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By Root 1565 0

terrifically difficult, it almost has to occur. You can perhaps imagine California salmon going extinct, but you can imagine no such thing in the Pacific Northwest, a region the salmon very nearly symbolizes. The great mainstem dams will never be torn down, but smaller dams may be. The federal government already has plans to purchase a high dam on the Elwha River, which drains the north side of the Olympic Range and hosts all five species of Pacific salmon, in order to tear it down. And the mainstem dams, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, will be re-engineered in order to block fewer adult salmon and pass more juveniles through. Holes may be punched through their immense, solid insides and then sealed with ponderous metal gates; when the fish are running downriver, the gates may be opened to let them pass without becoming chopped liver in the turbines. The river may be “managed” (for better or worse, it is in human hands) in a completely different way: the reservoirs rapidly drawn down to quicken the current, the gates opened for the fish, the whole process repeated, again and again, water tumbling down a ladder, until each successive run is safely at sea.

Forty years ago, only a handful of heretics, howling at wilderness, challenged the notion that the West needed hundreds of new dams. Today they are almost vindicated. There is more talk of deconstruction than of construction: of minor dams demolished, of big dams made “environmentally sound,” of marginal acreage retired and water returned to its source, of flows bypassing turbines to flush salmon and steelhead out to sea. How can this happen? The region’s population is growing and, in places, exploding. (California has added seven million people since New Melones Dam.) More people need more water and power and food. Asia sends its surplus population to California and the Northwest; the Mexican border is porous as a sieve.

It’s only recently—mainly in the years since this book first appeared—that Westerners have begun to ask where their water goes, what it costs, and what it earns. That inquiry may produce the most revolutionary results since the Reclamation Act.

In California, for example, enough water for greater Los Angeles was still being used, in 1986, to raise irrigated pasture for livestock. A roughly equal amount—enough for twenty million people at home, at play, and at work—was used that year to raise alfalfa, also for horses, sheep, and (mainly) cows.

The more one tries to make sense of this, the less success one has. Feeding irrigated grass to cows is as wasteful a use of water as you can conceive. Pasture is hydrologically inefficient in the extreme, and, metabolically speaking, so are cows: You need seven or eight feet of water in the hot deserts to keep grass alive, which means that you need almost fifty thousand pounds of water to raise one pound of cow. (Feeding alfalfa to cows requires even more water, but at least alfalfa fixes nitrogen in the soil.)

If the livestock industry earned California real money, and if cows (unlike avocadoes or artichokes) couldn’t be raised on rainfall in thirty-five other states, then giving more water to cows than to humans in the nation’s richest and most populous state—a semidesert state at the mercy of a precarious water supply—might make a grain or two of sense. In 1985, however, the pasture crop was worth about $100 million, while southern California’s economy was worth $300 billion, but irrigated pasture used more water than Los Angeles and San Diego combined. When you added cotton (a price-supported crop worth about $900 million that year) to alfalfa and pasture, you had a livestock industry and a cotton industry consuming much more water than everyone in urban California—and producing as much wealth in a year as the urban economy rings up in three or four days. (Rice, another crop that needs lots of water, consumed more than the entire Bay Area, but the state’s rice acreage supports much of the Pacific Flyway on waste grain and an enormous winter production of invertebrate food, so I am leaving the