policymakers, and there's incredibly motivated people who are wanting to make this change to have an Arizona that we can live in, that's sustainable, that lives within our means when it comes to water.

And I think I see crises and the potential future that we're seeing with the Colorado River as an opportunity. In many respects, it is a policy window to make substantial changes that we wouldn't make before. And maybe there is a reality in which this could be different.

And I think priming the pump a little bit through pieces like fiction and other sorts of things can really begin to drive that conversation, to create the political will to honestly, hopefully make the negotiations around the river, how we manage water here in the state, be something that works for everyone throughout the basin.