America Is Still Running Out of Water

Yahoo News, September 6, 2013

For much of the last week, policymakers' eyes have been trained overseas, as President Obama tries to convince Congress (and the public) that the country must intervene in Syria. Some of those against a military strike on the region have called on Obama to focus on the issues at home: slow job growth, immigration reform, and the debt ceiling, which is expected to be hit next month.

But there's another, rarely cited domestic issue that will likely be placed on the back burner, along with the others, now that Congress has returned from summer recess. And it's one that, if taken to the extreme, makes a budget-crisis-induced government shutdown seem a little less worrisome.

The United States is running out of fresh water. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., reminded the public of that at a conference Thursday in Albuquerque, N.M. Udall, who voted no to a resolution authorizing U.S. military intervention that ultimately passed, wants the country to focus on such domestic issues. "I don't think this is the time for us to get embroiled in the Syrian civil war," he told NPR on Thursday.

Global water consumption has tripled in the last 50 years. In the United States, the demand for fresh water will exceed the supply by 40 percent by the year 2030, according to a State Department report last year. Water scarcity results from short- and long-term droughts and human activity.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, at least 36 states are faced with local or regional water shortages. In New Mexico, the Rio Grande is on the World Wildlife Fund's list of the top 10 endangered rivers in the world. Last summer, residential wells in the Midwest, from Indiana to Missouri, began drying up, making it difficult to "wash dishes, or fill a coffee urn, even to flush the toilet," TheNew York Timesreported. In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry swore in board members on Wednesday to oversee the divvying up of $2 billion to finance water projects.

"The danger is clear, and we have to act to protect our way of life in the West," Udall said at the conference. Next week, he will propose what he called a modest amendment, one that would grant $15 million for water pilot projects nationwide, to a Senate bill on energy efficiency.

Each month, 3.9 trillion gallons of water are consumed in the U.S. For many Americans, the idea that the country might someday run out of fresh water is unfathomable. That possibility is also extremely far off. There is, however, a chance that the country will start feeling some of the effects of a shrinking water supply much sooner. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a practice that many feel could give the U.S. energy independence, requires millions of gallons of water every day to extract natural gas from the earth. Nearly all of that water is lost.

Updated: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 16:49:22 GMT | By Brian Brown

The Last Drop: America's Breadbasket Is Running Out of Water

Editor's note: This story is one in a series on a crisis in America's Breadbasket –the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer and its effects on a region that helps feed the world.

VEGA, Texas–While a high-pitched wind rattles the windows, and assaults a flapping, fraying American flag in the front yard, Lucas Spinhirne knows he’s staring into an abyss that many in Texas—and across the world—may be forced to contemplate.

The once bounteous quantities of water that flowed under his farmland in the Texas Panhandle are a distant memory–pumped to the last drop. Now there is only one source of water for his wheat and sorghum: the sky above. “We try to catch anything that falls,” Spinhirne says.

The scope of this mounting crisis is difficult to overstate: The High Plains of Texas are swiftly running out of groundwater supplied by one of the world’s largest aquifers – the Ogallala. A study by Texas Tech University has predicted that if groundwater production goes unabated, vast portions of several counties in the southern High Plains will soon have little water left in the aquifer to be of any practical value.

The Ogallala Aquifer spreads across eight states, from Texas to South Dakota, covering 111.8 million acres and 175,000 square miles. It’s the fountain of life not only for much of the Texas Panhandle, but also for the entire American Breadbasket of the Great Plains, a highly-sophisticated, amazingly-productive agricultural region that literally helps feed the world.

This catastrophic depletion is primarily manmade. By the early eighties, automated center-pivot irrigation devices were in wide use – those familiar spidery-armed wings processing in a circle atop wheeled tripods. This super-sized sprinkler system allowed farmers to water crops more regularly and effectively, which both significantly increased crop yields and precipitously drained the Ogallala.

Compounding the drawdown has been the nature of the Ogallala itself. Created 10 million years ago, this buried fossil water is–in many places—not recharged by precipitation or surface water. When it’s gone, it’s gone for centuries.

If the American Breadbasket cannot help supply ever-growing food demands, billions could starve.

“This country became what it became largely because we had water security,” says Venki Uddameri, Ph.D., director of the Water Resources Center at Texas Tech. “That’s being threatened to a large degree now.”

With the world population increasing, and other critical global aquifers suffering equally dramatic declines, scientists acknowledge that if the American Breadbasket cannot help supply ever-growing food demands, billions could starve.

“The depletion of the Ogallala is an internationally important crisis,” says Burke Griggs, Ph.D., consulting professor at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. “How individual states manage the depletion of that aquifer will obviously have international consequences.”

The Spinhirne farm is west of Amarillo, not far from Cadillac Ranch – that classic roadside attraction with 10 versions of the luxury car potted tail up. It’s a hostile landscape of swirling dust tornadoes, baked soil, skin-chapping air without a shred of humidity.

