• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1559 0

Dam downstream, and what the instantaneous disappearance of those huge life-sustaining lakes would mean to the thirteen million people hunkered down in southern California and to the Imperial Valley—which would no longer exist. But the West’s dependence on distant and easily disruptible dams and aqueducts is just the most palpable kind of vulnerability it now has to face. The more insidious forces—salt poisoning of the soil, groundwater mining, the inexorable transformation of the reservoirs from water to solid ground—are, in the long run, a worse threat. If Hoover and Glen Canyon dams were to collapse, they could be rebuilt; the cost would be only $15 billion or so. But to replace the groundwater being mined throughout the West would mean creating an entirely new Colorado River half again as large as the one that exists.

Like so many great and extravagant achievements, from the fountains of Rome to the federal deficit, the immense national dam-construction program that allowed civilization to flourish in the deserts of the West contains the seeds of disintegration; it is the old saw about an empire’s rising higher and higher and having farther and farther to fall. Without the federal government there would have been no Central Valley Project, and without that project California would never have amassed the wealth and creditworthiness to build its own State Water Project, which loosed a huge expansion of farming and urban development on the false promise of water that may never arrive. Without Uncle Sam masquerading from the 1930s to the 1970s as a godfather of limitless ambition and means, the seven Ogallala states might never have chosen to exhaust their groundwater as precipitously as they have; they let themselves be convinced that the government would rescue them when the water ran out, just as the Colorado Basin states foolishly persuaded themselves that Uncle Sam would “augment” their overappropriated river when it ran day. The government—the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers—first created a miraculous abundance of water, then sold it so cheaply that the mirage filled the horizon. Everywhere one turned, one saw water, cheap water, inexhaustible water, and when there were more virgin rivers and aquifiers to tap, the illusion was temporarily real. But now the desert is encroaching on the islands of green that have risen within it, and the once mighty Bureau seems helpless to keep its advance at bay; the government is broke, the cost of rescue is mind-boggling, and the rest of the country, its infrastructure in varying stages of collapse, thinks the West has already had too much of a good thing. So the West is finally being forced back onto solutions it should have tried decades ago: the cities are beginning to buy water from farmers; groundwater regulation is no longer equated with heavy-handed bolshevism. But to say that a new era has dawned is premature. Poll the rugged-individualist members of the Sacramento Rotary Club and a majority will say that their bankrupt government should by all means build them a $2.5 billion Auburn Dam.

There were excesses of both degree and style. For thousands of years Egyptian farmers irrigated by simple diversions from the Nile and nothing went badly wrong; then Egypt built the Aswan High Dam and got waterlogged land, salinity, schistosomiasis, nutrient-starved fields, a dying Mediterranean fishery, and a bill for all of the above that will easily eclipse the value of the irrigation “miracle” wrought by the dam. In the American West, the Bureau and the Corps fostered a similar style of water development that, though amazingly fruitful in the short run, leaves everyone and everything more vulnerable in the end. Only the federal government had the money to build the big mainstem reservoirs, which will end up being choked by silt or, at the very least, will require billions of dollars’ worth of silt-retention dams to keep the main reservoirs alive (these smaller reservoirs will, of course, silt up fairly quickly themselves, even assuming it makes economic sense to build them). It was