Just Enough to Fight Over

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 Southeast, 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 receives 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.