The Water Crisis
How wet are we behind the ears? That is, what is it that we do not know which we should know?
Excerpted from over five hundred pages of Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, 1993.
...But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move. And even if you succeeded in moving every drop, it wouldn't make much of a difference. John Wesley Powell, the first person who clearly understood this, figured that if you evenly distributed all the surface water flowing between the Columbia River and the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have a desert almost indistinguishable from the one that is there today. Powell failed to appreciate the vast amount of water sitting in underground aquifers, a legacy of the Ice Ages and their glacial melt, but even this water, which has turned the western plains and large portions of California and Arizona green, will be mostly gone within a hundred years--a resource squandered as quickly as oil. ... page 5
Desert, semidesert, call it what you will. The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-size section green--and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater. But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels, the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers, has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska. What they seem not to understand is how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made. Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success we have had in reclaiming the American desert. But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history--Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia, the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam--before they collapsed. // And it may not even have been drought that did them in. It may have been salt. ... page 5 - 6.
In 1963, the Bureau closed the gates of Glen Canyon Dam. As Lake Powell filled, the flow of fresh water below it was greatly reduced. At the same time, the Welton-Mohawk drain was pouring water with a salinity content of sixty-three hundred parts per million directly into the Colorado. The salinity of the river--what was left of it--soared to fifteen hundred parts per million at the Mexican border. The most important agricultural region in all of Mexico lies right below the border, utterly dependent on the Colorado River; we were giving the farmers slow liquid death to pour over their fields. // The Mexicans complained bitterly, to no avail. By treaty, we had promised them a million and a half acre-feet of water. But we hadn't promised them usable water. ... page 7
By the late 1970s, there were 1,251 major reservoirs in California, and every significant river--save one--had been dammed at least once. The Stanislaus River is dammed fourteen times on its short run to the sea. California has some of the biggest reservoirs in the country; its rivers, seasonally swollen by the huge Sierra snowpack, carry ten times the runoff of Colorado's. And yet all of those rivers and reservoirs satisfy only 60 percent of the demand. the rest of the water comes from under the ground. The rivers are infinitely renewable, at least until the reservoirs silt up or the climate changes. But a lot of the water being pumped out of the ground is as nonrenewable as oil. ... page 9
In the San Joaquin Valley, pumping now exceeds natural replenishment by more than half a trillion gallons a year. By the end of the [twentieth] century it would rise to a trillion gallons--a mining operation that, in sheer volume, beggars the exhaustion of oil. How long it can go on, no one knows. It depends on a lot of things, such as the price of food and the cost of energy and the question whether, as carbon dioxide changes the world's climate, California will become drier. (It is expected to become much drier.) But it is one reason you hear talk about redirecting the Eel and the Klamath and the Columbia and, someday, the Yukon River. ... page 10
The vanishing groundwater in Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nebraska is all part of the Ogallala aquifer, which holds two distinctions: one of being the largest discrete aquifer in the world, the other of being the fastest-disappearing aquifer in the world. ... page 10
More water projects. In the West, nearly everyone is for them. Politicians of every stripe have sacrificed their most sacred principles on the altar of water development. Barry Goldwater, scourge of welfare and champion of free enterprise, was a lifelong supporter of the Central Arizona Project, which comes as close to socialism as anything this country has every done (the main difference being that those who are subsidized are well-off, even rich). Former Governor Jerry Brown of California attended the funeral of E. F. Schumacher, the English economist who wrote Small Is Beautiful, then flew back home to lobby for a water project that would cost more than it did to put a man on the moon. Alan Cranston, once the leading liberal in the U.S. Senate, the champion of the poor and the oppressed, successfully lobbied to legalize illegal sales of subsidized water to giant corporate farms, thus denying water--and farms--to thousands of the poor and oppressed. ... page 12
In the 1960s, about a hundred and thirty thousand winter-run salmon returned to the Sacramento River to spawn--the remnants of a run that probably numbered in the half-million range before the state and federal projects were built. By the early seventies, the winter run was down to about twenty thousand fish. By 1987, it was down to two thousand. By 1991, the biologists counting the fish may have come close to outnumbering the fish; 191 spawners made it to the Red Bluff Diversion Dam. ... page 505
On May 20, 1979, an enormously tall, charismatic, and obsessed young man named Mark Dubois hiked into the canyon of the Stanislaus River, concealed himself near the river's edge, threw a length of chain around an undercut boulder, padlocked the ends of the chain together, tossed the key into the river, and leaned back against the boulder, waiting to drown. // The flood that was going to submerge Mark Dubois within a day or two wasn't moving downriver from the tick snowfields melting rapidly in the Sierra Nevada. This was a flood moving in reverse, up the river. A few months earlier, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had closed the gates of New Melones Dam, its most recent number of nature, a mammoth rockpile wedged in Iron Canyon a few miles downriver. ... page 508
But the thorniest desert in which today's water lobby finds itself wandering is the ecological legacy of its predecessors. By erecting thirty thousand dams of significant size across the American West, they dewatered countless rivers, wiped out millions of acres of riparian habitat, shut off many thousands of river miles of salmon habitat, salted over spawning beds, poisoned return flows with agricultural chemicals, set the plague of livestock loose on the arid land--in a nutshell, they made it close to impossible for numerous native species to survive. ... page 511
What it all boils down to is undoing the wrongs caused by earlier generations doing what they thought was right. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers knew that their dams would ruin the Columbia River fishery, or most of it, as the years and decades went by. But they convinced themselves, and the Congress--and, for that matter, most people living in the Pacific Northwest--that all the new power and water was worth the price. It was simply how everyone thought--then. ... page 512
In California, ... enough water for greater Los Angeles was still being used, in 1986, to raise irrigated pasture for livestock. A roughly equal amount--enough for twenty million people at home, at play, and at work--was used that year to raise alfalfa, also for horses, sheep, and (mainly) cows. ... page 514
You need seven or eight feet of water in the hot deserts to keep grass alive, which means that you need almost fifty thousand pounds of water to raise one pound of cow. (Feeding alfalfa to cows requires even more water, but at least alfalfa fixes nitrogen in the soil.) ... page 514 - 515
If free-market mechanisms--which much of western agriculture publicly applauds and privately abhors--were actually allowed to work, the West's water "shortage" would be exposed for what it is: the sort of shortage you expect when inexhaustible demand chases an almost free good. (If someone were selling Porsches for three thousand dollars apiece, there would be a shortage of those, too.) California has a shortage of water because it has a surfeit of cows--it's really almost as simple as that. ... page 516
The West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth. As Wallace Stegner wrote, somehow the cow and the cowboy and the irrigated field came to symbolize the region, instead of the bison and the salmon and the antelope what once abounded here. ... In a West that once and for all made sense, you might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states' rain. // You would have a West where most people live in contained cancers called cities (as they already do, anyway), and where more rural people would provide the opportunities for people from the cities--for people from all over the world--to enjoy the region's splendors as they once were. A region where people begin to recognize that water left in rivers can be worth a lot more--in revenues, in jobs--than water taken out of the rivers. Maybe even a region where a lot of people really don't give a damn how much money a river can produce. At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future rather than forward to the past. M. R. October, 1992, page 517 - 518
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Posted April 10, 2010