Lolo tops another mesa and stares down at the familiar landscape of an eviscerated town, its curving streets and subdivision cul-de-sacs all sitting silent in the sun. At the very edge of the empty town, one-acre ranchettes and snazzy five-thousand-square-foot houses with dead-stick trees and dust-hill landscaping fringe a brown tumbleweed golf course. The sandtraps don’t even show any more.
When California put its first calls on the river, no one really worried. A couple of towns went begging for water. Some idiot newcomers with bad water rights stopped grazing their horses, and that was it. A few years later, people started showering real fast. And a few after that, they showered once a week. And then people started using the buckets. By then, everyone had stopped joking about how "hot" it was. It didn’t really matter how "hot" it was. The problem wasn’t lack of water or an excess of heat, not really. The problem was that 4.4 million acre-feet of water were supposed to go down the river to California. There was water; they just couldn’t touch it.
Bacigalupi makes wonderful use of the apocalyptic conflict potential inherent in the oversettlement of the Southwest. He also recognizes the narrative value of the paradoxical water law regime that governs the Colorado River Basin. Arizona, a desert state fed by a large river, slakes the thirst of its farmers and cities largely thanks to the Central Arizona Project (CAP). CAP is a massive irrigation project authorized by federal legislation in 1968 that made possible both the intensification of agriculture and the explosion in population that have sustained the state’s economy for the past few decades. But the legislation authorizing CAP also clarified that the project’s rights on the Colorado were inferior to the rights of its downstream neighbors in California.
California's rights to 4.4 million acre-feet of the Colorado were first established in 1928 by the Boulder Canyon Project Act, the federal legislation that also authorized construction of Hoover Dam. By virtue of California's seniority, Arizona can only draw water after California has its share. Consequently, every year, thousands of acre feet of water flow out of Lake Mead and into Arizona that are already earmarked for use on the fields and lawns of California.
There is nothing particularly remarkable about the fact that Arizona must take into account the needs of California when it diverts water from the river. Water consumers the world over are well aware that water management is collaborative. What makes the situation on the Colorado so explosive is that the allocations of water among the states were made based on estimates that vastly exaggerated the average amount of water that falls on the Colorado River Basin. In fact, federal statutes and treaties currently make promises to the states and to Mexico that exceed the estimated 14.6 million acre feet of water that flows down the Colorado average year. To make matters worse, suburbs continue to sprout in the desert. As water demand increases, the population becomes increasingly reliant on a water source that, in the long term, is most likely not nearly as reliable as we would hope.
Arizona’s nightmare, and the inspiration for Bacigalupi’s story, is that the overallocation of the Colorado River will eventually require holders of junior rights (the CAP for instance) to refrain from using water destined for senior rights holders (in California, for example). The scenario is not entirely fanciful. Nevada and Arizona charge that California is already using more than its allotted share of the river, and both states fear that they will never be able to get full use of the water allotted to them. In the event of a serious, prolonged drought that results in a call by senior water rights holders, CAP-supplied development in Arizona is precariously poised on the edge of extinction.
Conservation measures can certainly reduce tension along the Colorado. But there is no doubt that a prolonged shortage of water on the Colorado would be a disaster, and that the consequences of a catastrophic drought would fall on Arizona before California. And although recent accords between the Colorado Basin states have also significantly reduced anxieties along the river, the fact that the reservoirs on the river are drying up makes it difficult to be entirely optimistic about the future of the region. Desalination plants and conservation projects (like the proposed lining of the All-American canal) may reduce California’s demand on the river and ease the prospects of a ‘call’ on the Colorado. Still, growth on the peripheries of Phoenix and Las Vegas is built on a supposition of the availability of Colorado River water, and that supposition may be the result of overly optimistic projections of the regular flow of the river.
Posts
