Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [295]
Wayne Wyatt, the manager of the Texas High Plains Underground Water Conservation District in Lubbock—a man now presiding over the most desperate water-conservation effort in the United States—does not believe irrigation will end on the southern plains in a spectacular cloud of dust. “In the thirties,” says Wyatt, “most of the farmers were still plowing with mules. They had power to dig down about four or five inches. Now they have hundred-horsepower tractors, which can easily bring up soil from two feet. It’s either wet or it’s clayey enough to hold against the wind. The only way I can see another Dust Bowl is if we have a real long drought. If it goes on for years in a row and the farmers can’t even manage one crop in between, and if it affects this whole country and not just a piece of it, then maybe it could happen again. But this region has never known a drought like that. Even during the big one, there were a couple of years when you could raise a dryland crop.” I asked Wyatt how far back climatic records go on the southern plains. “They go back to about the 1880s” was his response.
Wyatt, a courtly ex-farmer (“I beat my brains out trying to make a go of it”) who speaks in an almost opaque drawl, is rather optimistic about the future of the plains. “Half of the land around Lubbock is still dry-farmed. Farmers have been getting crops for forty, fifty years. Their costs are that much lower that they can make a profit, somehow. And I’m not sure the aquifer is going to run out so fast. Conservation is a religion around here now. We have farmers who’ve cut their water use in half. Anyone who doesn’t conserve tends to lose his friends fast. We’ve begun experimenting with capillary water—the water that the soil draws up from the aquifer and that saturates the layer above it. You can’t pump it, but by injecting compressed air into the soil there, you squeze it out like a sponge and it drains into the aquifer. Our economist thinks capillary water could be available for $25 to $50 an acre-foot. The farmers can lease air compressors from the oil industry as their reserves give out. Then you still have to pump the water up, but with enough conservation I think they can afford it. Capillary water could prolong the life of the Ogallala by another twenty to forty years.”
This, then, is the plains region today—a place that is reverting, slowly and steadily, into an amphitheater of natural forces toying with its inhabitants’ fate. Besides the constant threat of drought and wind, there are half a dozen other swords suspended over their heads. They are as vulnerable to nuclear powerplant fiascos in Washington State as they are to the debt crisis in Latin America. A couple of percentage-point increases in interest rates coupled with a collapse of the nuclear industry (which would put a premium on oil and gas), all of it occurring when rainfall drops from eighteen inches to twelve, could send them into a death spiral of debt, cost, and dust that might seal their fate. Meanwhile, the promise of water arriving from somewhere else when the aquifer begins running out is slipping almost out of view. Touring the region and speaking with farmers and politicians and bankers, one doesn’t hear much of rescue anymore, though the subject is on everyone’s mind. According to Steve Reynolds, the former state engineer of New Mexico, the odds against a rescue project being built “have gone from maybe fifty-fifty twenty years ago to eighty-twenty against today.” Reynolds said he “frankly doesn’t see how society will make this kind of investment in our behalf”—this despite his region’s “tremendously important contribution to America’s agricultural export production, the only thing that lets us pay for all we import.” But then