Cadillac Desert (82 page)

The Dust Bowl occurred after a profitable wheat market had coincided for years with, by plains standards, a spell of abundant moisture. Prices were high enough to inspire greed; the farmers began plowing up everything in sight. Millions of acres of fragile, highly erodable land, from New Mexico all the way up to the Dakotas, had their sod pierced and replaced by wheat. The farmers actually began going bust before the drought even began; a glutted market, international competition, high tariffs, and the impoverished condition of postwar Europe conspired to do them in. The Dust Bowl was the
coup de grâce.

The second Dust Bowl is apt to result from hardship rather than 1920s-style prosperity, though the pattern of land abuse will be pretty much the same. As the Ogallala aquifer steadily runs out and the surviving farmers watch their debts mount and their living standards decline, they will be forced by financial need to acquire and dry-farm as much new land as they can. Unless they can still afford to pump irrigation water on an emergency basis during droughts—if there is any water left to pump under their land—they will no longer be guaranteed a respectable harvest every year. Because of the high profits of irrigation, the plains farmers took a lot of marginal farmland out of production over the past few decades. They could afford to. Now it is likely to be returned to the plow. In the East, marginal land usually means rocks or swamps or steep hillsides. On the rockless, swampless, tabletop plains, it usually means fine sand. Most of western Nebraska is sand; so is a lot of eastern New Mexico and West Texas. In western Kiowa County, Colorado, 150,000 acres of sandy Class VI land (Class I is the best) are
already
in production, losing twenty tons of topsoil or more a year. There is also a lot of marginal land in production in the Portales region of eastern New Mexico.

The winds blow hardest on the southern plains in late winter and early spring—days of sixty-mile-per-hour gusts ripping across empty space, powered by convoluted airflows battling one another. On February 23, 1977, some of those winds blew into Portales country and began raising dust. A dust storm works on the principle of an avalanche: wind scours up some loose soil and forms a dense, stinging cloud of fine particles, which scours up more loose soil, and more, and more, until the horizon is filled by an advancing wave several thousand feet high, churning and swirling millions of tons of suspended matter. When these storms were first sighted in the 1930s, farmers ran inside their houses, fearing torrential rain. When they went back outside, their homes had lost their paint and their chickens were featherless. The Portales storm, which lasted only about a day and a half, removed forty tons of topsoil per acre from parts of Roosevelt and Kiowa counties—as much topsoil loss as rainfall causes in a year in the most erosion-prone parts of the East, and about three centuries’ worth of topsoil formation on the arid plains. Early in 1984, the same thing happened in parts of West Texas, south of Lubbock. One reason the storms did not grow out of control was that a lot of the surrounding irrigated land was being prepared for planting, and was wet.

Wayne Wyatt, the manager of the Texas High Plains Underground Water Conservation District in Lubbock—a man now presiding over the most desperate water-conservation effort in the United States—does not believe irrigation will end on the southern plains in a spectacular cloud of dust. “In the thirties,” says Wyatt, “most of the farmers were still plowing with mules. They had power to dig down about four or five inches. Now they have hundred-horsepower tractors, which can easily bring up soil from two feet. It’s either wet or it’s clayey enough to hold against the wind. The only way I can see another Dust Bowl is if we have a real long drought. If it goes on for years in a row and the farmers can’t even manage one crop in between, and if it affects this whole country and not just a piece of it, then maybe it could happen again. But this region has never known a drought like that. Even during the big one, there were a couple of years when you could raise a dryland crop.” I asked Wyatt how far back climatic records go on the southern plains. “They go back to about the 1880s” was his response.

