How Dry We Are

Ever see those Dust Bowl pictures? From the Depression Era? Once fertile fields laden with blowing and swirling sand, like the one above. The Midwest is our grain belt, and while there are lakes and rivers supplying water, a huge portion of farms from the Dakotas down through north Texas rely on a body of water that was once as big as Lake Superior (about 174,000 square miles), but it just happens to be underground, known as the High Plains or Ogallala Aquifer.

When wind power pumped water from this vast reservoir, trickling water to farms on the surface, the aquifer was able to replenish itself just based on surface water penetrating back into the earth. And then came the high-volume diesel pump, which multiplied by the thousands after World War II. Farm productivity exploded. But the volume of water in the Ogallala Aquifer began to drop… five inches a year. And since the aquifer is not of uniform depth, parts of it have already dried up. But, you exclaim, there’s been flooding in the Midwest , even parts of land that are clearly atop the aquifer; surely, that will reverse this trend, right? Not even close. The water is destined to run out, most probably during the lifetime of a lot of Americans who are alive today, and when it does, well, remember those Dust Bowl pictures? Yeah, we’ll be able to take a whole bunch of new ones.

Surely, you add, technology will find a way to bring water where it is needed? Technology in creating drought-resistant crops, maybe, but moving water? We already have such technology – the California Aqueduct, for example – but there is this little problem. You get a feeling for the cost of the proposition by thinking about how heavy a bucket of water is to lift; that’s the energy that’s need to move water uphill, and the United States is not flat, not even the Midwest. That you can generate electricity as the water flows downhill still creates a 15% net energy loss to move water across vast distances… and the pipes and aqueduct construction costs are monumental on top of that. Last time I looked, we were also having an energy crisis.

This is a very serious problem, particularly for a nation that is really trying to reduce its balance of payments deficit by importing less. Today, we actually export much of the agricultural products quenched by Ogallala water; but what happens when we run out of grain? “‘You go to areas where the aquifer has been depleted, [they] look pretty poor now,’ David Brauer, program manager for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service Ogallala Aquifer Program, told AOL News. ‘And it only takes a few years… ‘The magnitude of this is incredible," he continued. "We're talking about, for the last 20 years, 20 percent of the irrigated acreage of this nation is over the Ogallala.’” AOLNews.com (April 22^nd).

So what are we doing about this and will it be enough? “People have been warning about the aquifer's depletion for years, but coordinating conservation programs among farmers has proved difficult. Recently, Texas has imposed state controls on the amount of groundwater that farmers can pump, requiring 16 groundwater districts to each provide a target for an acceptable groundwater level in 50 years… Such measures, however, are mostly designed to delay the inevitable, since the recharge rate for the Ogallala Aquifer is small enough to be considered negligible. And so, Brauer says, as a natural resource the Ogallala is comparable to a vein of coal: What you take out doesn't get put back in. ‘All we're doing is buying time,’ he says.” Considering some estimates, we may be looking at 30 years. Time help to redesign crops to use less water or find ways to increase yields radically. But the water will run out. And then…

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if we will really celebrate d’earth day.