Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [284]
A flow of eight hundred gallons a minute will fill an Olympic swimming pool in just over an hour. It will also conveniently irrigate a hundred or more acres of crops. A hundred acres of irrigated land on the plains is worth five hundred acres unirrigated; actually, it is worth more, because a farmer need never again worry about going bankrupt during a drought. The water was free; all you needed in order to make money, real money—to watch your net income rise from $8,000 to $40,000 a year—was cheap fossil fuel or electricity, a big mobile sprinkler, and pumps.
The irrigation of the Ogallala region, which has occurred almost entirely since the Second World War, is, from a satellite’s point of view, one of the most profound changes visited by man on North America; only urbanization, deforestation, and the damming of rivers surpass it. In the space of twenty years, the high plains turned from brown to green, as if a tropical rainbelt had suddenly installed itself between the Rockies and the hundredth meridian. From an airplane, much of semiarid West Texas now appears as lush as Virginia. Where one saw virtually nothing out the window forty years ago, one now sees thousands and thousands of green circles. From thirty-eight thousand feet, each appears to be about the size of a nickel, though it is actually 133 acres—a dozen and a half baseball fields. The circles are created by self-propelled sprinklers referred to by some as “wheels of fortune.” A quarter-mile-long pipeline with high-pressure nozzles, mounted on giant wheels which allow the whole apparatus to pass easily over a field of corn, a wheel of fortune is man-made rain; the machines even climb modest slopes which would ordinarily defeat a ditch irrigation system. Wheels of fortune are superefficient, but intolerant: they don’t like trees, shrubs, or bogs. Therefore, the millions and millions of shelterbelt trees planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps have come down as fast as the region’s fortunes have risen. All that now holds the soil in place is crops and water which cannot last.
In 1914, there were 139 irrigation wells in all of West Texas. In 1937, there were 1,166. In 1954, there were 27,983. In 1971, there were 66,144. Nebraska irrigated fewer than a million acres in 1959. In 1977, it irrigated nearly seven million acres; the difference was almost entirely pumping from the Ogallala. By that year, there were, depending on whose estimate one believed, somewhere around twelve million acres irrigated by the Ogallala Aquifer. One of the poorest farming regions in the United States had metamorphosed overnight into one of the wealthiest, raising 40 percent of the fresh beef cattle in America and growing a huge chunk of our agricultural exports. As West Texas sprouted corn, a water-demanding crop that had never been known there, Lubbock and Amarillo sprouted skyscrapers, most of them erected by the banks that ecstatically financed the farmer’s road to wealth. On Fridays, the farmers cruise into town from eighty miles away, behind the wheels of their Cadillacs and big Buick Electras. After a conference with a deferential banker, they go off for drinks and a dinner of steak and lobster, then to watch a Texas Tech football game from fieldside seats. Since 1950, Lubbock’s population has increased at about the same rate as Texas’s irrigated land 7.5 percent a year. Anything growing at that rate doubles in size in a decade.
There is, however, a second set of statistics which offers a more meaningful depiction of what is going on. By 1975, Texas was withdrawing some eleven billion gallons of groundwater—per day. In Kansas, the figure was five billion; in Nebraska, 5.9 billion; in Colorado, 2.7 billion; in Oklahoma, 1.4 billion; in New Mexico, 1.6 billion. In places, farmers were