Hoover Dam: Hoover is a concrete, arched-gravity dam. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Lower Colorado Region, 30–36.
ingrained skepticism of the water bureaucracy establishment: Billington et al., 90–91. The multipurpose approach was especially controversial inside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, whose main mission was navigation.
government a big player in the private electricity business: In the 1930s private power plants in the West generated 3.5 million horsepower versus only 50,000 by the government in 1920. Hoover’s original 1.7 million horsepower, therefore, dramatically altered the political economy of electricity in the West.
14 million acre-feet per year: An acre-foot measured the volume that would cover one acre with one foot of water. It was equal to 325,851 gallons, or 1,233.5 cubic meters.
its flow was schizophrenic: Billington et al., 136. The Colorado’s intensity ranged from 2,500 to more than 300,000 cubic feet per second.
17 times siltier than the muddy Mississippi: McNeil, Something New Under the Sun, 178.
“too thick to drink, too thin to plow”: Michael Cohen, “Managing across Boundaries: The Case of the Colorado River Delta,” in Gleick, The World’s Water, 2002–2003, 134.
name was changed from the Valley of the Dead: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 122–123.
Salton Sink swelled with water: The years 1905 to 1907 were some of the wettest in the Colorado basin’s history. Since then, the Salton Sea, which initially acted like a reservoir, has continually shrunk from natural evaporation and is now very salty.
Los Angeles stepped forward in 1924 with a proposal: Billington et al., 160–161.
small Los Angeles River: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 53, 60, 73.
outflanked and killed Reclamation’s own farm irrigation plan: At a critical moment, Teddy Roosevelt threw his support to Los Angeles and arranged for his Forest Service to kill the Reclamation Service’s claims by declaring that much of Owens Valley would henceforth be national parkland.
Posing as cattlemen and as resort developers: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 68–69.
secretly buying up cheap land options: Ibid., 75–76. The key reason Mulholland wanted to route the water through San Fernando was that the unused portion could be stored there. This allowed him to use all of Los Angeles’s share of the Owens River, which was essential to maintain the city’s claim under the western water law of appropriation rights, popularly known as “use it or lose it.” As a direct result of the Owens River water, the San Fernando Valley was soon incorporated into Los Angeles. Among the insiders were Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, railroadmen Edward Harriman and Henry Huntington, and bankers Joseph Artori of Security Trust and Savings Bank and L. C. Brand of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company.
population surpassed Mulholland’s expectations: Billington et al., 161.
violent reaction from irate Owens Valley farmers: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 92–95.
broke the last local opposition to Mulholland’s bid: A chief opponent was the powerful Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, who placed greater importance on the near-term hit to the value of his large acreage in Mexico than on the long-term growth of Los Angeles. The Owens Valley problem also expedited the creation of regional water districts with taxing powers in order to raise funds to purchase the dam’s hydroelectricity to pump its water up the escarpment through the aqueduct and across the Mojave Desert.
divided the river into an upper and lower basin: The upper-basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico supplied over 90 percent of the Colorado’s water.
7.5 million acre-feet were assigned to each basin: Billington et al., 158–159; U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Lower Colorado Region, 10; Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 262–263.
builders constructed their own steel-fabricating plant: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 128–129; U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Reclamaton, Lower Colorado Region, 15–23.
the strike was broken, with the federal government’s tacit approval: Billington et al., 174–175. The Bureau of Reclamation also declared the construction site to be federal land to circumvent Nevada law prohibiting the underground use of internal combustion engines on health safety grounds.
“I came, I saw, and I was conquered”: Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted in Billington et al., 179.
five largest structures on Earth, all dams: Reisner, “Age of Dams and Its Legacy.”
hydroelectricity for the entire population living west: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 155.
the Grand Coulee: Billington et al., 206.
Roosevelt started the project on his own: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 156–157.
36 huge dams would be built on the Columbia: Ibid., 165.
Grand Coulee Dam: Worster, 271.
providing 40 percent of America’s total hydroelectricity: Billington et al., 191.
hydroelectricity sales heavily subsidized the building of the dam: Worster, 271. Ninety percent of the costs were covered with hydroelectricity sales; in the absence of a strong agribusiness lobby, the government made a concerted effort to limit existing users to the same water subsidies that were to be provided only to small 160-acre farms under the 1902 Reclamation legislation.
92 percent of Grand Coulee’s and Bonneville’s electricity output: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 162, 164. By the middle of the war, half of total U.S. aluminum production—which requires electrical power—was located in the Pacific Northwest. The United States produced some 60,000 warplanes in four years of war.
23,500 well pipes pumped up prodigious amounts: Ibid., 151, 335.
“The Central Valley Project”: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 336–337. Among the big landowners receiving subsidized waters were food giant DiGiorgio Corporation, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and Standard Oil.
most intensively water-engineered place on the planet: Reisner, “Age of Dams and Its Legacy.”
