Cadillac Desert (81 page)

As an accident of geography made the rescue of West Texas so difficult and expensive, however, an accident of migration made passage of the referendum at least as difficult. In California, the conservative and reactionary factions of the state’s electorate are concentrated mainly in the sprawl south of Los Angeles, in San Diego, and in the hard-bitten little cities of the San Joaquin Valley. Every one of those places is a desert or semidesert, haunted by extinction, and every one of them saw the State Water Project as salvation. An unknown number of people whose antipathy to government runs to things such as fluoridated water and Social Security voted enthusiastically for the most expensive public-works project in California’s history. In Texas, the ultraconservative faction of the electorate tends to be spread more around the state. If it has a center, it is probably Houston, which stood to gain virtually nothing from the Texas Water Plan. The mayor of Houston, in fact, was conspicuously absent among those big-city mayors who had enlisted as members of the Committee of 500. Dallas, another conservative bastion, was to get water, but felt no sense of desperate need. Aside from that, Texas’s population as a whole is skewed to the east, where the main problems with water tend to come in the form of thunderstorms, hurricanes, and floods. In California, two-thirds of the population resides in the drought-ridden south. “The opponents of Amendment Two were strange bedfellows,” says Ronnie Dugger. “You had the Sierra Club voting with the little old ladies in tennis shoes.” When the final count was in, the Texas Water Plan had lost, by sixty-six hundred votes.

About a year before the referendum on Amendment Two was held, Congressman George Mahon, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, had asked Jim Casey over for a chat between fellow West Texans. Mahon came from Lubbock and was old enough to remember it as a one-horse town. “He had a fear that things could return to that,” Casey remembers. “It haunted him.” As Casey expected, the conversation immediately came around to the Texas Water Plan. “He asked me what my gut reaction was,” Casey remembers. “Did I think it would fly? I told him, ‘I hate to tell you this frankly, but my gut reaction is that it’s crazy.’ I’ll never forget the look on his face. It was like I was a doctor telling him his daughter was going to die.” Casey’s pessimism notwithstanding, Mahon was adamant about studying the plan. He even had an amendment ready for the appropriations bill giving the Bureau whatever money it needed to perform a feasibility report. “I told him that a feasibility report on a plan this big was going to consume a hell of a lot of man-hours and money. But I told him if he insisted we’d do it, because this plan made more sense to me than some of the other cockamamie ideas that were floating around. If it turned out to be infeasible, then we’d all better get ready to kiss irrigation on the high plains goodbye.”

The figures Casey’s staff began toting up over the next three years were appalling. Routing the aqueduct across wet Louisiana and southeastern Texas would be a costly nightmare, even if the Bureau didn’t have to pay for bodyguards to protect its construction crews. “The Louisiana legislature told us to go ahead and study it, because the numbers would kill us anyway,” Casey remembers. “But if we’d actually gone ahead and tried to build the thing God knows what might have happened. I felt like taking out a new life insurance policy before going into the bayous down there.” The aqueduct would have to go underneath four major rivers by siphon; 142 minor streams would be siphoned under it. But what encumbered the Mississippi diversion most of all was its gluttonous appetite for energy. “Carry two buckets of water up the Washington Monument, take the elevator back down, and do it five more times. That was the lift we had to overcome to West Texas. We were talking billions of buckets. We were talking
trillions
of buckets,” says Casey. There was not nearly enough surplus power in Texas, so the project would have to build its own generating plants. The Bureau decided to go the nuclear route, on the widely held belief that nuclear electricity would soon be dirt-cheap. “We took the most pie-eyed projections we could find from the Atomic Energy Commission. We figured the plants would cost $250 million apiece. The plan required about twelve of them. Twelve nuclear plants of a million kilowatts each. You couldn’t build
one
nuclear plant in 1985 for the price we thought we were going to pay for twelve in 1971.”

