Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [8]
“What are you going to do with all that water?” asks Felix Sparks, the former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “Are you just going to leave it in the ground?” Not necessarily, one could reply, but fifty years or a little longer is an awfully short period in which to exhaust the providence of half a million years, to consume as much nonrenewable water as there is in Lake Huron. “Well,” says Sparks, “when we use it up, we’ll just have to get more water from somewhere else.”
Stephen Reynolds, Sparks’s former counterpart in New Mexico—as state engineer, the man in charge of water, he may have been the most powerful person in the state—says much the same thing: “We made a conscious decision to mine out our share of the Ogallala in a period of twenty-five to forty years.” In the portions of New Mexico that overlie the Ogallala, according to Reynolds, some farmers withdraw as much as five feet of water a year, while nature puts back a quarter of an inch. What will happen to the economy of Reynolds’s state when its major agricultural region turns to dust? “Agriculture uses about 90 percent of our water, and produces around 20 percent of the state’s income, so it wouldn’t necessarily be a knockout economic blow,” he answers. “Of course, you are talking about drastic changes in the whole life and culture of a very big region encompassing seven states.
“On the other hand,” says Reynolds, half-hopefully, “we may decide as a matter of national policy that all this agriculture is too important to lose. We can always decide to build some more water projects.”
More water projects. During the first and only term of his presidency, Jimmy Carter decided that the age of water projects had come to a deserved end. As a result, he drafted a “hit list” on which were a couple of dozen big dams and irrigation projects, east and west, which he vowed not to fund. Carter was merely stunned by the reaction from the East; he was blown over backward by the reaction from the West. Of about two hundred western members of Congress, there weren’t more than a dozen who dared to support him. One of the projects would return five cents in economic benefits for every taxpayer dollar invested; one offered irrigation farmers subsidies worth more than $1 million each; another, a huge dam on a middling California river, would cost more than Hoover, Shasta, Glen Canyon, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee combined. But Carter’s hit list had as much to do with his one-term presidency as Iran.
Like millions of easterners who wonder how such projects get built, Jimmy Carter had never spent much time in the West. He had never driven across the country and watched the landscape turn from green to brown at the hundredth meridian, the threshold of what was once called the Great American Desert—but which is still wet compared to the vast ultramontane basins beyond. In southern Louisiana, water is the central fact of existence, and a whole culture and set of values have grown up around it. In the West, lack of water is the central fact of existence, and a whole culture and set of values have grown up around it. In the East, to “waste” water is to consume it needlessly or excessively. In the West, to waste water is not to consume it—to let it flow unimpeded and undiverted down rivers. Use of water is, by definition, “beneficial” use—the term is right in the law—even if it goes to Fountain Hills, Arizona, and is shot five hundred feet into 115-degree