Needing to maximize rainfall, and with the soil ready to be swooped away by constant prairie winds, the Spinhirnes– like all dryland farmers on the Plains, who work without irrigation–carefully groom their land with a kind of agricultural artistry. They poke thousands of small holes to create dikes that capture and hold water, and they craft rows of dirt clumps and earthen walls to keep the ground from going airborne.

But still, the dirt swirls—it’s officially year four of a punishing drought that many say is even worse than the Dust Bowl days of the 30s.

Bruce Spinhirne, Lucas’ brother, shows a visitor a recent photo of the city of Lubbock, two hours away, about to be enveloped in a monstrous cloud of dust. “All of a sudden, the whole sky got an orange hue to it,” says Bruce, who works on new breeds of drought-resistant corn for DuPont Pioneer. “That’s the worst, because the smaller particles of your soil get picked up and moved away. Those are the things that hold your water, help you with fertility.”

Scenes like that are what make farmer Dale Artho, a friend and neighbor of the Spinhirnes’, say there’s little point discussing doomsday predictions by climate scientists. Doomsday, he’ll tell you, has already happened in Vega – in the summer of 2011.

“It was June 26,” Artho says. “We were 114 degrees, with winds 40 to 50 miles per hour. The corn just turned white. The water that was in the plant – it just bleached it. It was ugly.”

In the Texas Panhandle, the race to survive a frightening new normal is well underway.

“We’re headed for a brick wall at 100 miles per hour,” says James Mahan, Bruce Spinhirne’s father-in-law and a plant physiologist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service lab in Lubbock. “And, really, the effects of climate change are branches hitting the windshield along the way.”

For Lucas Spinhirne, the greatest casualty of losing his Vega farm would not be economic, but intangible – the loss of a deeply-embedded and deeply-enriching sense of community.

“In high school, we had a neighbor of ours who lost his wife,” he says. “And that day we all showed up. Everybody planted his wheat, cut his corn, and most every bit of his farming got done in one day. In the city, people will help you out some. But they’re not going to do everything you have to do in the next couple of months in one day.”

The ubiquitous Lone Star state flag testifies to how much Texans value their independence. This sentiment is also reflected in the state’s water law, based on the concept of “right to capture.” In short, if you own the land, you and only you own the water.

No other state’s water law allows such unfettered individual control. The danger, especially apparent as the Ogallala disappears, is that it favors an individual motivated to turn a profit in the present day above community needs of the future.

The Texas law allowed billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens to sell trillions of gallons of Ogallala Aquifer water beneath 211,000 acres surrounding his majestic Mesa Vista ranch, in Roberts County, near the Texas-Oklahoma border. In 2011, the now 85-year-old sold his water rights for $103 million to 11 water-impoverished cities nearby, including Lubbock and Amarillo.

“Here’s a guy selling a natural resource which is almost universally recognized – except in Texas – as a public resource,” says Griggs.

Another outcome of the right-to-capture philosophy underlies the seemingly tardy conservation efforts of the High Plains Water District, the largest in Texas, encompassing 16 counties.

Elsewhere, particularly in Kansas, farmers irrigating where the Ogallala is shallowest are required to meter their wells, observe water-use restrictions, and are fined for not doing so.

Landowners in the HPWD – even today – can choose to suck their portion of the Ogallala dry any time they like.

Finally, some 63 years after its birth, the water district does expect to have mandatory restrictions in place by the end of the year. Meanwhile, travelers to this region confront a procession of collapsing communities.

In the ghostly town of Earth, the Dairy Queen is pockmarked as if in a war zone. Tiny Lockney -- population 1,900 and running out of water – recently had to buy 82 acres of nearby Ogallala-fed land for $605,000. In Plainview, the double dose of drought and the diminishing Ogallala caused the closing of the Cargill beef-processing plant, eliminating 2,000 jobs.

“The last 50 years, we haven’t been proactive enough with water conservation,” says Glen Schur, whose farm is within a few miles of the closed Cargill plant in Plainview.

Though one part of this Texas story is truly terrifying, Schur represents another way forward, by embracing technological advances and displaying bottom-up leadership.

“The majority of us wish the water district would just set the rules,” he says. “Let’s get them adopted. It’s less than 10 percent of the producers who are opposed.”

The HPWD will likely mandate that its farmers limit their irrigation to 18 inches a year. That won’t be a problem for Schur. He’s been radically conserving water for years. In part, it’s so his son Layton – studying agriculture at Texas Tech – will have water to pump when he takes over the business.

“It’s not only our livelihoods. The rest of the world is relying on us.”

Schur is also typical of a generation of wired farmers geared for relentless adaptation. He operates the largest production-made machinery on the planet; can control his irrigating systems remotely on his mobile device, even thousands of miles away; and he knew instantly that his wheat crop gained value when Russia annexed Crimea.

As a willing guinea pig for the USDA lab in Lubbock, a kind of space program for agriculture, Schur uses a digital, infrared thermometer for plants developed there. As with humans, a plant’s temperature is a fundamental indication of its health – and by extension, its day-to-day water requirements.

