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canals and inefficient flood-irrigation methods. just dig deeper. What happens when they hit
This peculiar, often damaging phenomenon is the bottom?
seen across the West. Unlike surface water, which replenishes
This brings us back to Tulare County in each year with rain and snow, most of the
the Central Valley—an unbroken eight million West's groundwater could not recover within
irrigated acres that produces more than a our lifetimes even if all pumping were to cease
quarter of America's food and is thus absolutely entirely. In places, wells have been sunk a half
essential to the health of the entire nation. mile deep into the earth to reach groundwater
The Valley is one of the few truly water-rich that once sat just a few dozen feet below. The
places in the West, as its rivers are fed by town of Williams, Arizona, pumps water from a
snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada. Yet, like most depth of thirty-five hundred feet—the height of
of the West, the water cycle here is utterly three Empire State Buildings. As the water table
unpredictable: a year of monster snowpack drops below the level of municipal wells, rural
can be followed by one or several dry winters. communities and small farms can hardly afford
When the dry times come, the last-in-rights to drill new ones. Big corporations can, and they
suffer. In 2014—after three of the driest years in dig deeper.
California history left stunningly little snowpack In certain areas of the hot, hazy Central
on the Sierra Nevada—94 percent of the Central Valley, the scene is straight out of the Third
Valley remained irrigated. Yet the State Water World: townsfolk crowd around the water
Project, which supplies water to urban Southern truck each day when it arrives, jostling for
California, received a zero allocation. The cities position with their jars and rusty metal cans. The
limped by on other sources, but this system is nearby river has dwindled to a dirty creek. The
clearly unsustainable. land cracks and sinks as billions of gallons of
In fact, even "unsustainable" is inadequate groundwater are pumped out and spread onto
to describe what is happening in the Central nearby fields, growing food for export to distant
Valley. Why are towns here running out of states and countries. Above the dust and grime
water while the big farms remain relatively the Sierra stands stark and bare, waiting for the
flush? The past few years have been so dry, snows that may or may not come this winter.
there is no longer enough water left in the The day of reckoning is coming.
reservoirs to satisfy even the oldest rights. As a The big cities are still green, but they are
result, farmers have turned to pumping water borrowing water from the future. A century
from underground aquifers. Groundwater is of wrong thinking got us into this mess, and
the big, invisible secret of Western water: most continuing to follow the same approach won’t
people see it as an inexhaustible supply, yet it get us out. If we don't change the way we look
took hundreds or even thousands of years to at water, we might never get it back.
accumulate. When a well comes up dry, people

Estimated cost of California drought in 2014: $2.2 billion
17,000 agricultural jobs

* Howitt, R.E., Medellin-Azuara, J., MacEwan, D., Lund, J.R. and Sumner, D.A. (2014). Economic Analysis of the 2014
Drought for California Agriculture. Center for Watershed Sciences, University of California, Davis, California.

As inhabitants of the Earth, it is our duty and mission to take care of our planet.
Jing Si Aphorism by Dharma Master Cheng Yen

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