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["Don Bowen" <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

> You, on the other hand, have chosen to live in a desert.  There isn't any
> water there (have you noticed), there never has been and there never will
> be.

There is plenty of water in the desert, just not enough to the millions of
people and millions of acres of crop land.  Natives have lived in the desert
for over 10,000 years.  They grew crops and built villages along the many
rivers.  It is that their populations were very low and they worked with the
seasons and available water.

A typical crop use was to plant just behind the receding waters of spring
floods or to plant small intensive hand watered gardens near water sources.
The huge population increases are only possible with imported snow melt
water and cheap energy to pump from fossil aquifers.

The central valley of California is a prime example.  Winter snow melt
filled the huge Tulare lake.  As the water drained, evaporated, and
percolated into the aquifer, Indians farmed the drying edges and hunted in
the Tule.  Some even lived on floating rafts during the hot valley summers.

Don't bother looking for Tulare Lake on a modern map, it is long dried up
when the dam on the Kern River formed Lake Isabella.  Same with Owens Lake,
its water is in LA.  Mono lake was headed that way until the courts forced
the DWP to maintain a constant lake level and they do to the inch.  The
Salton Sea on the other hand did not exist until an irrigation project got
out of hand in 1903 and allowed the Colorado River to flood the Salton Sink.

By the way, look at the wide Colorado River and its many dams then look at
what it is as it crosses the border into Mexico.  A nasty polluted little
stream.

Don Bowen  KI6DIU
http://www.braingarage.com/Dons/Travels/journal/Journal.html