Wyatt, a courtly ex-farmer (“I beat my brains out trying to make a go of it”) who speaks in an almost opaque drawl, is rather optimistic about the future of the plains. “Half of the land around Lubbock is still dry-farmed. Farmers have been getting crops for forty, fifty years. Their costs are that much lower that they can make a profit, somehow. And I’m not sure the aquifer is going to run out so fast. Conservation is a religion around here now. We have farmers who’ve cut their water use in half. Anyone who doesn’t conserve tends to lose his friends fast. We’ve begun experimenting with capillary water—the water that the soil draws up from the aquifer and that saturates the layer above it. You can’t pump it, but by injecting compressed air into the soil there, you squeze it out like a sponge and it drains into the aquifer. Our economist thinks capillary water could be available for $25 to $50 an acre-foot. The farmers can lease air compressors from the oil industry as their reserves give out. Then you still have to pump the water up, but with enough conservation I think they can afford it. Capillary water could prolong the life of the Ogallala by another twenty to forty years.”

This, then, is the plains region today—a place that is reverting, slowly and steadily, into an amphitheater of natural forces toying with its inhabitants’ fate. Besides the constant threat of drought and wind, there are half a dozen other swords suspended over their heads. They are as vulnerable to nuclear powerplant fiascos in Washington State as they are to the debt crisis in Latin America. A couple of percentage-point increases in interest rates coupled with a collapse of the nuclear industry (which would put a premium on oil and gas), all of it occurring when rainfall drops from eighteen inches to twelve, could send them into a death spiral of debt, cost, and dust that might seal their fate. Meanwhile, the promise of water arriving from somewhere else when the aquifer begins running out is slipping almost out of view. Touring the region and speaking with farmers and politicians and bankers, one doesn’t hear much of rescue anymore, though the subject is on everyone’s mind. According to Steve Reynolds, the former state engineer of New Mexico, the odds against a rescue project being built “have gone from maybe fifty-fifty twenty years ago to eighty-twenty against today.” Reynolds said he “frankly doesn’t see how society will make this kind of investment in our behalf”—this despite his region’s “tremendously important contribution to America’s agricultural export production, the only thing that lets us pay for all we import.” But then he spread his lanky frame out in his chair, scratched a plaster of mud off his boot (one of Steve Reynolds’s leisure activities was walking along his state’s meager rivers and pulling phreatophytes out by their roots), and began to veer toward one of his favorite subjects: microwave energy stations in space. “One of those microwave satellites could produce ten thousand megawatts of power. That’s enough to power the whole project. I’ve never felt that we should give up on space. It’s our last frontier, and we need one. One of these microwave satellites would be a way to make space exploration economically useful.”

Even the economists who have looked into a water-importation project for the plains and pronounced it absurd seem unable to give up on the idea—such is our reluctance to let nature regain control, to suffer the fate of nearly all the irrigated civilizations of antiquity. In 1982, the High Plains—Ogallala Aquifer Region study projected an impossible cost of $300 to $800 per acre-foot for water imported into the region. But then it added: “The only long-term solution to declining groundwater supplies and maintaining a permanent irrigated agricultural economy in most of the High Plains region is the development of alternate water supplies.... Although emerging technologies for local water supply augmentation offer some potential for alleviating the overdraft of the aquifer, none can provide sustained and replenishable supplies to meet the region’s needs. [Therefore] regional water transfer potentials ... should be
continued and expanded to feasibility and planning levels”
(emphasis added).

Such investigations, the authors added in a cryptic sentence whose meaning will become clear later on, “should be international as well as national in scope.”

The overdraft of groundwater on the high plains is the greatest in the nation, in the world, in all of human history—but it is merely an enormous manifestation of a common phenomenon throughout the West. On the east side of the San Joaquin Valley in California, enough groundwater disappears every year to supply Illinois. The overdraft is projected nearly to double in eighteen years. Tucson and El Paso have fewer than eighty years of water left even after raiding neighboring basins; they will have to get more from somewhere else. The overdraft in Arizona is rapidly forcing the state into an urban economy. There is a serious overdraft in parts of central and eastern Oregon, which pales so much beside the Ogallala, Arizona, and California overdrafts one hardly hears it mentioned outside the state. Groundwater overdraft is, moreover, a phenomenon not limited to the West. Long Island, sitting atop a closed-basin aquifer, is both depleting it and poisoning it with chemical wastes; where it could go for more water is an interesting question, since there isn’t any available within four or five hundred miles that anyone seems willing to give up.

