TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/88/88capenv.2

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                                                                                July 4, 1988

ENVIRONMENT

Just Enough to Fight Over


In the West, there's much more to the water shortage than lack
of rain


When God created the American West, to paraphrase Mark Twain,
he provided plenty of whiskey to drink and just enough water to
fight over. In Twain's day, the Forty-Niners feuded with fists
and pistols over who could divert which SIerra streams to
separate gold from gravel. In the teens and Roaring Twenties,
thirsty young Los Angeles brashly laid claim to a snow-fed
mountain river, piped it 230 miles south to the city and
dispatched armed guards to protect the aqueduct from outraged
locals wielding dynamite.

If things seem more placid today, that is only because the hired
guns are lawyers and lobbyists camouflaged in pinstripes.
High-stakes hydrobattles are brewing throughout the West as it
runs out of new water sources. This arid region--stretching
from the 100th meridian to the Pacific--now finds itself unable
to accommodate both its rapid urban growth and a powerful
agribusiness that guzzles 85% of all water at heavily subsidized
prices that offer little incentive for conservation.

The current drought has dramatized these conflicts, but it did
not cause them, nor will its end resolve them. In the Midwest
and Southwest, farmers watching their crops wither this summer
are simply victims of lack of rain, a circumstance that should
improve next year if not next month. But in the West the water
shortage is not just a freak of nature. Los Angeles received
9 in. of rainfall a year and Phoenix only 8, vs. 40 in. of
precipitation for Chicago. Almost all the U.S. flatlands west
of the 100th meridian, which runs from Texas to North Dakota,
consistently receive too little precipitation to sustain
agriculture without irrigation. Says Dennis Mahr, a Southern
California water manager:  "We're in a constant state of
drought, and we've learned to live with it."

The region's thirst will only grow:  California's population is
expected to climb from 27 million to 36 million over the next
two decades. That will require an increase in water use of 1.3
million acre-feet a year.*  To meet this daunting future demand,
the California department of waterworks has proposed $700
million worth of new dams, aqueducts and other works. That
plan, however, is widely dismissed as unaffordable and
unnecessary:  one study calculates that it could deliver water
only at a cost of over $500 an acre-foot, twice the present
price for Southern California's coastal cities. "The days of
the big water projects are over," says Colorado Water Lawyer
John Musick. "What we're going to see is more competition for
the water we already have."

The skirmishes and shortages are already evident across the
West. In the San Francisco area, once lush gardens are
withering under strict water limits. Lake Tahoe has retreated
5 ft. down its banks, leaving popular beaches high and dry,
while parched Reno threatens to pump the lake still lower. In
Arizona water scouts from the booming cities are roaming the
landscape with checkbooks ready, buying farmland 90 miles
distant just to get the groundwater rights. The vast Ogallala
Aquifer, an underground lake that stretches from South Dakota
to Texas, is being overdrawn by wells at a rate of 5 ft. a year
in places, driving entire counties out of irrigated
agriculture. Meanwhile, farms and cities from Salt Lake City to
San Diego are literally drinking dry the Colorado River, which
now peters out, exhausted and polluted, in the Mexican desert,
miles short of the sea.

Westerners have not so much adapted to their environment as they
have defied it and remade it. This has required the region's
Senators and Governors to sink deep wells into the federal
treasury and draw forth sprawling, multibillion-dollar
water-moving and -storage schemes (not-withstanding the popular
image of Westerners as self-reliant and suspicious of meddlesome
Government). Thus in the midst of the current nationwide
drought, the 74 golf courses around Palm Springs, Calif., have
plenty of cheap federal water to keep their sprinklers hissing,
while Arizona farmers can afford to grow water-intensive crops
like alfalfa in the middle of the desert. Little wonder: water
in Palm Springs costs the golf courses just $18 an acre-foot.

The wasteful effect of these subsidies is not widely
understood. Many outsiders, as well as most locals surveyed by
the Western Governors' Association, falsely believe the region
would have sufficient water if only profligate cities like
Newport Beach, Calif., and Scottsdale, Ariz., made do with fewer
swimming pools and car washes. Rather than match supply to
demand by steeply raising water rates, most political leaders
merely exhort residents to take shorter showers and flush
toilets less often. Los Angeles will soon spend $600,000
broadcasting such bromides.

