Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [306]
In that same article, Pillsbury also wrote:
In order to maintain and ensure the long-term viability of irrigated agriculture and to provide enough water to carry the salts to the ocean or some other natural sink, the development of water resources should be intensified.... Before man began harnessing the rivers, the seasonal floods were highly effective in carrying salts to the ocean and keeping the river basin in reasonably good salt balance. Today, with river flows being regulated by storage systems, and with high consumptive use of the released water, there is not enough waste flow left to achieve anything approaching balance. The salt is being stored, in one way or another, within the river basins.... Unless the lower rivers are allowed to reassert their natural function as exporters of salt to the ocean, today’s productive land will eventually become salt-encrusted and barren.
In the end, Pillsbury concluded, there is only one answer. “Eventually, some grand-scale water diversion concept will be needed....”
In 1946, after participating in a conference involving twenty-four eminent hydrologists and engineers, Dr. Charles P. Berkey had a moment of epiphany. Berkey was, at the time, one of the foremost hydrologists in the world. Newbury Professor Emeritus of Geology at Columbia University, he had been a consultant to the city of New York on its Catskill and Neversink water supply projects, and had a list of accomplishments and credentials four times as long as his arm—a list which had kept him so busy he never had a chance to contemplate the implications of his life’s work until he was well into advanced age. Then it came to him—a sunburst of perception, a giant semantic leap.
What prompted Berkey’s enlightenment was a talk delivered at the conference by J. C. Stevens, then the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Berkey was so dumbstruck by what Stevens had to say that he drafted a response as soon as he got back to his desk at Columbia—a response which reads more like a confession of blindness or an admission of personal failing than anything else. This is part of what he had to say:
Although the principles involved in the paper by Mr. Stevens are well known, it is not certain that the implications are fully appreciated by many even in responsible relation to them. The Factual Data had been long known to the writer, but no statement before this one had brought so forcibly to mind their importance and bearing on long-range planning.... The United States has virtually set up an empire on impounded and redistributed water. The nation is encouraging development, on a scale never before attempted, of lands that are almost worthless except for the waters that can be delivered to them by the works of man. There is building up, through settlement and new populations, a line of industries foreign to the normal resources of the region...
Effort to use water on desert lands is not a new adventure by any means; but a program involving development of a great region—inviting thereby a large new population under conditions that carry elements of certain future destructive encroachment in limited and computable time—that is new. Not only is it new, but in some of the implications it is fairly astonishing.... The nearest thing in that respect was the settlement of the western high plains in earlier days by people who believed