Requiem for a River

(Page 5 of 5)

"The system is more thoroughly integrated than we thought," Deacon told me during a telephone interview. "So taking water from one valley is going to take water from another in that area."

Ironically, Nevada's water laws are relatively good compared with laws in other states and were written to promote the sustainable use of groundwater. In a sense Mulroy is right in saying that 40,000 acre-feet could be taken from Spring Valley. "The catch is, this definition of sustainability assumes that the only useful purpose of water is to help supply people," Deacon said. "There is no provision for maintaining viable ecosystems."

He acknowledged that Mulroy is under tremendous pressure. "Pat understands very well that her job is to supply water to Las Vegas, and that if she starts saying there isn't enough for sustainable use, she's going to get fired." That happened, he said, to two previous directors of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, as it was once called, who tried to make the case in the 1960s and 1970s.

Dean Baker agrees with Deacon. "This will be [Senator] Harry Reid's and Pat Mulroy's legacy of disaster 30 years from now, with billions of dollars to pay off and environmental problems and lawsuits that are insurmountable, with not enough water to put in the pipeline."

Imperial, California
[Elevation 59 feet below sea level]

Several hundred miles to the south of the great basin, in a desert several thousand feet lower and a couple dozen degrees hotter, the Colorado River flows into the Mexican state of Baja California. Between the booming border town of Mexicali and the Gulf of California, the riverbed will run almost dry.

Before the river crosses the border, the Imperial Dam near Yuma, Arizona, diverts about 75 percent of its water-more than three million acre-feet annually-into the 82-mile-long All-American Canal, the world's largest irrigation canal.

The canal creates an agricultural "green zone" called the Imperial Valley -- or, as local boosters like to call it, America's Winter Salad Bowl. (In wintertime, when production in California's huge Central Valley tapers off, about 90 percent of the nation's produce comes from here.) Most of the valley's 400 or so farming families have been here for three or four generations, working 1,500-acre farms in the middle of the Sonoran Desert and generating about $1 billion in revenue every year.

"We haven't had rain down here for about a year and a half. It has been dry," George Moses tells me as we cruise past fields of cotton and spring wheat in his pickup. Bordering the fields is a long, narrow canal that runs to the hazy horizon, part of a network of roughly 3,000 miles of canals and drainage ditches that water nearly a half-million acres. "What I'm showing you is the circulation system of the valley," he says. Moses, who has been working since 5:30 in the morning, is a zanjero, a job title derived from the Spanish word for ditch, zanja, and idiomatically translated as "ditch rider." He has thick gray hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and a craggy, seamed face, one cheek rounded by a chaw of tobacco.

Moses and the several dozen other zanjeros employed by the Imperial Valley Irrigation District (IID) work in shifts around the clock, opening and closing canal gates, taking orders on cell phones from the district's control center. Many of the canals are a century old and were dug with nothing more than horses, mules, and shovels. Even today there are few pumps; most of the system operates on gravity alone, making it the biggest gravity-fed irrigation project on the planet. The valley is also the single largest user of the Colorado River's water, receiving 3.1 million acre-feet each year under the Colorado River Compact-about 70 percent of California's allotment-thanks to water rights staked out by farmers in the nineteenth century.

It's hard to put a price on all that water. Just ask Maureen Stapleton, the general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority.

I meet Stapleton at the Water Authority's headquarters, on the outskirts of San Diego. A slender woman with straight blond hair, she is wearing a dark blue pinstriped suit. If she and Pat Mulroy ever teamed up as negotiators, Stapleton would have the good-cop role. She makes her points with quiet, unflappable reasonableness.

After eight years of disputes with the irrigation district, Stapleton managed to close a deal that she calls "the largest and longest water transfer in the history of the country." Over the next 75 years the deal will transfer a total of 30 million acre-feet-enough to fill Lake Mead-from the Imperial Valley to San Diego. By 2020 the valley will supply 22 percent of the city's drinking water. In return, San Diego will pay the valley roughly $50 million a year.

In addition to purchasing water from the Imperial Valley, Stapleton tells me that San Diego is pursuing a strategy of diversification, to avoid reliance on any one source of water.

"If we've learned anything, it's that you don't want any single supply to dominate your portfolio," she says. "Been there, done that. Didn't work. Conservation is not the silver bullet; desalination is not the silver bullet; water transfers are not the silver bullet. It has to be a combination of appropriate resource planning. Couple global warming into that, and that's where you have to look at the adaptability of your plans in order to be responsive."

