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Spoils of the Water Wars

We’ve been borrowing from the future for too long.
It’s time to change the way we look at water.
Alan Ong

 Hundred-foot-high white rock shows the
Intensity severe water level drop of Lake Mead. Photo by
D0 Abnormally Dry Guy DeMeo, courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey.
D1 Moderate Drought
D2 Severe Drought
D3 Extreme Drought
D4 Exceptional Drought 3California drought conditions, February 2015.
Map courtesy of NDMC-UNL (see pg. 21)

n rural Tulare County, California, near the Unlike the humid eastern U.S., the western
heart of America's richest farming region, the half—extending from the Great Plains to
Imost terrifying of shortages has happened— the Pacific Ocean—receives only seasonal
the people are out of drinking water. precipitation, mostly in the mountains. Famed
As the worst drought in at least a thousand explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell,
years dries the state's rivers and drains its lakes, who in 1869 led the first expedition along
this does not come as a complete surprise, the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon,
yet it provides a graphic reminder that even stated that even if every river in the West were
the wealthy and powerful United States is not diverted, no more than 1 to 3 percent could be
immune from nature's whims. And if we look redeemed through irrigation. But that did not
deeper into the troubles of Tulare County and discourage Americans from settling the West.
other water-stressed regions of the western They continued to believe that by taming the
U.S., we discover that the main cause of this rivers that descended from the mountains to
drought is not simply a lack of precipitation, but the desert, this arid country could be made as
rather our failure to respect the natural limits of green as their homes in the East.
our water supply. As the West was rapidly settled, it quickly
became obvious to nineteenth-century farmers

1 0 TZU CHI USA SUMMER 2015