Water history in the west is a full-service crash-course in all of 19th- and 20th-century American capitalism’s very worst tendencies. We encountered a scarce and necessary resource, understood exactly how scarce and necessary it was, then proceeded to kill each other for the chance to turn as much of it as possible into profit before all of it was gone. Now, in 2019, it’s mostly all gone and the west is burning.
The prophet of water in the west, the man who foresaw nearly every issue we’ve struggled to deal with in the last 150 years, is John Wesley Powell. What’s the best way to describe Powell? Well, to start, he was an absolute madman. Imagine a one-armed Civil War veteran turned college professor who, in 1869, decides to take four boats down the Green River, into the Colorado, and through the Grand Canyon. At the time, no one had even come close to achieving this feat. Some white settlers had seen or boated various parts of the river—a few had witnessed the Grand Canyon from the rim—and native communities had lived along some parts of Powell’s route. But, to the best of anyone’s knowledge at the time, not even the natives had attempted this entire trip by boat. The rivers were truly unknown and unknowable to Powell. He could have encountered a waterfall as extreme as Niagara Falls at any point along the way, and died instantly. And, to compound this uncertainty, Powell undertook the journey in four wooden boats, never having run a rapid before, with an entire crew of men who had also never run a rapid before.
Somehow, Powell and most of his crew survived the three-month journey. Those who didn’t survive couldn’t exactly blame Powell for their fate. At the top of a truly massive rapid in the Grand Canyon, three men abandoned the expedition, thinking they’d have better survival odds hiking than trying to run these rapids in their tender wooden boats. Only two days later, Powell and the remaining crew finished their journey, having run the intimidating rapids without issue. The three who’d abandoned them had already harassed a band of natives near the rim of the Grand Canyon and been killed.
The journey is what Powell is famous for, but his later reports are what make him a prophet of water in the west. (...)
But by the 1870s, westward expansion was in full swing. Powell saw the gradual changes in the names on maps—the area labeled “Great American Desert” moving farther west as speculators and railroad companies encouraged people to make a go of farming west of the 100th meridian. Areas that were once labeled “Great Desert” were increasingly re-dubbed “Great Plains,” and throughout the 1870s, (paid) scientists were pushing some absolutely insane theories to encourage people to move west. The most absurd of these may have been the “rain follows the plow” theory. Think Field of Dreams, but for farming. The idea was that once people started farming in dry regions, rain would naturally come. When you plowed soil, even very bad and seemingly un-arable soil, the plowing would just automatically release trapped moisture into the atmosphere. This was, of course, nonsense. At heart, the “great plains” and “rain follows the plow” were marketing slogans, an early instance of real estate developers rebranding a previously undesirable area to turn a profit.
Powell’s reports attempted to show just how hopeless much of this project was. The Homestead Acts were granting western lands (to people but also to corporations, and with very high rates of fraud) in 160-acre tracts. This tract size made sense in the east where irrigation wasn’t necessary. But 160 acres was too large a tract to productively irrigate, and too small a tract to use as unirrigated land in the west. And, Powell calculated, even if you put every ounce of freshwater in the western U.S. to work irrigating farmland, you would still only be able to produce crops from 1-3 percent of the available land. There just wasn’t enough water.
The problem was complex, and so was Powell’s solution. He pushed for a slow, orderly, well-researched expansion of irrigated agriculture using publicly-constructed dams to collect and store water. And, rather than the eastern U.S. method of granting water rights only to those who owned land that touched the river or stream that the water came from, Powell suggested employing a use-permit system to regulate and trade water rights. (The land-adjoining water rights system is called “riparianism,” while the use-based system in the west is called “prior appropriation.” Read the Wikipedia articles for these and you will have learned a good deal of what they’d teach you in a water law class at a top law school.) Finally, Powell recommended organizing our political boundaries to facilitate the communal use and cooperative regulation of water resources. That is, he thought state boundaries in the west should conform to watersheds. This would mean that state governments and residents would have purview over their entire water system and wouldn’t have to fight with other states over upstream or downstream uses.
