Just Enough to Fight Over

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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 (notwithstanding 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 far 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 good news: because agriculture now consumes 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.