Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [296]
Even the economists who have looked into a water-importation project for the plains and pronounced it absurd seem unable to give up on the idea—such is our reluctance to let nature regain control, to suffer the fate of nearly all the irrigated civilizations of antiquity. In 1982, the High Plains—Ogallala Aquifer Region study projected an impossible cost of $300 to $800 per acre-foot for water imported into the region. But then it added: “The only long-term solution to declining groundwater supplies and maintaining a permanent irrigated agricultural economy in most of the High Plains region is the development of alternate water supplies.... Although emerging technologies for local water supply augmentation offer some potential for alleviating the overdraft of the aquifer, none can provide sustained and replenishable supplies to meet the region’s needs. [Therefore] regional water transfer potentials ... should be continued and expanded to feasibility and planning levels” (emphasis added).
Such investigations, the authors added in a cryptic sentence whose meaning will become clear later on, “should be international as well as national in scope.”
The overdraft of groundwater on the high plains is the greatest in the nation, in the world, in all of human history—but it is merely an enormous manifestation of a common phenomenon throughout the West. On the east side of the San Joaquin Valley in California, enough groundwater disappears every year to supply Illinois. The overdraft is projected nearly to double in eighteen years. Tucson and El Paso have fewer than eighty years of water left even after raiding neighboring basins; they will have to get more from somewhere else. The overdraft in Arizona is rapidly forcing the state into an urban economy. There is a serious overdraft in parts of central and eastern Oregon, which pales so much beside the Ogallala, Arizona, and California overdrafts one hardly hears it mentioned outside the state. Groundwater overdraft is, moreover, a phenomenon not limited to the West. Long Island, sitting atop a closed-basin aquifer, is both depleting it and poisoning it with chemical wastes; where it could go for more water is an interesting question, since there isn’t any available within four or five hundred miles that anyone seems willing to give up.
Of all these places, the only one that now appears likely to bring its use of water in balance with its supply is Arizona, mainly because it has little choice. The probable result, of course, is that irrigation farming will largely disappear unless Colorado River water, brought in through the Central Arizona Project, is sold to the farmers at incredibly subsidized rates. It was in Arizona, by ironic coincidence, that the only great desert civilization ever established in North America in earlier times disappeared—either for want of water, or, perhaps more likely, because of a surfeit of salt.
A few hundred million years ago, the waters of the oceans were A still fresh enough to drink. It is the earth that contains the mineral salts one tastes in seawater. The salts are in all runoff, leached out of rock and soil. The runoff concentrates in rivers, which end up in the oceans—or, as in the case of Mono Lake and Great Salt Lake, in closed-basin sumps up to seven times saltier than the sea. Once in the ocean, the salts have no place to go; the seas are stuck with them. When the water is evaporated, the salts remain behind; when the