Notwithstanding power price estimates that were beyond the realm of fantasy, the Texas Water Plan—which, in the Bureau’s version, was somewhat larger than Texas’s own—would consume $325 million worth of power every year, in 1971 dollars. The West Texas farmers would end up with a water bill of $330 an acre-foot, all because of the relentless upslope of the plains. The most they could possibly pay, the Bureau decided, was $125 (“and that was hocus-pocus,” says Casey). Taxpayers, therefore, would subsidize the rest. The benefit-cost ratio ultimately worked out to .27 to 1.00—for every dollar invested, there would be twenty-seven cents’ worth of economic return. “The disparity between primary benefits and costs is so great that there is no reasonable prospect that any plan for transporting Mississippi River water to West Texas or eastern New Mexico would [become] favorable,” the Bureau’s report read. And it continued, “It is unlikely that the project described ... could be completed in time to prevent virtual cessation of groundwater irrigation on the Texas High Plains and large-scale reduction of such irrigation in eastern New Mexico.” If there was any justification for it at all, it was that “the project could contribute significantly to population dispersion in the 21st century, if this becomes a national objective.”

In the Ogallala region, the Bureau’s conclusions were met initially with discouragement, but not despair. Everyone knew that the Bureau and the Corps had built projects which made little better sense; they were merely smaller. The real issue, as far as Texas and Kansas and Oklahoma and Colorado and New Mexico were concerned, was that one couldn’t simply abandon millions of acres of farmland to the desert from which it had so recently been saved. One couldn’t let another Dust Bowl occur. The economics might look bad now, but who knew how they would look in thirty years? By the turn of the century, according to projections, there would be ten billion people, maybe more, on the planet. Who would feed them? Who still had land? The Russians did, but they couldn’t feed themselves. Neither could Europe. Asia was thick with humanity; in Java, people would kill for enough land to raise a couple of cows. Australia was not only a desert, but, unlike the American West, a desert without rivers. Could anyone imagine Africa feeding the world? Canada was too cold to grow much of anything besides wheat and cattle. The only place left was South America, but when you chopped down rain forests and tried to grow crops the soil turned to laterite, hard as stone.

On the high plains, you still have five or ten feet of loamy topsoil. You had 1 percent of the farmers on 6 percent of the nation’s agricultural land growing 15 percent of the wheat, corn, cotton, and grain sorghum. You had American technology, American know-how. You had the most productive region of the nation that was the food larder of the world. You had cities of 100,000, 200,000 people which depended utterly on irrigation farming and oil and gas. Could the nation just
abandon
them to fate, like the Leadvilles and Silver Cities and Bodies of a hundred years ago?

From the looks of things, it would. After the Bureau’s report was released, one heard little about the Texas Water Plan for a number of years. In 1976, and again in 1981, Texans rejected water bonds that appeared likely to set the plan in motion. Arkansas and Louisiana began to talk of their water as if it were their daughters’ chastity. The farmers, meanwhile, were still in business.

By the late 1970s, however, the Ogallala had dropped several more feet while energy prices had gone up sevenfold in a decade. The first farmers began going bankrupt—in Texas, in Colorado, in Kansas, in New Mexico, Tens of thousands of acres began reverting to dryland. The press, tantalized by the prospect of an imminent catastrophe, finally took some interest; newspaper and magazine stories appeared by the dozen. The result of all this was a predictable welter of federal studies, the most important of which was the 1982 Six-State High Plains-Ogallala Area Study, coordinated by the Economic Development Administration of the Department of Commerce. The study, as expected, predicted calamity, but decided it would not arrive as soon as most people thought. By the year 2020—which was as far ahead as it looked—Texas’s share of the Ogalllala would be down to 87.2 million acre-feet from 283.7 million in 1977. New Mexico’s would be all but used up. Colorado and Kansas would be somewhat better off. Irrigation in those states would increase over the near term, then begin to decline early in the twenty-first century. The real reckoning would come after 2020. Nebraska, however, would still overlie 1.9 billion acre-feet by then, and would be irrigating 11.5 million acres—far more than any state in the nation. Irrigation farming would simply move northward, leaving Lubbock, Clovis, and Limon behind. In Texas, according to the report, oil and gas production would be down to 7 percent of its 1977 level—a double blow that could make the fate of cities such as Buffalo appear benign. The economy of the southern plains would be a three-legged stool with two legs gone, unless some miraculous rise in agricultural prices, or some new source of cheap energy, or some revolution in DNA plant genetics came along, permitting corn to get by on fourteen inches of rain. The region would be, to use Jim Casey’s phrase, an Appalachia without trees. The only commodities in abundance would be sun and wind.