Public-spirited campaigns have been farm more effective in
Arizona, where the forward-looking 1980 Groundwater Management
Act restricts depletion of aquifers and effectively raises water
costs statewide. Tucson, which had suffered an alarming 120-ft.
drop in its water table, imposed a scaled billing system,
charging more per gallon as water use increased. The city's per
capita water consumption dropped from a high of 205 gal. a day
in 1974 to 161 now. California could use similar conservation
laws; in Palm Springs, where household water costs 46 cents for
100 cu. ft. (vs. $1.16 in Tucson), per capita use is 459 gal.
a day.

Yet while residential conservation is desirable, it cannot
accommodate the West's urban growth. To save enough water for
their projected 33% population leap over the next two decades,
Californians would have to cut per-person consumption by
one-third, an unprecedented feat of discipline by U.S.
standards.

But here's the god news:  because agriculture now consumer 85%
of the West's available water, a mere 4% saving by farmers would
provide enough for new uses, even if the cities continue to
splash water at the current rate. Says Thomas Graff, senior
attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund:  "The West has
plenty of water to meet the future of its cities and industries
as well as for environmental values, but its farmers must be
given incentives to use less water."

More good news:  the opportunity for conservation is
considerable, considering the scale of profligacy now encouraged
in Western agriculture. Throughout the region, scarce but
subsidized water is inefficiently flooded onto marginal soil to
raise crops like cotton and rice that are already in surplus and
must often be bought at a loss by the Federal Government. A
recent study, commissioned by Democratic Congressman George
Miller of California, showed that fully a third of the
Government's $535 million annual spending on irrigation water
flows to farmers who receive other agricultural subsidies.
Miller has introduced legislation to halt this double dipping.

Few farmers waste water by choice. Marc Reisner, author of
Cadillac Desert, an incisive history of water development in the
West, observes that subsidized water is "so cheap the farmers
can't afford to conserve it."  Ten miles west of Phoenix, for
example, Mike Duncan, 38, would have to spend considerably more
to irrigate his cotton if he were to use water-saving drip
tubes. "If I farmed in the Coolidge area, where water is $80
an acre-foot," Duncan says, "I'd most seriously look at using
drip irrigation."  Instead, Duncan gets water at the federally
subsidized rate of $9 an acre-foot. Better to keep pouring it
on the field.

Like natural gas a decade ago, water is in short supply only
because of outmoded laws and customs that prevent its sale to
willing buyers in most states. The doctrine of prior
appropriation has in practice meant "use it or lose it."  Thus
Utah, for example, diverts Colorado River water for which it has
little present use. Other obstacles to water marketing are
bureaucratic:  muscular interests like Southern California's
metropolitan water district and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
tend to view water marketing as a threat to their present
service monopolies.

If farmers could freely sell or lease their water rights,
profit motives would provide a powerful incentive for
conservation. In Arizona, where such "water ranching" is
widespread, farmers are drawing top dollar and, in the words of
former Governor Bruce Babbitt, "retiring to beach-front condos
in La Jolla [Calif.] to raise martinis instead of alfalfa."  If
water rights were widely traded, proponents say, cities and
factories could assure their needs for posterity. Agriculture
would still receive four-fifths of the West's water and would
thrive, despite the increased costs.

Already, farmers have proved they are able to profit in some
districts where unsubsidized irrigation costs as much as $75.
They shift to crops that use less water, require heavy capital
investment and bring a higher price:  orchard fruits and nuts,
specialty vegetables, safflower. They invest in drip irrigation
and other water-saving technologies, and, where possible, water
their land with inexpensive sewage effluent.

For all these benefits, free-market water stirs enmity in rural
communities. La Paz County in western Arizona has watched with
alarm since 1985 as nearly half its privately held land has been
sold, mostly by farmers, to water-ranching interests. County
Manager Neta Bowen decries the loss of tax base and employment:
"When farmlands are retired in a community that depends solely
on agriculture, what happens to the corner grocery?  The cafe?
The gas station?  The local bar?"

One answer:  some towns might tap the West's outdoor recreation
industry, which is worth $40 billion and booming, not least
among foreign visitors. Western recreation should get a fresh
boost from water marketing. Many environmentalists support the
concept, especially as it recognizes the "in-stream values" of
water:  for trout fishing, white-water rafting and habitat for
game birds and animals. Says Babbitt:  "In many parts of the
West, a cow has a lot less economic value than an elk."  It is
time for water laws and practices to recognize that new
equation.


* An acre-foot is the amount of water necessary to cover one
acre to the depth of one foot, or roughly 325,000 gal.

--By Dan Goodgame.  Reported by James Willwerth/Phoenix,
Richard Woodbury/El Paso and   Dennis Wyss/Central Valley