Two of Powell’s recommendations were implemented, though likely not in the way he would have preferred. In the early- and mid-20th century, the U.S. embarked on an epic dam-building spree. But much of this building was driven less by need for water storage and electrical power than by competition for funding between two giant federal bureaucracies. Marc Reisner’s exhaustive and surprisingly thrilling retelling of the battle between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers in Cadillac Desert is the authoritative history on this point. Reisner documents decades through which the agencies battled to outmaneuver each other, spending billions to build thousands of dams just to make sure the other agency didn’t build them first.
The beneficiaries of the dam-building extravaganza were largely agricultural interests in the surrounding areas. More dams than could possibly be justified meant relatively large water stores. A combination of the mythology around small American farmers and the reality of agribusiness lobbying power meant that agricultural interests could reap direct benefits from these federal projects, mostly through heavily subsidized water, power prices, and food control. Far from Powell’s vision of watershed-based communities managing their water resources according to their local best interests, government and industry joined forces to turn Powell’s somewhat communitarian or at least localist vision into a capitalist suicide pact. This is not to say that all dams are bad or unnecessary—they are a valuable water management and power-generating tool. But a lot of dams that exist right now are both bad and unnecessary.
The western U.S. also adopted Powell’s recommendation for a water rights system. Most of the west now uses a prior appropriation system for allocating water rights rather than a riparian system. This means that water rights are divorced from land ownership: Anyone who can access water can make a claim to it, and those claims operate on a first come, first served basis. So if water sources dry up, the senior rights holders are the most protected, while newer users are left out to dry, both figuratively and literally.
Like dams, this is not an unreasonable system on its own. But it has combined with crafty capital and legal maneuvering to disastrous effect. First, to hold your water right, you have to use it. This means that nearly all water is going to get used, because there’s no formal protection (in the system as first conceived—things are slightly better now) for letting water run its natural course. Throughout the west, water systems have seen the complete loss of native wildlife populations and increasingly compromised water supplies, as water is taken out of rivers to irrigate land and returned to the water system in lower quantities and with higher salt content.
Second, water rights can be purchased and the water diverted far away. This is what allowed someone like William Mulholland in Los Angeles to buy up the entire Owens River and divert it to the San Fernando Valley, turning the Owens River Valley from “the Switzerland of California” into a desert, drying up Owens Lake, and massively increasing the value of Mulholland’s own properties in San Fernando. The battles over the Owens River are also covered in Reisner’s book. They involve spies within the Bureau of Reclamation, lies and grift and outright theft to obtain water rights, locals dynamiting the L.A. aqueduct, and Mulholland mustering an army of 600 gun-toting LAPD officers and transporting them hundreds of miles inland to protect his waterways. In case you’re wondering how all that turned out, the Owens River Valley is still a desert, nearly the entire river goes west via aqueduct, and Mulholland Drive is one of the fanciest streets in L.A.
It should come as no surprise that Powell’s vision of cautious and sustainable water use in the west was never fully realized. An additional part of the puzzle that Powell failed to foresee was the use of groundwater. Massive underground aquifers underlie much of the U.S., and the western states have managed to produce agriculture in an area marginally larger than Powell’s 1-3 percent estimate thanks to the use of that groundwater. The problem, of course, is that groundwater is largely a non-renewable resource. Depending on the type of aquifer, it might recharge slowly or not at all. And the coastal aquifers, like the one underlying Santa Barbara, are at risk of seawater intrusion if they’re drawn down too low.
And have we managed this non-renewable resource in a reasonable way to preserve it for as long as possible? Spoiler: We have not. In fact, officials in charge of regulating groundwater have always been well aware that it was a non-renewable resource, and decided to exhaust it anyway. The former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board described their decision to use the state’s groundwater supply over the course of 25 to 50 years like this: “What are you going to do with all that water? Are you going to leave it in the ground? . . . Well, when we use it up, we’ll just have to get more water from somewhere else.” The New Mexico State Engineer openly admitted the same: “We made a conscious decision to mine out our share of the Oglalla (aquifer) in a period of twenty-five to forty years.” It has been more than 40 years since these programs started.
