Can Southwestern Cities Survive

  

As black-market marijuana growers suck the sparse remaining water supply in the high deserts east of Los Angeles, willing to us semi-automatic gunfire to keep anyone from getting near, it’s hard to equate this illicit form of water usage with the acres and acres of idle agricultural land that lie fallow throughout central and southern California (slowly enveloping points north as well). Only an occasional scattered irrigation circle with active growing crops among a surrounding litany of brown lifeless circles. Grapevines without life. Nut trees doomed to starve to death by water deprivation. Forests turning into pure tinder from lack of rainfall… waiting for the next wildfire to explode. Is the vast and incredible California fruit and vegetable farm doomed? That’s all about our food supply and California’s role as a major source for the entire nation.

But there are so many cities facing a withering future as water resources are quite literally vaporizing. In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa literally ran out of water until a January downpour offered a temporary respite. In Australia, Perth and Adelaide just might be the next Cape Town. The record temperatures in the Pacific Northwest suggest that even some of the rainiest regions can no longer take rainfall and a temperate climate for granted. For nations with vast tracts of desert, if temperatures continue to climb as they have, such regions could be rendered completely uninhabitable by humans… and by more than a few long-running indigenous species of plant and animal life.

Access to water is very likely to outstrip the seemingly unending quest for gas and oil as the biggest value proposition on earth. Will we be towing giant icebergs, to the extent they continue, to urban coastal regions as replacements for dwindling well, aquifer, lake and stream water? Even as those of us in Southern California depend on the Owens Valley water supply and trickles from the Colorado River, the once abundant lakes all over the state, we are just beginning a gubernatorial “request” for all Californians to implement a 15% statewide cutback in water usage. Photographs of “gardeners” spray-painting brown lawns with green paint are no longer the brunt of local jokes. The water shortage is very, very real. 

Desalination? A process that uses a lot of electrical power, is massively expensive to build and produces a deeply toxic effluent of salt that cannot simply be released back into the ocean. Pumping water from areas with a surplus to those where there is a dearth? Pick up a bucket of water. It takes massive infrastructure to move that water and an even more massive need for electricity to lift that weight up and over even slight rises in the landscape. None of these alternatives is practical on a scale that is obviously required. Make better use of what we have?

Nothing screams utter desperation, perhaps signaling a “sooner or later” end to cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, more than one of the earth’s largest reservoirs, the massive lake created by the construction of Hoover Dam. We call it Lake Mead (pictured above). The entire Southwestern part of the United States depends on this dwindling water supply. 

Writing for the July 11th Los Angeles Times, Jaweed Kaleem and Thomas Curwen tell us: “Lake Mead, a lifeline for 25 million people and millions of acres of farmland in California, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico, made history when it was engineered 85 years ago, capturing trillions of gallons of river water and ushering in the growth of the modern West.

“But after years of an unrelenting drought that has quickly accelerated amid record temperatures and lower snowpack melt, the lake is set to mark another, more dire turning point. Next month, the federal government expects to declare its first-ever shortage on the lake, triggering cuts to water delivered to Arizona, Nevada and Mexico on Jan. 1. If the lake, currently at 1,068 feet, drops 28 more feet by next year, the spigot of water to California will start to tighten in 2023.

“The crisis, said Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, can no longer be ignored. ‘According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,’ he said. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling. ‘This is aridification.’

“As fires sweep over large swaths of the West and scorching temperatures fry others, the scarcity of water is a less visible but perhaps the most pressing consequence of climate change confronting the states that depend on Lake Mead.

“First to be hit are locals along the Nevada-Arizona border near Las Vegas, who rely on the lake for tourism, fishing and recreation. Ramps are closed. Jammed boats are towed from newly shallow waters. Fishermen scour to figure out where to catch striped bass. The iconic lake’s predicament is marked by a ‘bathtub ring’ of calcium deposits that highlight the rocky edge where water once flowed.” But agricultural lands are already suffering. How long before the cities that depend on this water supply are no longer able to function? There are no “Great Lakes” sitting in reserve here, as glaciers melt away, fires decimate forests, rainfall fades and the earth’s water supplies simply dry up.

And still, we still have conservative political forces unwilling to face the climate change reality under some bizarre notion of an economic burden that our business community is unable to afford to cost. Tax cuts are fine. Adding taxes to deal with climate change and perhaps forestall the trillions and trillions of dollars of natural disasters we now know are inevitable without a serious effort to the contrary… not anything they will ever vote for or support. Maybe they can toast to their self-destructive intransigence with a glass of scotch and sand!

I’m Peter Dekom, and we may  already live in an era of “too late” for a whole lot damage but we have not yet passed into the land of inevitable and totally over.