Cadillac Desert (79 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

Things Fall Apart

O
n a hydrographic map, the outline of the Ogallala Aquifer resembles the South American and African continents—broad and bulbous to the north, tapering to a narrow cape at the southern end. Driving its entire length—from southern South Dakota down into the heart of West Texas, where it feathers out just above the Pecos River—takes two long days and feels almost like a transcontinental trip, the more so because the landscape is relentlessly the same: the same flatness, the same treelessness, the same curveless thirty-mile stretches of road. All that changes is the crops: sorghum, then corn, then sorghum, then corn, then alfalfa, wheat, cotton—enough cotton, one would think, to clothe all humanity.

This was the country that Coronado traversed, looking for the gold cities of Cibola; it is the country that cost him half his men, his reputation, and nearly his life. In Coronado’s time, it grew nothing but short grass, on which millions of buffalo feasted; feasting on them were grizzly bears, prairie wolves, vultures, and an unknown number of Sioux, Comanche, and Cheyenne. The tribes, widely regarded as ferocious, merely reflected the landscape itself. Even the Indians used the open plains mainly for seasonal hunting, retreating to river valleys when the weather became extreme—which was a good part of the time. The southern high plains, from Colorado south to the hill country of Texas, never knew a permanent civilization, as far as archaeologists can tell. There was a Llano culture as early as 10,000 B.C., followed by others that came and went like snow. Around 1300 B.C., Pueblo Indians occupied the region, but abandoned it less than a century later. The Comanche, superb horsemen, may have shunned the open plains as much as possible because there was no tree where one could tie up one’s mount. A place where one couldn’t even secure a horse was no place to try to anchor a civilization.

White men were to learn that lesson, repeatedly, after the buffalo and the Indians were vanquished and gone. During the 1860s and 1870s the plains hosted great cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, but those ended in drought, overgrazing, and falling meat prices. Depauperized of much of its grass and invaded by mesquite and weeds, the region emptied out. But a decade of wet weather and demand for bread during and after the First World War sparked a repopulation, and the plains became a sea of wheat. Then came the Dust Bowl. After each calamity, a residual population managed to remain, surviving on a few cattle, some defiant wheat, the government, and finally, oil and natural gas. It was one of those survivors who sank a water well, hooked up a new invention—a diesel-driven centrifugal pump—and discovered the region’s bounteous secret: underneath it, confined in a closed-basin aquifer, was enough fresh water to fill Lake Huron.

Everyone had always known there was water below. If you sank a well and erected a windmill-driven pump, you got enough for a family and a few head of stock. But windmills could bring up only a few gallons a minute and offered no clue as to how much water was actually down there. The centrifugal pump, which could raise eight hundred gallons a minute or more, did, and when geologists took a closer look they confirmed the evidence offered by the pumps. Under the plains was the trapped runoff of several Ice Ages, all nicely confined within gravel beds. The thickness of the aquifer varied; along the periphery it feathered to a few feet, but in the middle portions under Nebraska there were saturations of seven hundred feet. All in all, there were probably three billion acre-feet in confinement.

A flow of eight hundred gallons a minute will fill an Olympic swimming pool in just over an hour. It will also conveniently irrigate a hundred or more acres of crops. A hundred acres of irrigated land on the plains is worth five hundred acres unirrigated; actually, it is worth more, because a farmer need never again worry about going bankrupt during a drought. The water was free; all you needed in order to make money, real money—to watch your net income rise from $8,000 to $40,000 a year—was cheap fossil fuel or electricity, a big mobile sprinkler, and pumps.

The irrigation of the Ogallala region, which has occurred almost entirely since the Second World War, is, from a satellite’s point of view, one of the most profound changes visited by man on North America; only urbanization, deforestation, and the damming of rivers surpass it. In the space of twenty years, the high plains turned from brown to green, as if a tropical rainbelt had suddenly installed itself between the Rockies and the hundredth meridian. From an airplane, much of semiarid West Texas now appears as lush as Virginia. Where one saw virtually nothing out the window forty years ago, one now sees thousands and thousands of green circles. From thirty-eight thousand feet, each appears to be about the size of a nickel, though it is actually 133 acres—a dozen and a half baseball fields. The circles are created by self-propelled sprinklers referred to by some as “wheels of fortune.” A quarter-mile-long pipeline with high-pressure nozzles, mounted on giant wheels which allow the whole apparatus to pass easily over a field of corn, a wheel of fortune is man-made rain; the machines even climb modest slopes which would ordinarily defeat a ditch irrigation system. Wheels of fortune are superefficient, but intolerant: they don’t like trees, shrubs, or bogs. Therefore, the millions and millions of shelterbelt trees planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps have come down as fast as the region’s fortunes have risen. All that now holds the soil in place is crops and water which cannot last.

