Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [194]
Large and bearded, inclined toward jeans, cowboy boots, and western shirts, Martin looks as if he would feel more at home in the cockpit of a Peterbilt than at a professor’s desk, even if his writings are nationally known. His first notoriety came in 1973, when he and a colleague, Robert Young—who was so wounded by the hounding he got that he opted to leave the state—published a book called Water Supplies and Economic Growth in an Arid Environment, an innocuous-sounding little tract which, in Arizona, was almost as revolutionary as Das Kapital. They first asked, as a matter of speculation, what might happen if the Central Arizona Project was not built. The underground aquifers, Young and Martin reckoned, would undoubtedly be depleted as the farmers continued to pump them out (in the 1960s, the rate of overdraft—use over replenishment—climbed as high as four million acre-feet per year). As pumping costs rose due to the dropping water table, some farmers would begin to go out of business. But there was still enough water so that the decline would be very slow. Arizona’s farm income, by Young and Martin’s calculations, would be reduced by about one-fifth of 1 percent per year. The reason the decline in income would be so modest was self-evident: as pumped water got more expensive, the farmers would conserve it better and switch to higher-value crops, and they would do more with less. The way to see if the Central Arizona Project Was worth building, then, was to see if each acre-foot of water it brought in would be cheaper than the value (in lost farm income) of each disappearing acre-foot from the aquifers. Martin and Young figured that every acre-foot that was being mined was causing a loss of $5.35 in farm income—a conservative estimate, as far as they were concerned. Could the CAP deliver water cheaper than that? By the Bureau’s own calculations, CAP water would cost at least $10 per acre-foot—without even figuring the cost of distributing it. As a result, the farmers would make more money if they continued pumping groundwater than if they bought water from the CAP. In fact, if the price of distribution systems—which the farmers would presumably have to build themselves—was as high as it promised to be, buying CAP water might be a ticket into bankruptcy.
Twice since then, Martin has repeated the analysis, and his results confirm his earlier conclusions—only far more emphatically. By 1977, the projected canalside price of CAP water had reached $16.67 per acre-foot. Add the cost of a distribution network, and farmers growing any kind of low-value crops—alfalfa, small grains, perhaps even the state’s main crop, cotton—could not afford it. In 1980, he and another colleague from the University of Arizona, Helen Ingram, did a detailed study, region by region, of the likely cost of distribution systems, and were amazed by what they found out. In one irrigation district, Maricopa-Stansfield, the price of the distribution system—hundreds of miles of canals and laterals, headgates, and people to operate them—would likely come to $160 million, leaving each farmer a bill of $100 per acre-foot of water per year just for distribution. The Bureau’s canalside estimate for CAP water had, by then, risen to around $30 per acre-foot, per year. The price of pumped groundwater was nearly $100 less per acre-foot at Maricopa-Stansfield—around $39. It was an extreme case, but Ingram and Martin couldn’t find a single irrigation district where CAP water promised to be cheaper than groundwater. In most of them, it would cost half again or twice as much, sometimes more. One of the main arguments the farmers had always made for the CAP was that they couldn’t all switch to high-value crops as the groundwater table went lower and pumping costs became intolerable. The American consumer, they said, could only eat so many lemons and oranges. But if Martin’s figures were right, farmers