Yet San Diego would be hard-pressed without the Imperial Valley agreement. The transfer represents a historic shift in the West, where agriculture has always dominated water use. As cities continue to grow, deals like this one will become increasingly common. Agriculture holds the West's last and largest remaining stores of water. New dams won't solve the region's looming water shortages, not while existing reservoirs can't be filled. If ambitious engineering projects like Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, and Lake Powell made possible the growth of the Southwest in the twentieth century, water that is bought, borrowed, traded, or otherwise appropriated from agriculture will allow the region's cities to survive the twenty-first.

Although the agreement has been in effect for four years, it remains controversial. Just a few days before I met with Stapleton, the San Diego County Water Authority, to avoid more legal battles, agreed to pay IID an additional $40 million over the next 10 years.

"Water in the Imperial Valley is their lifeblood," Stapleton says. "There was a serious concern about whether this would diminish the agricultural economy. But I think it has proven to be an opportunity, both for the agricultural community, which can benefit from an infusion of dollars, and for this urban agency, which needs the certainty of water through transfers. We see it truly as a win-win opportunity."

That's not a point of view widely shared in the Imperial Valley. At the irrigation district's headquarters in Imperial, a hot, dusty town about 120 miles east of San Diego and 20 miles north of the Mexican border, I meet with John Pierre Menvielle, a third-generation farmer in the valley. He's wearing a crisp white button-down shirt and blue jeans; his eyes are narrowed to a permanent squint, and his voice is raspy enough to file steel. When I mention Stapleton's "win-win" comment, he scoffs.

"For Maureen to tell you it's a win-win is crazy," he says. "No way. A win for them, because they get the water, which helps their economy. It kind of got shoved down the IID's throat. Nobody likes it. It's a natural resource that belongs in this valley. People don't like the outsiders coming in here; it leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth. And the transfer is for too long-75 years. There was no up-front money to help things get going."

The problem with the transfer, Menvielle says, is that all the water the valley sends to San Diego is supposed to be surplus water created by improved conservation practices by the valley's farmers. But it costs money to install more efficient drip-irrigation systems, or to buy pumps that will return water to the head of a field to be reused, or to replace the zanjeros with computer-controlled canal gates. And the price paid by San Diego for the valley's water doesn't cover those costs.

Menvielle estimates that the total cost to modernize the valley's irrigation system could approach $300 million. In addition to the computer-controlled canal gates, IID plans to install pumps below the main canals to capture water seeping into the soil. Until those conservation measures are in place, the only way the valley can meet its obligations to San Diego is by fallowing fields. Last year farmers took 20,000 acres out of production, with consequences that have rippled through the valley's economy. Farmers here refer to fallowing as the F word.

"It hurts farm service providers. The harvesting people. Your fertilizer people, twine people, combine people-anybody associated with a fallowed field," Menvielle says. "We're kind of stuck with this transfer. Hopefully in the long run it will turn into a win-win, as Maureen Stapleton says it is. But it could be 10 years before farmers actually start seeing money in their pockets. And that's a long time to wait."

Menvielle also worries that the water transfer agreement with San Diego won't be the last. Of the 170,000 people who live in the valley, only about 400 families run farms.

"The farm community was king," Menvielle says. "But that's changing. When you have a five-person, publicly elected board, eventually you'll end up with non-pro-ag people on there, and they're just going to jam it to the farmers. We worry that future boards may transfer more water, and then there won't be enough water to farm your land with, and your land becomes worthless."

Vince Brooke, a powerfully built farmer and former president of the Imperial Valley Farm Bureau Board, says the water transfer is not just a local issue. It has national implications, and raises a fundamental question: Is the country willing to sacrifice agriculture-and perhaps jeopardize food safety as we rely more on imports-for the sake of urban growth?

"I think at some point the state and federal governments are going to have to address that," Brooke says. "Water is a critical issue, but so is a consistent and safe food supply. And I believe that they will collide."

The Southwest managed to pull off a small miracle throughout the twentieth century, sustaining both unbridled urban expansion and productive agriculture. It's a run that couldn't possibly have lasted, not in these deserts. Global warming and the drought are accelerating a process that has been under way for decades, forcing issues that the region would have inevitably faced even in the absence of climate change.

The crisis facing the Southwest isn't so much due to any lack of water-even in the driest years the Colorado River can satisfy the needs of millions. The real crisis is a demographic one. Is urban development a goal to be pursued at any cost? Or as Cecil Garland, the rancher in tiny Callao, Utah, put it, do we want lawns or lettuce? Craps or crops?