The prophet of water in the west, the man who foresaw nearly every issue we’ve struggled to deal with in the last 150 years, is John Wesley Powell. What’s the best way to describe Powell? Well, to start, he was an absolute madman. Imagine a one-armed Civil War veteran turned college professor who, in 1869, decides to take four boats down the Green River, into the Colorado, and through the Grand Canyon. At the time, no one had even come close to achieving this feat. Some white settlers had seen or boated various parts of the river—a few had witnessed the Grand Canyon from the rim—and native communities had lived along some parts of Powell’s route. But, to the best of anyone’s knowledge at the time, not even the natives had attempted this entire trip by boat. The rivers were truly unknown and unknowable to Powell. He could have encountered a waterfall as extreme as Niagara Falls at any point along the way, and died instantly. And, to compound this uncertainty, Powell undertook the journey in four wooden boats, never having run a rapid before, with an entire crew of men who had also never run a rapid before.
Somehow, Powell and most of his crew survived the three-month journey. Those who didn’t survive couldn’t exactly blame Powell for their fate. At the top of a truly massive rapid in the Grand Canyon, three men abandoned the expedition, thinking they’d have better survival odds hiking than trying to run these rapids in their tender wooden boats. Only two days later, Powell and the remaining crew finished their journey, having run the intimidating rapids without issue. The three who’d abandoned them had already harassed a band of natives near the rim of the Grand Canyon and been killed.The journey is what Powell is famous for, but his later reports are what make him a prophet of water in the west. (...)
But by the 1870s, westward expansion was in full swing. Powell saw the gradual changes in the names on maps—the area labeled “Great American Desert” moving farther west as speculators and railroad companies encouraged people to make a go of farming west of the 100th meridian. Areas that were once labeled “Great Desert” were increasingly re-dubbed “Great Plains,” and throughout the 1870s, (paid) scientists were pushing some absolutely insane theories to encourage people to move west. The most absurd of these may have been the “rain follows the plow” theory. Think Field of Dreams, but for farming. The idea was that once people started farming in dry regions, rain would naturally come. When you plowed soil, even very bad and seemingly un-arable soil, the plowing would just automatically release trapped moisture into the atmosphere. This was, of course, nonsense. At heart, the “great plains” and “rain follows the plow” were marketing slogans, an early instance of real estate developers rebranding a previously undesirable area to turn a profit.
Powell’s reports attempted to show just how hopeless much of this project was. The Homestead Acts were granting western lands (to people but also to corporations, and with very high rates of fraud) in 160-acre tracts. This tract size made sense in the east where irrigation wasn’t necessary. But 160 acres was too large a tract to productively irrigate, and too small a tract to use as unirrigated land in the west. And, Powell calculated, even if you put every ounce of freshwater in the western U.S. to work irrigating farmland, you would still only be able to produce crops from 1-3 percent of the available land. There just wasn’t enough water.
The problem was complex, and so was Powell’s solution. He pushed for a slow, orderly, well-researched expansion of irrigated agriculture using publicly-constructed dams to collect and store water. And, rather than the eastern U.S. method of granting water rights only to those who owned land that touched the river or stream that the water came from, Powell suggested employing a use-permit system to regulate and trade water rights. (The land-adjoining water rights system is called “riparianism,” while the use-based system in the west is called “prior appropriation.” Read the Wikipedia articles for these and you will have learned a good deal of what they’d teach you in a water law class at a top law school.) Finally, Powell recommended organizing our political boundaries to facilitate the communal use and cooperative regulation of water resources. That is, he thought state boundaries in the west should conform to watersheds. This would mean that state governments and residents would have purview over their entire water system and wouldn’t have to fight with other states over upstream or downstream uses.
