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By Root 1475 0

within the same state, even within the same county. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, a farmer can raise a number of different crops without irrigation; there is usually a summer drought, but it is short, and even if he decides not to depend entirely on rainfall, a few inches of irrigation water—instead of the hundred inches used by some farmers in California and Arizona—will usually do. Two hours away, on the east side of the Cascades, rainfall drops to a third of what the Willamette Valley ordinarily receives; not only that, but the whole of eastern Oregon is much higher than the section west of the Cascades, and lacks a marine influence, so the climate is far colder as well. It can be forty above zero in Eugene and ten below zero in Bend, a two-hour drive to the east. In eastern Oregon, not only must a farmer irrigate but he is extraordinarily limited, compared to his Willamette Valley counterpart, in the types of crops he can grow.

Around Bakersfield, California, an irrigation farmer can raise the same crops that one sees growing in Libya, southern Italy, Hawaii, and Iraq: pistachios, kiwis, almonds, grapes, olives, melons, crops whose value per cultivated acre is astonishingly high. An hour’s drive away, across the Tehachapi Mountains, lies the Antelope Valley, a high-desert region with a cold interior climate that can bring frost in May, and where little but alfalfa and grass can be grown. Both Bakersfield and the Antelope Valley are within Kern County, whose climatic extremes are rather typical of California, and, for that matter, of many counties throughout the West. Air conditioners and furnaces in two relatively nearby towns—Phoenix and Flagstaff—may be running at the same time; one end of a county may be plagued by floods while another is plagued by drought.

The reason for all this is mainly topographic: the mountains that block weather fronts and seal off the interior from the ocean’s summer cooling and winter warmth (the prevailing westerly winds of the northern hemisphere give the ocean a much wider influence in the West than in the East, reaching as far away as Idaho); the tectonic upheavals that pushed much of the interior West, even the flat mountainless sections, to elevations higher than a mile. The significance of it, from the standpoint of water development, is that it makes infinitely greater economic sense to build dams and irrigate in warmer regions than in colder ones—even if it makes infinitely greater political sense to do otherwise.

When John Wesley Powell explored the American West, he duly noted these bewildering extremes of climate. Powell knew that irrigation was an expensive proposition, and that a few inches of extra rainfall or a couple of thousand feet of elevation difference would mean a project that was worth developing or, on the other hand, a project that would require heavy subsidization. A farmer raising fruit or two annual crops of tomatoes in the Imperial Valley might earn ten times more per irrigated acre than a farmer raising alfalfa at six thousand feet in Colorado; yet it might cost far more to deliver water to the Colorado farmer because his water might have to be pumped uphill, out of deep river canyons, while the Imperial Valley lay near sea level below Hoover Dam. The Imperial Valley farmer could pay enough for water to allow the government to recoup its enormous investment in dams, canals, and other irrigation works; the Colorado farmer might be able to repay, at best, a dime on every dollar.

What Powell did not foresee, however, was the Colorado River Basin arbitrarily divided, with each half given an equal amount of water. To him, such a false partitioning might have seemed absurd, for it made far better sense to irrigate in the lower basin than in the upper. But he could not imagine that the blind ambition of the Bureau and the political power of the upper basin would join forces to try to pretend that a mile of elevation difference, and the staggering climatic difference such a disparity implies, did not exist.

Simply stated, the problem with most of the upper