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By Root 1623 0

... the resultant structureless soil almost impermeable to water. In general, high salt concentrations obstruct germination and impede the absorption of water and nutrients by plants. Salts accumulate steadily in the water table, which has only very limited lateral movement to carry them away. Hence the groundwater everywhere [in southern Iraq] has become extremely saline.... New waters added as excessive irrigation, rains, or floods can raise the level of the water table very considerably under the prevailing conditions of inadequate drainage. With a further capillary rise when the soil is wet, the dissolved salts and exchangeable sodium are brought into the root zone or even to the surface,” killing the crops. As the authors—Thorkild Jacobsen and Robert Adams—suggested, Iraq is still struggling with its most ancient nemesis. It can feed itself mainly because it exports oil. At least 20 percent of its arable land (which doesn’t amount to much) is permanently destroyed and can never be returned to cultivation. “Probably there is no single explanation,” the authors wrote, “but that growing soil salinity played an important part in the breakup of Sumerian civilization seems beyond question.”

Van Schilfgaarde’s approach to the salinity problem is not the one favored by the farmers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and members of Congress in whose districts the problem lies. “The Bureau says we’ve analyzed the solutions I am talking about and they’ve been discredited, which is utter nonsense. Nobody has had the guts to implement them. I’m an outcast at every meeting I go to.” The solutions favored by van Schilfgaarde belong to a kind of jujitsu style; the prevailing wisdom is to attack the problem with tanks and planes. “I have been saying for years that the solution to this problem is better management—very careful management,” he says, his urbane Dutch manner giving way to rising exasperation. “Certain crops can take high salinity levels. At our experimental plots in the San Joaquin Valley, we have been growing cotton for six years with fifty-nine hundred parts per million water and getting 50-percent-higher yields. The salt stress seems to stunt the plants but doesn’t affect their production of cotton flowers. The water also has boron in it—an average irrigator wouldn’t touch it. This shows that you can use water on one crop, then on one that tolerates salt better, then bring it back and use it again on a still more salt-tolerant crop before letting it go. You use a lot less, which means that you have less to get rid of in poorly drained areas such as the San Joaquin Valley. The cost is low—about $10 an acre. The cost of the Yuma Desalination Plant is officially up to $300 million.”

The Yuma Desalination Plant, its operation chronically delayed, is an example of the tanks-and-guns approach. In the 1940s, with the Central Arizona Project deadlocked in Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation was anxious to build something in that state, not only to mollify its citizenry and the increasingly powerful Carl Hayden but also give its regional office, suffering existential malaise after the completion of Hoover Dam, something new to do. Along the lower Gila River were several tens of thousands of prime irrigable acres which had been irrigated off and on by Spanish, Indians, and Americans for the past three hundred years. Unfortunately, the region, named Wellton-Mohawk after two desert hamlets located there, is plagued by poor drainage. The Bureau revived the region by installing, at considerable expense, an elaborate drainage system to carry the waste-water away. Perforated tiles were laid several feet beneath the land, which led into a master drain that emptied into the Colorado River above the Mexican border. The project was completed in the early 1960s, just as the Bureau was closing the gates of Glen Canyon Dam.

The effect of those two actions—a sudden surge of water containing sixty-three hundred parts per million of salts accompanied by a drastic reduction of fresh surplus flows from above—gave the Mexicans fits. Below the border,