Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [316]
As we discover afresh each day, those forces can only be held at bay, never vanquished, and that is where the real vandalism—the financial vandalism of the future—comes in. Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? To bring more water to whole regions, whole states, dependent on aquifers that have been recklessly mined? To restore wetlands and wild rivers and other natural features of the landscape that have been obliterated, now that more and more people are discovering that life is impoverished without them?
We won’t have to. Our children probably won’t have to. But somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and between a $4 trillion national debt (a good bit of it incurred financing the dams) and the inevitability of expensive energy, it will be a miracle if they can pay it.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves. What we achieved may be spectacular; in another sense, though, we achieved the obverse of our goals. The Bureau of Reclamation set out to help the small farmers of the West but ended up making a lot of rich farmers even wealthier at the small farmers’ expense. Through water development, the federal government set out to rescue farmers from natural hardships—droughts and floods—but created a new kind of hardship in the form of a chronic, seemingly permanent condition of agricultural glut. We set out to tame the rivers and ended up killing them. We set out to make the future of the American West secure; what we really did was make ourselves rich and our descendants insecure. Few of them are apt to regret that we built Hoover Dam; on balance, however, they may find themselves wishing that we had left things pretty much as they were.
Suppose, though, that it were possible to solve at one stroke all the West’s problems with water. Suppose you could import into the American West enough water to allow irrigation to continue, even to expand, for another three or four hundred years—to continue even after the great dams built during this century have largely silted up. Suppose you had enough surplus water to flush all the accumulated salts out to sea, thereby avoiding the hoary fate of almost every irrigated civilization. Suppose that, in the process of storing all this water behind great dams, you could create between 50,000 and 80,000 megawatts of surplus power—power that would be available for general consumption even after all of the irrigation water had been moved to where it was needed. (In 1985, the total installed electrical generating capacity of the United States was 600,000 megawatts, so if we take the higher figure we are talking about increasing the U.S. electrical output by nearly one-seventh.) This would be clean hydroelectric power—no pollution, no CO2, no acid rain. The cost would be stupendous, but perhaps not much greater than the $300 billion the Pentagon has managed to dispose of annually since 1984.
Physically, such a solution appears within the realm of possibility. In a $6-trillion economy, it may even be affordable, disregarding the question of whether it makes economic sense. In the West, many of the irrigation farmers who are threatened by one catastrophe or another regard it as a matter of life or death, and it has long been an obsession to no small number of engineers and hardhat politicians. Its main drawbacks are that it would largely destroy what is left of the natural West and it might require taking Canada by force.
Larger than California and Oregon and Washington stitched together, flooded by up to two hundred inches of rain annually, bisected by big rivers whose names few people know, British Columbia is