By William DeBuys. Truthout, December 4, 2011
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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