Is it possible that the 1982 report’s conclusions are overly optimistic? “It’s possible,” says Herbert Grubb, the planning director of the Texas Water Development Board. “When I saw the rate of increase they used for energy costs, I thought it was much too low. In the late seventies, I’d been hearing estimates of oil costing as much as $295 a barrel by the end of the century. It turns out now that they were pretty much on target, at least so far. A lot of us didn’t expect an oil glut to materialize in the early 1980s. But no one can say how long it will last. If in ten years we get another series of price jolts like we did in the seventies, I don’t see how the irrigators can keep pumping.”

From a national perspective—forgetting about the farmers’ plight—whether irrigation on the southern plains ends in thirty years, or in seven, or even in fifty years does not matter; the fact is, it will mostly end. The more important issue, from that same perspective, is what will happen then—not just to the farmers and the cost of food and the balance of payments deficits, but to the land.

When thousand of farmers on millions of irrigated acres can no longer afford to pump vanishing water, the dilemma they face will be universal: how to survive on a finite amount of acreage that has suddenly become one-fifth to one-eighth as productive as it was. The answer is foreordained: they cannot. Many of them, therefore, will sell out to more stubborn neighbors and head for the cities for work or relief. Those who remain on enough acreage to offer them a glimmer of hope will ponder their brief list of choices: they can try to raise dryland cotton or wheat or some desert crop—jojoba or guayule, perhaps—or they can try to revert their plowed fields to shortgrass prairie, and raise cattle.

Raising cattle, pehaps even buffalo—which outperform cattle in arid country—might seem the thing to do. However, it is hard to see how it will happen without billions of dollars’ worth of federal support. To convert from, say, wheat to grassland, a farmer first needs to plant some fast-growing annual, such as rye, to develop a litter cover for the soil and build up its organic content; it will cost him perhaps $15 an acre and require a year. Then he has to seed gama grass; this costs him even more and takes another year. Finally, if the grass manages to take hold—a lot of it won’t—he can begin grazing a few cattle and reseeding those areas that failed to propagate. If he owns a thousand acres, he will probably have spent $30,000 to $50,000 (valued circa 1984); it has taken him three years, and he hasn’t earned a dime. He still has his living expenses to cover, and, unless he is a well-established farmer, a small mountain of unpaid debts. Once his grass is growing, he may still have to wait years for his cattle to mature. After seven years or so, he will finally begin to earn some income. But by then he will have fallen into a bottomless hole.

Farmers may therefore resist the temptation to raise cattle and do the economically sensible thing: raise a dryland crop. As Paul Sears wrote in
Deserts on the March,
“So long as there remains the most remote possibility that the drier grasslands, whose sod has been destroyed by the plow, can be made to yield crops under cultivation, we may count upon human stubbornness to return again and again to the attack....” And in that effort lurks the likelihood of a recurrence of the catastrophe that inspired Sears’s book: the Dust Bowl.

When a $1 million home perched on a fifty-degree slope above Malibu is clobbered by a mudslide after three weeks of rain—as thousands of houses throughout California were during the El Niño winters of 1982 and 1983—their owners tend to think of themselves as the victims of a “natural” disaster. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is commonly regarded as such a “natural” disaster, because seven dry years in a row were accompanied by fierce winds, which scoured up the topmost layer of Oklahoma and blew it as far as Norway. The climate of the plains has remained relatively unchanged for hundreds of years, however, and there is no convincing evidence that such a disaster ever occurred before white men plowed up the sod and brought in cattle or, much worse, sheep to graze it down. Even after seven years of drought, the Dust Bowl would probably not have occurred had not man created the conditions for it. By 1932, in Texas alone, seventy million acres of land that had once been covered with a blanket of grass were growing mesquite and thorny weeds, which are poor at holding soil in place. The weeds had no business there; they were native to the ultramontane basins several hundred miles west. As Paul Sears wrote, “Weeds, like wild-eyed anarchists, are the symptoms, not the real cause, of a disturbed order. When the Russian thistle swept down across the western ranges, the general opinion was that it was a devouring plague, crowding in and consuming the native plants. It was no such thing. The native vegetation had already been destroyed by the plow and thronging herds—the ground was vacated and the thistles took it over.”