Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [9]
More water projects. In the West, nearly everyone is for them. Politicians of every stripe have sacrificed their most sacred principles on the altar of water development. Barry Goldwater, scourge of welfare and champion of free enterprise, was a lifelong supporter of the Central Arizona Project, which comes as close to socialism as anything this country has ever done (the main difference being that those who are subsidized are well-off, even rich). Former Governor Jerry Brown of California attended the funeral of E. F. Schumacher, the English economist who wrote Small Is Beautiful, then flew back home to lobby for a water project that would cost more than it did to put a man on the moon. Alan Cranston, once the leading liberal in the U.S. Senate, the champion of the poor and the oppressed, successfully lobbied to legalize illegal sales of subsidized water to giant corporate farms, thus denying water—and farms—to thousands of the poor and oppressed.
In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them. It goes 444 miles (the distance from Boston to Washington) by aqueduct from the Feather River to south of L.A. It goes in man-made rivers, in siphons, in tunnels. In a hundred years, actually less, God’s riverine handiwork in the West has been stood on its head. A number of rivers have been nearly dried up. One now flows backward. Some flow through mountains into other rivers’ beds. There are huge reservoirs where there was once desert; there is desert, or cropland, where there were once huge shallow swamps and lakes.
It still isn’t enough.
In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse. Since the distance the water would have to travel is a thousand miles, and the elevation gain four thousand feet, and since six million acre-feet of water weigh roughly 16.5 trillion pounds, a lot of energy would be required to pump it. The Bureau figured that six nuclear plants would do, and calculated the cost of the power at one mill per kilowatt-hour, a tiny fraction of what it costs today. The whole package came to $20 billion, in 1971 dollars; the benefit-cost ratio would have been .27 to 1. For each dollar invested, twenty-seven cents in economic productivity would be returned. “That’s kind of discouraging,” says Stephen Reynolds. “But when you consider our balance-of-payments deficits, you have to remember that we send $100 billion out of this country each year just to pay for imported oil. The main thing we export is food. The Ogallala region produces a very large share of our agricultural exports.”
More water projects. In the early 1960s, the Ralph M. Parsons Corporation, a giant engineering firm based in Pasadena, California, released a plan to capture much of the floor of the Yukon and Tanana rivers and divert it two thousand miles to the Southwest through the Rocky Mountain Trench. The proposal, called the North American Water and Power Alliance, wasn’t highly regarded by Canada, which was the key to the “alliance,” but in the West it was passionately received. Ten years later, as environmentalism and inflation both took root, NAWAPA seemed destined for permanent oblivion. But then OPEC raised the price of oil 1,600 percent, and Three Mile Island