Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [195]
But that was the good news. The bad news was that during periods of drought, with California guaranteed its full entitlement before Arizona received a drop, this incredibly expensive water might often not arrive. The Bureau’s own projections showed “firm” CAP water dwindling from 1.6 million acre-feet at the beginning to 300,000 acre-feet or less in fifty years; only during wet years, or if the upper-basin projects are never built, will there be more. To think of the Central Arizona Project as salvation, then, is not just to stretch things a bit. For those groundwater-dependent farmers who will have to build distribution systems, at least—and there are a lot of them—the Central Arizona Project could spell economic ruin.
Did Arizona’s farmers realize any of this? One of William Martin and Helen Ingram’s graduate students, Nancy Laney, traveled around the state to find out. To her astonishment, most of the farmers didn’t. One of the farms Laney visited was the Farmers’ Investment Corporation, a huge pecan-growing operation south of Tucson that is about as far from the diversion point on the Colorado River as one can be. (Why pecans, which are native to the Mississippi Delta, should be grown on subsidized water in a desert state is another matter entirely.) If it arrives, CAP water will have surmounted a lift of well over a thousand feet and traveled more than three hundred miles to get there. Meanwhile, there is still plenty of water immediately under the farm, less than two hundred feet down. Despite the huge subsidies written into the CAP—as with any Reclamation project, the farmers are excused from paying interest costs—the groundwater is certain to be much cheaper, at least until the aquifer drops several hundred more feet. (The worst areawide decline in Arizona’s water table has been around two hundred feet, and that took decades to happen.) But the farm manager at Farmers’ Investment expressed to Laney his unalterable belief that “CAP water will be cheaper than pumping.” “Water is essential,” he said with religious conviction, adding that he “would back any plan where more water would be available.” He had no idea what CAP water would cost him, but planned to sign contracts to buy it anyway. His state of knowledge and level of blind faith were not unusual. One farmer thought that the water was going to arrive by gravity instead of being pumped many hundred of feet uphill. One believed that there was still enough surplus water in the Colorado River to turn the entire Grand Canyon into a reservoir—something he devoutly wished. Only two of the farmers Laney interviewed seemed to have a sense of things as they really were. One realized that Arizona’s Colorado River water was jeopardized and thought it was high time we “took” Canada’s surplus water to replenish it. The other said that even if it turned out he couldn’t afford CAP water, he was going to sign a contract to buy it anyway, because “contracts are made to be broken.”
“Contracts are made to be broken.” There, in a simple phrase, was perhaps the worst legacy of the Bureau of Reclamation’s eighty years as the indulgent godfather of the arid West. The irrigation farmers not only had come to expect heavily subsidized water as a kind of right, allowing them to pretend that the region’s preeminent natural fact—a drastic scarcity of that substance—was an illusion. They now believed that if it turned out they couldn’t afford the water, the Bureau (which is to say, the nation’s taxpayers) would practically give it away. These farmers were about the most conservative faction in what may be the most politically conservative of all the fifty states. They regularly sent to Congress politicians eager to demolish the social edifice built by the New Deal—to abolish welfare, school lunch programs, aid to the handicapped, funding for the arts, even to sell off some of the national parks and public