Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Doug Willhite <drwillhite@earthlink.net>]

Published Dec 4 2011 by TomDispatch.com
The Parching of the West
by William deBuys
The Age of Thirst in the American West

Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the  
History of Civilization

Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust,  
and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from  
Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire  
ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New  
Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history  
(3,697,000 acres).

The fires were a function of drought.  As of summer’s end, 2011 was  
the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas,  
and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also  
resulted from record heat.  It was the hottest summer ever recorded  
for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the  
hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.

Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented  
temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward  
unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a  
new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F  
or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)

And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest  
or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and  
grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which  
may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of  
civilization.  No kidding.

If that gets you down, here’s a little cheer-up note: the end is not  
yet nigh.

In fact, this year the weather elsewhere rode to the rescue, and the  
news for the Southwest was good where it really mattered.  Since  
January, the biggest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead,  
backed up by the Hoover Dam and just 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas,  
has risen almost 40 feet. That lake is crucial when it comes to  
watering lawns or taking showers from Arizona to California.  And the  
near 40-foot surge of extra water offered a significant upward nudge  
to the Southwest’s water reserves.

The Colorado River, which the reservoir impounds, supplies all or  
part of the water on which nearly 30 million people depend, most of  
them living downstream of Lake Mead in Los Angeles, San Diego,  
Phoenix, Tucson, Tijuana, and scores of smaller communities in the  
United States and Mexico.

Back in 1999, the lake was full. Patricia Mulroy, who heads the water  
utility serving Las Vegas, rues the optimism of those bygone days.   
“We had a fifty-year, reliable water supply,” she says. “By 2002, we  
had no water supply. We were out. We were done. I swore to myself  
we’d never do that again.”

In 2000, the lake began to fall -- like a boulder off a cliff,  
bouncing a couple of times on the way down. Its water level dropped a  
staggering 130 feet, stopping less than seven feet above the stage  
that would have triggered reductions in downstream deliveries. Then  
-- and here’s the good news, just in case you were wondering -- last  
winter, it snowed prodigiously up north in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

The spring and summer run-off from those snowpacks brought enormous  
relief. It renewed what we in the Southwest like to call the Hydro- 
Illogic cycle: when drought comes, everybody wrings their hands and  
promises to institute needed reform, if only it would rain a little.  
Then the drought breaks or eases and we all return to business as  
usual, until the cycle comes around to drought again.

So don’t be fooled.  One day, perhaps soon, Lake Mead will renew its  
downward plunge.  That’s a certainty, the experts tell us.  And  
here’s the thing: the next time, a sudden rescue by heavy snows in  
the northern Rockies might not come. If the snowpacks of the future  
are merely ordinary, let alone puny, then you’ll know that we really  
are entering a new age.

And climate change will be a major reason, but we’ll have done a good  
job of aiding and abetting it. The states of the so-called Lower  
Basin of the Colorado River -- California, Arizona, and Nevada --  
have been living beyond their water means for years. Any departure  
from recent decades of hydrological abundance, even a return to long- 
term average flows in the Colorado River, would produce a painful  
reckoning for the Lower Basin states.  And even worse is surely on  
the way.

Just think of the coming Age of Thirst in the American Southwest and  
West as a three-act tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions.

The Age of Thirst: Act I

The curtain in this play would surely rise on the Colorado River  
Compact of 1922, which divided the river’s water equally between the  
Upper and Lower Basins, allocating to each annually 7.5 million acre- 
feet, also known by its acronym "maf." (An acre-foot suffices to  
support three or four families for a year.) Unfortunately, the  
architects of the compact, drawing on data from an anomalously wet  
historical period, assumed the river’s average annual flow to be  
about 17 maf per year.  Based on reconstructions that now stretch  
back more than 1,000 years, the river’s long-term average is closer  
to 14.7 maf.  Factor in evaporation from reservoirs (1.5 maf per  
year) and our treaty obligation to Mexico (another 1.5 maf), and the  
math doesn’t favor a water-guzzling society.

Nonetheless, the states of the Lower Basin have been taking their  
allotment as if nothing were wrong and consequently overdrafting  
their account by up to 1.3 maf annually.  At this rate, even under  
unrealistically favorable scenarios, the Lower Basin will eventually  
drain Lake Mead and cutbacks will begin, possibly as soon as in the  
next few years.  And then things will get dicier because California,  
the water behemoth of the West, won’t have to absorb any of those  
cutbacks.

Here’s one of the screwiest quirks in western water law: to win  
Congressional approval for the building of a monumental aqueduct, the  
Central Arizona Project (CAP), which would bring Colorado River water  
to Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona agreed to subordinate its Colorado  
River water rights to California’s.  In that way, the $4 billion, 336- 
mile-long CAP was born, and for it Arizona paid a heavy price. The  
state obliged itself to absorb not just its own losses in a cutback  
situation, but California’s as well.

Worst case scenario: the CAP aqueduct, now a lifeline for millions,  
could become as dry as the desert it runs through, while California  
continues to bathe. Imagine Phoenix curling and cracking around the  
edges, while lawn sprinklers hiss in Malibu. The contrast will upset  
a lot of Arizonans.

Worse yet, the prospective schedule of cutbacks now in place for the  
coming bad times is too puny to save Lake Mead.

The Age of Thirst: Act II

While that Arizona-California relationship guarantees full employment  
for battalions of water lawyers, a far bigger problem looms: climate  
change. Models for the Southwest have been predicting a 4ºC (7.2ºF)  
increase in mean temperature by century’s end, and events seem to be  
outpacing the predictions.

We have already experienced close to 1º C of that increase, which  
accounts, at least in part, for last summer’s colossal fires and  
record-setting temperatures -- and it’s now clear that we’re just  
getting started.