In 1914, there were 139 irrigation wells in all of West Texas. In 1937, there were 1,166. In 1954, there were 27,983. In 1971, there were 66,144. Nebraska irrigated fewer than a million acres in 1959. In 1977, it irrigated nearly seven million acres; the difference was almost entirely pumping from the Ogallala. By that year, there were, depending on whose estimate one believed, somewhere around twelve million acres irrigated by the Ogallala Aquifer. One of the poorest farming regions in the United States had metamorphosed overnight into one of the wealthiest, raising 40 percent of the fresh beef cattle in America and growing a huge chunk of our agricultural exports. As West Texas sprouted corn, a water-demanding crop that had never been known there, Lubbock and Amarillo sprouted skyscrapers, most of them erected by the banks that ecstatically financed the farmer’s road to wealth. On Fridays, the farmers cruise into town from eighty miles away, behind the wheels of their Cadillacs and big Buick Electras. After a conference with a deferential banker, they go off for drinks and a dinner of steak and lobster, then to watch a Texas Tech football game from fieldside seats. Since 1950, Lubbock’s population has increased at about the same rate as Texas’s irrigated land 7.5 percent a year. Anything growing at that rate doubles in size in a decade.

There is, however, a second set of statistics which offers a more meaningful depiction of what is going on. By 1975, Texas was withdrawing some eleven billion gallons of groundwater—per
day.
In Kansas, the figure was five billion; in Nebraska, 5.9 billion; in Colorado, 2.7 billion; in Oklahoma, 1.4 billion; in New Mexico, 1.6 billion. In places, farmers were withdrawing four to six feet of water a year, while nature was putting back half an inch. The overdraft from the Ogallala region in 1975 was about fourteen million acre-feet a year, the flow of the Colorado River; it represented half the groundwater overdraft in the entire United States. The Colorado is not a big river, but it would be big enough to empty Lake Huron in a reasonably short time.

The Ogallala region supports not so much a farming industry as a mining industry. If the pumping has been reckless, as some believe, it is an example of carefully planned recklessness, for all the states regulate the pumping of groundwater; their choice was to allow its exhaustion within roughly thirty to a hundred years after the pumping began in earnest back in the early 1960s. Except for petroleum and natural gas and coal, most mining industries affect a rather small area. This is one that affects an area larger than California. Actually, it affects the entire world, for the product of mining the Ogallala is a prodigious amount of food, much of it consumed overseas.

It is a dead certainty that the Ogallala will begin to give out relatively soon; the only question is when. Everything hinges on one constant—the weight of water—and two variables: the cost of energy and the price of food. As anyone knows who has ever carried a full pail up five flights of steps, water is one of the heaviest substances on earth; pumping it a hundred or two hundred feet out of the ground consumes a lot of energy. The Ogallala farmers do not benefit, as do many groundwater pumpers throughout the West, from hydroelectricity generated at Bureau of Reclamation dams and sold to them at discount rates. For the water table to drop fifteen or twenty feet during a period when the price of energy increases sevenfold is a catastrophe. This, however, is precisely what happened throughout much of Kansas, Oklahoma, and West Texas between 1972 and 1984. During the same period, the price of most farm commodities barely doubled, if that.