Of all these places, the only one that now appears likely to bring its use of water in balance with its supply is Arizona, mainly because it has little choice. The probable result, of course, is that irrigation farming will largely disappear unless Colorado River water, brought in through the Central Arizona Project, is sold to the farmers at incredibly subsidized rates. It was in Arizona, by ironic coincidence, that the only great desert civilization ever established in North America in earlier times disappeared—either for want of water, or, perhaps more likely, because of a surfeit of salt.

A
few hundred million years ago, the waters of the oceans were A still fresh enough to drink. It is the earth that contains the mineral salts one tastes in seawater. The salts are in all runoff, leached out of rock and soil. The runoff concentrates in rivers, which end up in the oceans—or, as in the case of Mono Lake and Great Salt Lake, in closed-basin sumps up to seven times saltier than the sea. Once in the ocean, the salts have no place to go; the seas are stuck with them. When the water is evaporated, the salts remain behind; when the water falls as rain and becomes runoff again, a fresh batch of salts washes in.

Like DDT in pelican egg shells, the salts in the oceans are testimony to the effects of concentration. As the evaporative cycle is repeated, day after day, year after year, millennium after millennium, eon after eon, the oceans grow saltier all the time. On March 24, 1992, the dissolved salt content in ocean water off San Francisco was about thirty-five thousand parts per million, perhaps a fraction of a ppm higher than it was ten thousand years ago. The process is so incredibly slow and immense that, for once, no act of man seems capable of affecting it by the tiniest measurable iota. What is changing—what has changed drastically in the very recent past—is the concentration of salts in some of the world’s rivers, and in some of its preeminent agricultural land.

Explaining the collapse of ancient civilizations is a cottage industry within the anthropological and archaeological professions, like the riddle of the dinosaurs. The explanations vary considerably. Some blame their demise on chronic human failings: degeneracy, conflict, war. The decline of Rome, according to some, was the result of the Romans’ use of lead in their eating and drinking utensils; since lead causes irreversible brain damage if eaten or ingested in fairly small amounts, the theory offers a tempting explanation for the obviously demented behavior of certain Roman leaders. (It does not, however, explain why most Romans were demonstrably sane, or why there was so much genius about.) Because most of the great civilizations rose in deserts or semideserts, a popular explanation has always been drought—a drought beyond any that modern mankind has known, perhaps caused by aberrant sunspot cycles or some huge volcanic eruptions that changed the climate.

The most fruitful of the ancient cultures grew up at the southeastern end of the Fertile Crescent, the broad valley formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq. From there civilization appears to have spread eastward into Persia, and on to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China. Later, it spread to the west. Most of the Romans’ fabled feats of hydrologic engineering were borrowed from the Assyrians, who borrowed them from their predecessors, the Sumerians. In the seventh century B.C., the Assyrians, under Sennacherib, built an inverted siphon into the Nineveh Aqueduct, a feat of hydrologic engineering which was not really improved upon until New York City built a pressurized siphon into its second Croton Aqueduct in the 1860s. For all its precocious brilliance and innovation, however, the southern part of the Fertile Crescent went into eclipse around the year 2000 B.C. When Babylon rose in the eighteenth century B.C., many impressive Sumerian cities lay in ruins around it, as Babylon itself would lie desolated centuries later.

The story was repeated nearly everywhere, even in the New World, where a number of remarkable civilizations arose and prospered independently. One of the most impressive was the Hohokam civilization, in central Arizona, which left as its legacy some seven hundred miles of irrigation canals. Sometime around the fourteenth century, however, the Hohokam vanished—reason unknown. The Inca, Aztec, and Maya used irrigation, too, though they didn’t rely on it as absolutely as the Hohokam. Their fate was sealed by European invaders, so it is perhaps idle speculation whether they would ultimately have gone the route of their predeceessors in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. Whatever the answer, it appears that only one civilization completely dependent on irrigation managed to survive uninterruptedly for thousands of years. That civilization was Egypt—but Egypt was fundamentally different from the others in one way.