The simple rule of thumb for climate change is that wet places will  
get wetter and dry places drier. One reason the dry places will dry  
is that higher temperatures mean more evaporation. In other words,  
there will be ever less water in the rivers that keep the region’s  
cities (and much else) alive. Modeling already suggests that by mid- 
century surface stream-flow will decline by 10% to 30%.

Independent studies at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in  
California and the University of Colorado evaluated the viability of  
Lake Mead and eventually arrived at similar conclusions: after about  
2026, the risk of “failure” at Lake Mead, according to a member of  
the Colorado group, “just skyrockets.” Failure in this context would  
mean water levels lower than the dam’s lowest intake, no water  
heading downstream, and the lake becoming a “dead pool.”

If -- perhaps “when” is the more appropriate word -- that happens,  
California’s Colorado River Aqueduct, which supplies water to Los  
Angeles, San Diego, and the All-American Canal, which sustains the  
Imperial and Coachella Valleys, will go just as dry as the Central  
Arizona Project aqueduct. Meanwhile, if climate change is affecting  
the Colorado River’s watershed that harshly, it will undoubtedly also  
be hitting the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

The aptly named Lester Snow, a recent director of California’s  
Department of Water Resources, understood this. His future water  
planning assumed a 40% decline in runoff from the Sierras, which  
feeds the California Aqueduct. None of his contemplated scenarios  
were happy ones. The Colorado River Aqueduct and the California  
Aqueduct make the urban conglomerations of southern California  
possible. If both fail at once, the result will be, as promised, the  
greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.

Only Patricia Mulroy has an endgame strategy for the demise of Lake  
Mead. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is, even now, tunneling  
under the lake to install the equivalent of a bathtub drain at close  
to its lowest point. At a cost of more than $800 million, it will  
drain the dregs of Lake Mead for Las Vegas.

Admittedly, water quality will be a problem, as the dead pool will  
concentrate pollutants. The good news, according to the standard joke  
among those who chronicle Sin City’s improbable history, is that the  
hard-partying residents and over-stimulated tourists who sip from  
Lake Mead’s last waters will no longer need to purchase anti- 
depressants. They’ll get all the Zoloft and Xanax they need from  
their tap water.

And only now do we arrive at the third act of this expanding tragedy.

The Age of Thirst: Act III

Those who believe in American exceptionalism hold that the historical  
patterns shaping the fate of other empires and nations don’t apply to  
the United States. Be that as it may, we are certainly on track to  
test whether the U.S. is similarly inoculated against the patterns of  
environmental history.

Because tree rings record growing conditions year by year, the people  
who study them have been able to reconstruct climate over very long  
spans of time. One of their biggest discoveries is that droughts more  
severe and far longer than anything known in recent centuries have  
occurred repeatedly in the American Southwest. The droughts of the  
Dust Bowl in the 1930s, of the 1950s, and of the period from 1998 to  
2004 are remembered in the region, yet none lasted a full decade.

By contrast, the drought that brought the civilization of the  
ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, centered at Chaco Canyon, to its  
knees in the twelfth century, by contrast, lasted more than 30 years.  
The one that finished off Mesa Verdean culture in the thirteenth  
century was similarly a “megadrought.”

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona  
who played a major role in the Nobel-Prize-winning work of the  
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tells me that the prospect  
of 130° F days in Phoenix worries him far less than the prospect of  
decades of acute dryness. “If anything is scary, the scariest is that  
we could trip across a transition into a megadrought.” He adds, “You  
can probably bet your house that, unless we do something about these  
greenhouse gas emissions, the megadroughts of the future are going to  
be a lot hotter than the ones of the past.”

Other scientists believe that the Southwest is already making the  
transition to a “new climatology,” a new normal that will at least  
bring to mind the aridity of the Dust Bowl years. Richard Seager of  
Columbia University, for instance, suggests that “the cycle of  
natural dry periods and wet periods will continue, but… around a mean  
that gets drier. So the depths -- the dry parts of the naturally  
occurring droughts -- will be drier than we’re used to, and the wet  
parts won’t be as wet.”

Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After  
something terrible happens -- tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes --  
people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the  
things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is  
that nothing happens. By the time you know you’re in one, you’ve  
already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings  
of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You  
never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well.  
Drought brings out the worst in us.

After the Chacoan drought, corn-farming ancestral Puebloans still  
remained in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. They hung on,  
even if at lower population densities. After the Mesa Verdean  
drought, everybody left.

By the number of smashed crania and other broken bones in the ruins  
of the region’s beautiful stone villages, archaeologists judge that  
the aridifying world of the Mesa Verdeans was fatally afflicted by  
violence. Warfare and societal breakdown, evidently driven by the  
changing climate, helped end that culture.

So it matters what we do. Within the limits imposed by the  
environment, the history we make is contingent, not fated. But we are  
not exactly off to a good start in dealing with the challenges ahead.  
The problem of water consumption in the Southwest is remarkably  
similar to the problem of greenhouse gas pollution. First, people  
haggle to exhaustion over the need to take action; then, they haggle  
over inadequate and largely symbolic reductions. For a host of well- 
considered, eminently understandable, and ultimately erroneous  
reasons, inaction becomes the main achievement. For this drama, think  
Hamlet. Or if the lobbyists who argue for business as usual out west  
and in Congress spring to mind first, think Iago.

We know at least one big thing about how this particular tragedy will  
turn out: the so-called civilization of the Southwest will not  
survive the present century, not at its present scale anyway. The  
question yet to be answered is how much it will have to shrink, and  
at what cost. Stay tuned. It will be one of the greatest, if  
grimmest, shows on Earth.

William deBuys is the author of seven books, including the just  
published A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the  
American Southwest (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and The Walk (an  
excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize). He has long been involved in  
environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding  
chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000- 
acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico.

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