[Dialogue] We Must Honor Earth's Limits

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 by CommonDreams.org 

We Must Honor Earth's Limits 

by Pete Letheby

 

If you check out an atlas of California, you'll notice that Owens Lake is
filled in with white, not blue. That's because Los Angeles sucked it dry
decades ago. Las Vegas is considering similar plunder of groundwater
elsewhere in Nevada. And there are many other cities -- Denver, Phoenix,
Houston, Tampa, to name a few -- that have chosen to push nature's limits. 

Closer to my Nebraska home, I watch the continuing plunder of the Great
Plains' Ogallala Aquifer, the largest underground reservoir in the United
States and one of the largest on the planet. It once held as much water as
Lake Huron. It is a treasure that took millennia to accumulate. Remarkably,
it could cease to be a water source within another generation. 

And for what? To provide water to irrigators who grow surplus, subsidized
corn -- the thirstiest of grain crops. Much of this overproduction is in
semiarid Nebraska west of the 98th meridian. 

Nebraska's Ogallala drawdowns aren't yet as dramatic as elsewhere in the
Plains -- as much as 200 feet in the Texas Panhandle, according to the U.S.
Geological Survey. But Nebraska is pumping hard to catch up. And it is
important to remember, as a 2001 Kansas State University study points out,
that only 15 percent of this vast underground ocean is physically and
economically feasible to bring to the surface. 

Other big losers in this heartland water grab are rivers and streams fed by
the Ogallala. The Arkansas River, the United States' fifth longest, once
began its healthy flow near Leadville, Colo. Now a majority of the time
there is no flow in the river at Dodge City, Kan., nearly 450 miles
downstream. The river's effective headwater is another 85 miles eastward, in
Great Bend. The historic Platte River, which guided explorers and settlers
westward in the 18th and 19th centuries, has effectively dried up in central
Nebraska the past five summers. 

I would object less if the groundwater-irrigated acres in my state produced
valuable crops that can't be grown elsewhere. But this country needs more
corn like an alcoholic needs a happy hour. Our flawed federal farm policy is
partially liable. The government's price guarantee for corn encourages
overproduction, which further drives down the crop's price, which further
increases subsidy payments. 

Tragically, many of those who have been chugging so much water out of the
ground for so long, and those who have sat idly by and watched it happen,
seem most adept at blaming and justifying. The drought that has plagued much
of the western, southern and central Plains since 2000 gets most of the
blame. It's easier to fault something beyond our control than those who
actually use the water. 

Nebraska's featured solution is this: Drill 550 wells in the fragile
Sandhills -- the nation's largest dune grassland, almost as big as West
Virginia -- siphon out 450,000 acre-feet of water a year, and send it by
canal to corn growers. 

Sounds like happy hour to me. 

Proposed legislation introduced earlier this year in Nebraska would tax
water consumption. Those who use the most would pay the most tax. More than
90 percent of the aquifer's water is used for crop irrigation, according to
the Geological Survey. The bill never made it out of committee. 

There are other options toward some semblance of sustainability -- retiring
cropland, prohibiting the drilling of new wells, purchasing groundwater
rights, shifting federal subsidies from crop overproduction to environmental
stewardship. 

Whatever we do, it must be substantial. Once the Ogallala is drawn down
beyond repair -- and we are nearing that point, some hydrologists and
geologists say -- the exodus from America's rural heartland shifts from
second to third gear. Communities dependent on groundwater for consumption,
development and recreation will wither and die. 

We will be left with yet another illustration of an all-too-common American
mindset: short on vision, mired in denial and unable to comprehend nature's
limits. 

Pete Letheby is a newspaper editor and columnist in Grand Island, Neb. He
wrote this comment for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle
<http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/ART/3d10ac4f88953> , Salina,
Kan. 

C 2006 Prairie Writers Circle

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