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By Root 1637 0

economies—as the states recognized and lamented long ago—are vulnerable to forces they can do little to control. What supports Colorado besides irrigated agriculture? Mainly minerals—coal, uranium, molybdenum, oil—and tourism, logging, and ranching. Every one of those industries is subject to someone else’s whim: world supply and demand, international cartels, the price of oil, the Federal Reserve Board, or, the ultimate caprice of all, nature. Much the same applies to New Mexico. Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Kansas are farm states whose prosperity or ruin, before irrigation, depended on whether the isohyet of twenty-inch rainfall moved westward town the Rockies or eastward toward the Mississippi River. Once they became dependent on a huge irrigation economy, all of the states knew they would be in the same position as a junkie. Texas with its vanishing oil and gas; Kansas astride the hundredth meridian; Colorado depending so much on tourists who, if oil prices doubled or there was no snow, would stay home—each state knew that when the water ran out, they would again face the same awful vulnerability that had haunted them since the first settlers arrived.

Strictly regulated, the Ogallala could have been made to last hundreds of years instead of decades. Irrigation farming could have been slowly phased in, kept at a lower level, and gradually phased out. In such a case, hundreds of thousands of people who became dependent on it overnight wouldn’t face ruin, and the states’ economies wouldn’t go into sudden osmotic shock when the pumps began bringing up air. The states had begged the government to build them dams for irrigation, and they had lobbied to keep the price of water artificially low, arguing that agriculture was the only stability they had. the opportunity for economic stability offered by the world’s largest aquifer, however, was squandered for immediate gain. The only inference one can draw is that the states felt confident that when they ran out of water, the rest of the country would be willing to rescue them.

As deputy chief of planning for the Bureau of Reclamation in the mid-1960s, Jim Casey saw things from a fundamentally different perspective than the farmers, or, for that matter, most of his eleven thousand colleagues. The main concern of the typical Bureau engineer is building a bigger and grander project than the last one. It was Casey’s job to think about what few of them did, or dared to: reservoirs silting up, river-basin funds drying up, salts building up—all the problems consigned through some unwritten conspiracy between politicians and bureaucrats to an amorphous, distant, and politically unrewarding future. Casey was, by definition, the Bureau’s Cassandra. Peering into the future, he saw no place headed for deeper trouble than the Ogallala region. If surface water can be compared with interest income, and non-renewable groundwater with capital, then much of the West was living mainly on interest income. California was milking interest and capital in about equal proportion. The plains states, however, were devouring capital as a gang of spendthrift heirs might squander a great capitalist’s fortune. To Casey’s amazement, few of the farmers seemed to realize it. “They thought the water would last until the Second Coming,” he says. Frustrated by the farmers’ blindness, he finally decided that he had better address the one group that might listen to him: the region’s bankers.

“I think it was about 1966 when I went out to give my speech,” Casey says. His voice, after twenty years in Washington, is still thickly gravied with West Texas drawl. “You wouldn’t believe how many bankers there are in Lubbock. I said to them, ‘Look, you’re all riding high out here and it’s a great thing and we all like to pretend that great things are going to last. But no aquifer can sustain this rate of pumping. I don’t know when you’re going to run out of water, but I’d bet you’re going to run out at about the same time you start running out of oil and gas. If that gets too expenseive the farmers won’t be able to pump,