The odds are high, therefore, that long before all the water runs out, the farmers will no longer be able to afford to pump. In 1969, a study performed by Texas A and M University projected that the West Texas aquifer would decline to forty-four million acre-feet by the year 2015, down from 341 million acre-feet before the Second World War. Irrigated acreage would, by then, have fallen to 125,000 acres from a mid-sixties peak of 3.5 million acres. Sorghum yields would be down 90 percent; cotton would be down 65 percent; total agricultural value in the region would diminish by 80 percent. In those figures lay the makings of a Dust Bowl-sized exodus, a social calamity, and a huge rash of bankruptcies that could ripple through the nation’s economy. In 2015, the study predicted, there would be 300,000 fewer people in the region than there were in 1969. A new set of figures compiled in 1979 by the Texas Department of Water Resources was somewhat more optimistic, but the planning director of that same agency did not sound as if he subscribed to the optimism himself. “It’s pretty easy to conjure up a disatrous series of events,” said Herbert Grubb in 1980. “We’re sort of assuming that a lot of the farmers will stay in business raising dryland cotton or wheat. But with interest rates high as they are, and drylands yields down 70 or 80 percent from irrigation yields, I really don’t see how the farmers are going to carry their debts. The older ones, maybe. But the younger ones, the newer ones, are up to their ears in debt. So you could just as easily assume that millions of acres suddenly go fallow. Then along comes a drought, some eighty-mile-an-hour winds, and you’ve got another Dust Bowl. The shelterbellt trees are gone. A lot of those farmers are milking every cent out of the land while the water lasts. The conditions are ripe for something downright catastrophic.”

The decision of the Ogallala states to treat the aquifer as if it were a coal mine, thereby setting themselves up for a long, long fall, is ironic in an extreme sense. Their economies—as the states recognized and lamented long ago—are vulnerable to forces they can do little to control. What supports Colorado besides irrigated agriculture? Mainly minerals—coal, uranium, molybdenum, oil—and tourism, logging, and ranching. Every one of those industries is subject to someone else’s whim: world supply and demand, international cartels, the price of oil, the Federal Reserve Board, or, the ultimate caprice of all, nature. Much the same applies to New Mexico. Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Kansas are farm states whose prosperity or ruin, before irrigation, depended on whether the isohyet of twenty-inch rainfall moved westward town the Rockies or eastward toward the Mississippi River. Once they became dependent on a huge irrigation economy, all of the states knew they would be in the same position as a junkie. Texas with its vanishing oil and gas; Kansas astride the hundredth meridian; Colorado depending so much on tourists who, if oil prices doubled or there was no snow, would stay home—each state knew that when the water ran out, they would again face the same awful vulnerability that had haunted them since the first settlers arrived.

Strictly regulated, the Ogallala could have been made to last hundreds of years instead of decades. Irrigation farming could have been slowly phased in, kept at a lower level, and gradually phased out. In such a case, hundreds of thousands of people who became dependent on it overnight wouldn’t face ruin, and the states’ economies wouldn’t go into sudden osmotic shock when the pumps began bringing up air. The states had begged the government to build them dams for irrigation, and they had lobbied to keep the price of water artificially low, arguing that agriculture was the only stability they had. the opportunity for economic stability offered by the world’s largest aquifer, however, was squandered for immediate gain. The only inference one can draw is that the states felt confident that when they ran out of water, the rest of the country would be willing to rescue them.

A
s deputy chief of planning for the Bureau of Reclamation in the mid-1960s, Jim Casey saw things from a fundamentally different perspective than the farmers, or, for that matter, most of his eleven thousand colleagues. The main concern of the typical Bureau engineer is building a bigger and grander project than the last one. It was Casey’s job to think about what few of them did, or dared to: reservoirs silting up, river-basin funds drying up, salts building up—all the problems consigned through some unwritten conspiracy between politicians and bureaucrats to an amorphous, distant, and politically unrewarding future. Casey was, by definition, the Bureau’s Cassandra. Peering into the future, he saw no place headed for deeper trouble than the Ogallala region. If surface water can be compared with interest income, and non-renewable groundwater with capital, then much of the West was living mainly on interest income. California was milking interest and capital in about equal proportion. The plains states, however, were devouring capital as a gang of spendthrift heirs might squander a great capitalist’s fortune. To Casey’s amazement, few of the farmers seemed to realize it. “They thought the water would last until the Second Coming,” he says. Frustrated by the farmers’ blindness, he finally decided that he had better address the one group that might listen to him: the region’s bankers.