Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [335]
It isn’t much different in any other western state. In Colorado, the alfalfa crop is worth a couple of hundred million dollars a year, while tourism is worth about five billion dollars a year. To raise alfalfa, you have to dam, dewater, and otherwise destroy the rivers that many of the tourists come to fish, to raft, or simply to see. The hydroelectricity that could be generated down river by water used to raise alfalfa is potentially worth more than the crop. In Idaho, the money crop is potatoes, but the crops that use most of the state’s water are alfalfa and grass. Each cow raised in the Columbia River watershed—where millions of cows are raised—indirectly consumes water for several salmon. Then the cow pollutes the rivers, overgrazes the hillsides, erodes the streambanks, and conspires, beyond the workings of its feeble brain, to ruin the fish and their habitat in other ways (for example, by sending forth acres of methane-rich flatulence that hasten the greenhouse effect).
In an arid or semi-arid region, you can irrigate low-value, thirsty crops such as alfalfa and pasture grass only if you have cheap water—if your fields are riparian, or if your dams and aqueducts were built decades ago, or if you get your water subsidized by the taxpayers, as one of every three of the far West’s full-time irrigation farmers does. If you need forty or fifty thousand pounds of water in places like California and Colorado to irrigate enough fodder to raise two dollars worth of cow, you can’t even consider it if forty thousand pounds of water costs seven or eight dollars (as it would if you bought it from the California Water Project). But it makes perfectly good sense if the government sells you the same quantity for thirty or forty cents—as it does if the Central Valley Project is your source.
If free-market mechanisms—which much of western agriculture publicly applauds and privately abhors—were actually allowed to work, the West’s water “shortage” would be exposed for what it is: the sort of shortage you expect when inexhaustible demand chases an almost free good. (If someone were selling Porsches for three thousand dollars apiece, there would be a shortage of those, too.) California has a shortage of water because it has a surfeit of cows—it’s really almost as simple as that.
The urban areas in the West have been slow to recognize all this, but lately they have begun to recognize it with a vengeance. The Metropolitan Water District is flooding its millions of customers with literature that shows how a thousand acre-feet of water used in high-tech industry can create sixteen thousand jobs, and how the same thousand acre-feet of water used on pasture farms creates eight jobs. Eight. This kind of stuff infuriates the San Joaquin Valley, its erstwhile ally in the water wars, so valley mouthpieces respond in a manner that inspires the Met not just to anger but to retribution. All the old alliances are falling apart. Southern California wants nothing more to do with the San Joaquin; its water barons would rather scheme over sushi with environmentalists, because they represent the new nexus of power. Even the rice growers in the Sacramento Valley want little to do with the San Joaquin Valley; they raise lots of waterfowl food on acreage that the birds of the Pacific Flyway have come to depend on, and most conservationists now acknowledge that fact, and some have even begun to like rice—so why should the rice industry, which gets little subsidized water, carry the San Joaquin Valley’s hod?
Meanwhile, all kinds of new alliances are beginning to form. The Sacramento Valley has its own water lobby, which has begun to hold meetings with the salmon fishermen, searching for solutions to their water shortage—which is devastatingly real. Las Vegas and Reno, which represent 95 percent of Nevada’s economy but use 10 percent of its water (alfalfa growers use most of the rest), may fight like hyenas over monstrous gambling palaces that Japanese companies want to build, but they are in sweet accord on water policy. The new chief