Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [292]
In the Ogallala region, the Bureau’s conclusions were met initially with discouragement, but not despair. Everyone knew that the Bureau and the Corps had built projects which made little better sense; they were merely smaller. The real issue, as far as Texas and Kansas and Oklahoma and Colorado and New Mexico were concerned, was that one couldn’t simply abandon millions of acres of farmland to the desert from which it had so recently been saved. One couldn’t let another Dust Bowl occur. The economics might look bad now, but who knew how they would look in thirty years? By the turn of the century, according to projections, there would be ten billion people, maybe more, on the planet. Who would feed them? Who still had land? The Russians did, but they couldn’t feed themselves. Neither could Europe. Asia was thick with humanity; in Java, people would kill for enough land to raise a couple of cows. Australia was not only a desert, but, unlike the American West, a desert without rivers. Could anyone imagine Africa feeding the world? Canada was too cold to grow much of anything besides wheat and cattle. The only place left was South America, but when you chopped down rain forests and tried to grow crops the soil turned to laterite, hard as stone.
On the high plains, you still have five or ten feet of loamy topsoil. You had 1 percent of the farmers on 6 percent of the nation’s agricultural land growing 15 percent of the wheat, corn, cotton, and grain sorghum. You had American technology, American know-how. You had the most productive region of the nation that was the food larder of the world. You had cities of 100,000, 200,000 people which depended utterly on irrigation farming and oil and gas. Could the nation just abandon them to fate, like the Leadvilles and Silver Cities and Bodies of a hundred years ago?
From the looks of things, it would. After the Bureau’s report was released, one heard little about the Texas Water Plan for a number of years. In 1976, and again in 1981, Texans rejected water bonds that appeared likely to set the plan in motion. Arkansas and Louisiana began to talk of their water as if it were their daughters’ chastity. The farmers, meanwhile, were still in business.
By the late 1970s, however, the Ogallala had dropped several more feet while energy prices had gone up sevenfold in a decade. The first farmers began going bankrupt—in Texas, in Colorado, in Kansas, in New Mexico, Tens of thousands of acres began reverting to dryland. The press, tantalized by the prospect of an imminent catastrophe, finally took some interest; newspaper and magazine stories appeared by the dozen. The result of all this was a predictable welter of federal studies, the most important of which was the 1982 Six-State High Plains-Ogallala Area Study, coordinated by the Economic Development Administration of the Department of Commerce. The study, as expected, predicted calamity, but decided it would not arrive as soon as most people thought. By the year 2020—which was as far ahead as it looked—Texas’s share of the Ogalllala would be down to 87.2 million acre-feet from 283.7 million in 1977. New Mexico’s would be all but used up. Colorado and Kansas would be somewhat better off. Irrigation in those states would increase over the near term, then begin to decline early in the twenty-first century. The real reckoning would come after 2020. Nebraska, however, would still overlie 1.9 billion acre-feet by then, and would be irrigating 11.5 million acres—far more than any state in the nation. Irrigation farming would simply move northward, leaving Lubbock, Clovis, and Limon behind. In Texas, according to the report, oil and gas production would be down to 7 percent of its 1977 level—a double blow that could make the fate of cities such as Buffalo appear benign. The economy of the southern plains would be a three-legged stool with two legs gone, unless some miraculous rise in agricultural prices, or some new source of cheap energy, or some revolution in DNA plant genetics came along, permitting corn to get by on fourteen inches of rain.