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Great book. Hadn't read it. Probably essential reading for those interested in the often troubled intersection of the ecosphere with civilization. One maybe can find a four hour video version. The backdrop includes mountains that create a rain shadow, which makes the shadowed parts pretty dry, then unto this land recently came farmers with something of a puritanical streak. In summary,
People figured that when the region was settled, rainfall would magically increase, that it would "follow the plow." In the late 1800s, such theories amounted to Biblical dogma. When they proved catastrophically wrong, Powell's irrigation ideas were finally embraced and pursued with near fanaticism. … In May of 1957, a very distinguished Texas historian, Walter Prescott Webb, … called the West "a semidesert with a desert heart" and said it had too dark a soul to be truly converted. The greatest national folly we could commit, Webb argued, would be to exhaust the Treasure trying to make over the West in the image of Illinois … The editors of Harper's were soon up to their knees in a flood of vitriolic mail from westerners condemning Webb as an infidel, a heretic, a doomsayer.
— p.14.
and the rest is mostly filling in the long, and often crazy details. Some of the religious fervor has now been transubstantiated into a sort of techno-optimism (or which follows from the special "quixotic optimism" of the 1900s), possibly on account of winning a round or two over the land. Two faces may now be observed, one that argues for the "greatest good for the greatest number"—of humans, fuck the salmon and the run they rode in on—and the other "the greatest good for the greatest number" that does allow for the salmon, the birds, the river itself, etc. There is a range between the faces; one can find ranchers doing maybe not sustainable things to the land yet who did support the "they look like hippies" scientists at Mono lake. Granted, pre-conservation Los Angeles was at the time expanding its water demands without limit, so this may have been a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" convenience. Another "greatest good for the greatest number" is that of cancer cells.
The salinity of the river—what was left of it—soared to fifteen hundred parts per million at the Mexican border. The most important agricultural region in all of Mexico lies right below the border, utterly dependent on the Colorado River; we were giving the farmers slow liquid death to pour over their fields.
The Mexicans complained bitterly, to no avail. By treaty, we had promised them a million and a half acre-feet of water. But we hadn't promised them usable water.
…
But they were not willing to see one acre of irrigated land succumb to the forces of nature, regardless of cost. So they authorized probably $1 billion worth of engineered solutions to the Colorado salinity problem in order that a few hundred upstream farmers could go on irrigating and poisoning the river. The Yuma Plant will remove the Colorado's salt … at a cost of around $300 per acre-foot of water. The upriver irrigators buy the same amount from the Bureau for three dollars and fifty cents.
— p.17.
And so on and so forth…
One face sees the problems as a technical challenge; we need only apply inventiveness and some can-do spirit—lacking, of course, since the recent rise of the other face to some measure of political power—plus some trifling amount of capital to implement the latest scheme. The other face looks at the cost and complexity of the techno-solution and wonders how much less expensive alternatives such as conservation would be, and guesses that the techno-solution du jour—desalination using nukes, no, solar!—is likely to dig the hole we are in even deeper.
A better question might be: what can you do right now, at the local level, without needing some number of billions from the fed? Unless you are the type that gets monies from the fed, of course.
Barry Goldwater, scourge of welfare and champion of free enterprise, was a lifelong supporter of the Central Arizona Project, which comes as close to socialism as anything this country has ever done
…
Govenor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., of California flew to London at his own expense to attend the funeral of his hero E. F. Schumacher, who wrote "Small Is Beautiful", then returned to promote what could turn out to be the most expensive single public-works project ever built, the expansion of the California Water Project.
— p.22, p.320.