This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
A couple of quick things that could be done.
Stop growing crops that are intensive water users that are destine for export. Hay, alfalfa, almonds.
Introduce capitalism to water pricing. Residential use pays among the highest price for water. Increase the price of agricultural use of water to that level or near it. Farmers would conserve more, and perhaps follow the Israeli model of drip.
And recycle wastewater wherever you can, And build Desal where appropriate.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
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Innit nice of ProPublica to notice something that has been obvious to those of us in the southwest for twenty years?
My family are 5th generation Arizonans. I have been a resident of Tucson for 54 years when I came here for college. That 20 years I quote is how long out drought has been apparent.
There are large pecan groves south and north of Tucson growing the best pecans on the planet in my estimation. The owners of those trees have recognized the water shortages and are scaling back water use and not selling thru their public store anymore which is a loss.
Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water was written 36 years ago, and nothing has changed. If anything, he underestimated the effects of global warming.
In fact, our idiotic Republicans have leased land to the f-ing Saudis along with the aquifers under them and are allowing them to grow alfalfa to send back to Saudi to feed their horses; threatening the water supply for Phoenix.
I would have thought that the Saudi royal family with their billions from oil would be building desalinization plants by the dozen to take advantage of the long coastlines of their desert country. But no, they need alfalfa grown a half a world away in desert Arizona which has no water coastline I am aware of. Would it not make sense for them to grow what they need in their own country? Heck, they could trade with their arch enemy Iran if they got desperate enough considering that Iran is a heck’ve a lot closer to them than Arizona is.
For at least 50 years fresh water in the Southwest has been a big problem none of the politicians want to tackle. The rates favor the farmers. Almond farmers in particular seem unwilling to rethink their water usage. But it isn’t just the farmers. The population is growing and every new citizen needs water. It isn’t getting any better. Nobody seems willing to change their water usage. There are better ways to farm, but the farmers don’t want to give up their privileged position. Lake Mead is down to about 27% of capacity and it is drying out rapidly. At some point people will start shooting.
Basically common sense.
I’m told the California central valley uses as much water daily as L.A. and San Francisco combined.
All while the plain states grow corn for ethanol subsidies. Sometimes obvious alleviations are obvious.
Also Nestle. Fuck those guys.
The litigation will be extensive and very complex with multiple conflicts of interest so it will not keep up with the water loss. That is going to lead to some very large-scale human tragedies no matter what.
Doesn’t have to. We just need to start adopting European models of paying farmers not to farm. And look at buying out some of the desert areas which never should have been massive farms in the first place.
Can we really afford to buy out the Sauds’ 85k deal for water in AZ for alfalfa?
True, it doesn’t have to and we already have those models and have used them in the past but farming is not the only problem.
Water wars in the American West have been going on virtually since settlement began but the scale keeps getting larger w/ the entire SW involved in this one. Now there is no backup even for cities as aquifers have been mined excessively so federal intervention will have to be pretty draconian and include more than farming in order to be effective.
ETA: I was recalling Peter Drucker’s famous line, “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and how combative states tend to be when it comes to water. Not a culture that breeds cooperation which kind of goes double given the combination of red and blue states in our current political climate; can’t imagine what strategy a federal government might develop that deals with that and avoids violence.
This doesn’t make sense. Water flows downhill. The upper people get first shot at the water.
Wouldn’t disagree at all. Should be prepared for a big price tag to depopulate some of the areas which never should have been populated in the first place, dismantle all the canals and that which went up since around 1900, start letting nature reclaim things.
Carrying capacity - " the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available" - was a concept I learned at an early age while observing tadpoles I had caught and placed in two separate fish bowls. One bowl had numerous tadpoles, the other bowl had just two. Guess which bowl thrived?
Many western U.S. cities surpassed their carrying capacity long ago. Through technology, we’ve been able to artificially raise the carrying capacity of many of these environments. The fact is, there are too many people/crops using the land/water. Ecologists understand that places like Phoenix should not exist where it does. Climate change only hastens the awareness of this reality. Economic collapse does not follow far behind resource depletion.
Wars will be fought over water.
The problem is fresh water. Much of the problem can be solved with better farming methods and desalinization. The Israelis raise crops in arid conditions using more modern water conservative techniques. I don’t think it is necessary to depopulate the southwest. What we have to do is become better at water usage.
As is true of all the pending environmental catastrophes looming on our horizon the choices are simple: Make substantive changes in practice and policy which endanger the short-term capital gains or deny the problem exists.
Since the Reagan Administration, when all these things were first spelled out, we’ve been quite successful at denial through coordinated disinformation campaigns by Captains of Industrial and their lobbyists. Most of these folks are planning on being dead before the real environment shit hits the fan.
The battles over water are going to make the fights over oil look like child’s play.