Two of Powell’s recommendations were implemented, though likely not in the way he would have preferred. In the early- and mid-20th century, the U.S. embarked on an epic dam-building spree. But much of this building was driven less by need for water storage and electrical power than by competition for funding between two giant federal bureaucracies. Marc Reisner’s exhaustive and surprisingly thrilling retelling of the battle between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers in Cadillac Desert is the authoritative history on this point. Reisner documents decades through which the agencies battled to outmaneuver each other, spending billions to build thousands of dams just to make sure the other agency didn’t build them first.
The beneficiaries of the dam-building extravaganza were largely agricultural interests in the surrounding areas. More dams than could possibly be justified meant relatively large water stores. A combination of the mythology around small American farmers and the reality of agribusiness lobbying power meant that agricultural interests could reap direct benefits from these federal projects, mostly through heavily subsidized water, power prices, and food control. Far from Powell’s vision of watershed-based communities managing their water resources according to their local best interests, government and industry joined forces to turn Powell’s somewhat communitarian or at least localist vision into a capitalist suicide pact. This is not to say that all dams are bad or unnecessary—they are a valuable water management and power-generating tool. But a lot of dams that exist right now are both bad and unnecessary.
The western U.S. also adopted Powell’s recommendation for a water rights system. Most of the west now uses a prior appropriation system for allocating water rights rather than a riparian system. This means that water rights are divorced from land ownership: Anyone who can access water can make a claim to it, and those claims operate on a first come, first served basis. So if water sources dry up, the senior rights holders are the most protected, while newer users are left out to dry, both figuratively and literally.
Like dams, this is not an unreasonable system on its own. But it has combined with crafty capital and legal maneuvering to disastrous effect. First, to hold your water right, you have to use it. This means that nearly all water is going to get used, because there’s no formal protection (in the system as first conceived—things are slightly better now) for letting water run its natural course. Throughout the west, water systems have seen the complete loss of native wildlife populations and increasingly compromised water supplies, as water is taken out of rivers to irrigate land and returned to the water system in lower quantities and with higher salt content.
Second, water rights can be purchased and the water diverted far away. This is what allowed someone like William Mulholland in Los Angeles to buy up the entire Owens River and divert it to the San Fernando Valley, turning the Owens River Valley from “the Switzerland of California” into a desert, drying up Owens Lake, and massively increasing the value of Mulholland’s own properties in San Fernando. The battles over the Owens River are also covered in Reisner’s book. They involve spies within the Bureau of Reclamation, lies and grift and outright theft to obtain water rights, locals dynamiting the L.A. aqueduct, and Mulholland mustering an army of 600 gun-toting LAPD officers and transporting them hundreds of miles inland to protect his waterways. In case you’re wondering how all that turned out, the Owens River Valley is still a desert, nearly the entire river goes west via aqueduct, and Mulholland Drive is one of the fanciest streets in L.A.
It should come as no surprise that Powell’s vision of cautious and sustainable water use in the west was never fully realized. An additional part of the puzzle that Powell failed to foresee was the use of groundwater. Massive underground aquifers underlie much of the U.S., and the western states have managed to produce agriculture in an area marginally larger than Powell’s 1-3 percent estimate thanks to the use of that groundwater. The problem, of course, is that groundwater is largely a non-renewable resource. Depending on the type of aquifer, it might recharge slowly or not at all. And the coastal aquifers, like the one underlying Santa Barbara, are at risk of seawater intrusion if they’re drawn down too low.
And have we managed this non-renewable resource in a reasonable way to preserve it for as long as possible? Spoiler: We have not. In fact, officials in charge of regulating groundwater have always been well aware that it was a non-renewable resource, and decided to exhaust it anyway. The former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board described their decision to use the state’s groundwater supply over the course of 25 to 50 years like this: “What are you going to do with all that water? Are you going to leave it in the ground? . . . Well, when we use it up, we’ll just have to get more water from somewhere else.” The New Mexico State Engineer openly admitted the same: “We made a conscious decision to mine out our share of the Oglalla (aquifer) in a period of twenty-five to forty years.” It has been more than 40 years since these programs started.
by Sparky Abraham, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
