When I moved to Phoenix in the early 1990s, my first
home was an apartment in a complex with a courtyard dominated by
what seemed to be a football-field’s worth of vigorously
green lawn. That lawn was no anomaly. The neighborhood I lived in
over the next four years had a Leave It to Beaver aesthetic, each
house bracketed, front and back, by rectangles of grass that had to
be watered and watered to keep them from disintegrating into
rectangles of desert. By terms of my lease, I had to keep the lawn
up, so I worried about the water bill. I soon stopped worrying.
Water in Phoenix was cheaper than water in my previous home,
Houston. It was even cheaper than water in my Chicago-area
hometown, which sits directly on the shore of Lake Michigan.
In 2002, when I was living in Northern California, I
watched an Alaskan businessman propose to take water from the
redwood-lined Gualala River in Mendocino County, pump it into giant
plastic bags floating offshore in the Pacific, and then tow the
bags south, to San Diego. It seemed a loony plan, and opposition
from area residents shot it down. But it was certainly a signal of
San Diego’s thirst.
Phoenix water largesse and San
Diego water desperation are reflections of more than 80 years of
complex efforts to divide the flow of the Colorado River among
seven U.S. states and Mexico. Essentially, Arizona played the water
game well in the first half of the 20th century, won an outsized
share of the Colorado and has been able to grow a lot of sod in the
Sonoran Desert.
Now, though, with galloping growth across
the arid Southwest, the game has changed. With the Colorado fully
allocated, state governments are trying to squeeze benefit from
every drop of their allotments. Using water with maximum efficiency
is, in general, laudable behavior. In the specific case of the
lower Colorado, however, increased efficiency in human water use is
— as Matt Jenkins’ counterintuitive story, “The
Efficiency Paradox,” shows — a looming threat to the
extremely diverse ecology of the Colorado River Delta.
With help from Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the
Study of the North American West, Matt took a long and deep look at
cross-border water issues and came away convinced that if
environmental concerns aren’t soon factored into the Colorado
River equation, efficient water use may — very efficiently
— kill a biological wonder. I think the piece more than worth
a long, deep read.
—
In general, I use this space
to comment on a notable article or two from the current issue, but
this time around, I’d like to direct you to GOAT, our blog on
environmental, political and cultural goings-on in the West.
It’s thoughtful commentary and real reportage from a diverse
group of editors, each of whom has deep experience and expertise in
different aspects of Western life. I don’t think
there’s anything much like GOAT on the Web, but I’m
biased, so I’ll let you be the judge: Go to
blog.hcn.org/goat. Or just visit our Web site — www.hcn.org
— click on the smiling goat skull, and let me know what you
think.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Against the current.
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