The lab works in tandem not only with farmers, but also freely shares all of its work with private enterprise. The infrared technology began as a small, speculative $60,000 government project; it’s now a multi-million dollar business called Smartfield.

“Right now, we’re producing a whole lot more grain, and a whole lot more cotton in the High Plains of Texas with less water than what we had,” Schur says. “And with the adaptation of new technology, we’re finding new and better ways to produce more food with less water.”

“It’s not only our livelihoods,” he says. “The rest of the world is relying on us.”

In Texas, as the last drops are being pulled from the Ogallala and years of desert-like conditions persist, farmers are fighting back with every tool the digital age can provide. But what’s truly keeping them on the land is a bottomless well of resilience.

“We got our faith in the Good Lord,” says Schur. “He’s the one who provides. He’s the one who determines what we’re going to make … But, you know, he’s certainly testing our patience.”

With additional reporting by Gil Aegerter.

AMERICA IS RUNNING OUT OF WATER

Written by: Brittany Malooly

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Although most Americans believe water scarcity occurs only in countries where Angelina Jolie campaigns for peace, two of the world’s most overexerted rivers are right here in the United States. According to the World Resource Institute, both the Colorado and Rio Grande suffer from extremely high stress, meaning that we annually withdraw more than 80 percent of each river’s renewable water supply, and at least a third of the US exhibits medium to high water stress or greater.

Take Lake Mead. Located outside Las Vegas, the lake has experienced an alarming decline in elevation. The US Bureau of Reclamation commissioned the Hoover Dam in 1931 to protect the water needs of the area, but according to the Las Vegas Sun, experts predict that Lake Mead could run dry by 2050, with declining power generation possibly occurring in as little as a year. According to the Sun, the Colorado River “provides drinking water for 36 million Americans, supplies irrigation for 15 percent of the nation’s crops, and supports a $26 billion recreation economy that employs 250,000 people." In other words, if Lake Mead dries out, we’re fucked.

What should we do to fix this and other water problems? Glen MacDonald, a UCLA distinguished professor, a UC presidential chair, and the director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, believes he has the answers. I emailed him to discuss America’s water problem, the issues in the Southwest, and what the government can do to save our water supply.

VICE: Where do you think our biggest threat lies in terms of water scarcity?
Glen MacDonald: In the United States, we are so used to turning on the taps and getting clean water that we forget this is not the way it is in many parts of the world, or that in a state like California we need about 80 percent of the water we apply to grow the food we eat. We urbanites forget about the huge needs of water for agriculture and the problems that drought can cause for farmers and ranchers, even in a rich country like the United States.

Which industries, in your opinion, could make changes that would produce the biggest drop in global water consumption and river stress?
The biggest use of water is agriculture. However, in California many farmers are using water pretty well relative to the crops they grow. Getting efficiencies in irrigation while protecting crop yield is getting increasingly difficult as the easy fixes have already been applied in many cases. Perhaps we need a movement by consumers to favor water-wise food choices and crops. [This will] help incentivize the growing of crops which are efficient in terms of water per yield, provide healthy and diverse food choices, and allow farmers to make a living. This is an important area with exciting possibilities.

What do you think about population control as a part of the solution to the global water crisis?
I believe that if we work together we can supply good clean water to meet projected population growth in this century. As economic status, educational status, and freedom increases, population-growth rates tend to decline naturally. I think we should worry about getting good clean water to people who lack it and not focus on global population head counting.  

What about reclaimed water?
Reclaimed water is part of the solution in arid cities. It can be gray water used for irrigation, or it can be treated wastewater placed directly back into the water system or used to replenish groundwater and reservoir supplies first.  

What is the future of Southwestern American cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles? 
I believe that in the Southwest we may see changes in our urban landscaping as we become even more water-wise. Remember that 50 to 70 percent of urban water is typically used for landscaping. By rethinking our gardens and outdoor spaces we can conserve a lot! I think in any case that urban water supplies will be protected. Cities in the Southwest will not dry up and disappear, but the cost could be higher water rates for consumers, and less water for agriculture.

What should the government do to protect our water?
The State needs to pass a comprehensive water bond that has no pork and provides improved water infrastructure and water management—including ground water management. Problems with our groundwater supplies are a looming problem that we need to get a handle on.

What countries provide good examples of responsible water conservation that the US can follow?
I think Australia has a broad number of technologies and strategies that work to save water. [Since] their climate is similar to ours, it provides a good test bed for us to look at.

What can the average citizen implement to make a dent in water consumption?  
Most people have installed low-flow toilets and showers—if not, do it now! Tackle how much you water your outside plants. Most people over-water their gardens. If you can get rid of lawn and replace it with beautiful low-water demanding plants, by all means do it now!  We have zero lawn at our new house, and I am seeing more and more people replacing lawns and boring high-water consumption gardens with beautiful water-wise landscaping.