Tennessee River basin: Morison, 960–964. The river, 652 miles long, rises in the Appalachians of North Carolina and Virginia and flows west, where it empties in the Ohio River near Paducah, Kentucky.
staircase of 42 dams and reservoirs: Specter, 68; Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 167.
results transformed the Tennessee Valley: Morison, 963. Electricity prices fell from 2.4 cents to 1 cent per kilowatt-hour.
75,000 dams had been built: Specter, 68.
6,600 large ones over 50 feet: Peet, 9; Sandra Postel, “Hydro Dynamics,” 62.
343–344. Bureau of Reclamation cataloged: Worster, 277.
17 western states had 45.4 million acres under irrigation: Ibid., 276–277.
American water use for all purposes multiplied tenfold: Ibid., 312. Water use rose from 40 billion gallons per day to 393 billion between 1900 and 1975. U.S. Census figures show that population rose from 76 to 216 million in the same period.
40 percent of American cattle: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 154; McGuire, “Water-Level Changes in the High Plains Aquifer, 1980–1999” Pearce 59.
Ogallala only half an inch per year: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 438.
gigantic cloud of stinging, shearing dust: Ibid., 452. See also Evans, American Century, 232–233.
60 major, sky-blackening dust storms each year: Evans, American Century, 232. There were 40 major dust storms in 1935, 68 in 1936, 72 in 1937, and 61 in 1938.
3.5 million “Dust Bowl refugees”: Ibid., 234.
centrifugal pump could lift 800 gallons: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 436.
could raise water even faster: Glennon, Water Follies, 26. The new techniques were capable of pumping 1,200 gallons per minute.
Ogallala annual water use quadrupled: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 154; McGuire, “Water-Level Changes in the High Plains Aquifer, 1980–1999.”
growing 15 percent of that nation’s wheat, corn, cotton: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 437, 448–449.
drawing water out of the Ogallala 10 times faster: McNeill, Somethin
g New Under the Sun, 154.
Ogallala reservoir would last: Ibid. Irrigation peaked in northern Texas in the mid-1970s and began contracting across the High Plains as a whole in 1983. On Central Valley overpumping, see Felicity Barringer, “As Aquifers Fall, Calls to Regulate the Use of Groundwater Rise,” New York Times, May 14, 2009.
U.S. groundwater usage more than doubled: Robert Glennon, “Bottling a Birthright,” in McDonald and Jehl, 17. Over that thirty years, groundwater usage increased from 8 to 18.5 billion gallons per day—65 gallons per person.
19 large dams and reservoirs held four times: The last dam on the river was the hydroelectric giant Glen Canyon, completed in the mid-1960s.
Every drop was used and reused 17 times: Cohen, 134.
starting to take up to an additional 900,000 acre-feet: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 260–261.
salinity at the river’s halfway point: Worster, 321–322.
scrambled to develop emergency plans: Gertner.
75 percent of the state’s entire agricultural output: Bureau of Reclamation, “Central Valley Project—General Overview,” www.usbr.gov/dataweb/html/cvp.html.
water-efficient industries and cities: For example, 1,000 acre-feet of water used to produce semiconductors and other high-tech applications created some 16,000 jobs, while the same water on pasture farms added only eight jobs; Las Vegas and Reno used 10 percent of Nevada’s water but accounted for 95 percent of its economy—while marginal alfalfa farmers who consumed most of the rest couldn’t survive without the water subsidy.
United States decommissioning surpassed new construction by 2000: Clarke and King, 44. As it often did, the change in American domestic attitudes within the leading world power helped condition opinions at world institutions. In 2000 the U.N.’s World Commission on Dams reported that the negative effects of many large dam projects outweighed the benefits and urged nations to explore alternative approaches to satisfying their water resource needs.
the United States had more than 50,000 toxic waste dumps: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 29.
released naturally by all the volcanoes in Earth’s history: Ponting, 366.
deadly radioactive waste: Nuclear waste afflicted both America’s Columbia River and the Soviet Union’s upper Ob River basin in western Siberia, which became the most radioactive place on Earth. In 1967, when a prolonged drought dried the bed of Lake Karachay, into which the Soviets had disposed nuclear waste, lake dust carrying 3,000 times the radioactivity of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was scattered by the winds over half a million people in central Asia; the area remained so radioactive twenty years later that anyone visiting the lakeshore for an hour risked death from the radiation.
“The pollution entering our waterways”: Carson, 39, 41.
“The problem of water pollution by pesticides”: Ibid., 39.
“Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind”: Ibid., 8.
combusted on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River: Specter, 69. Similar fires on India’s Ganges and Russia’s Volga rivers in the same period attested to the universality of the environmental problem.
Earth Summits of heads of state: Earth Summits were held at Rio de Janeiro (1992) and Johannesburg (2002). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues reports every five or six years (1990, 1995, 2001, 2007). The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, inaugurated by Kofi Annan, was published in 2005.
“Every drop of water that runs to the sea without yielding”: Herbert Hoover, quoted in Glennon, Water Follies, 13; Joseph Stalin, quoted in Peet, 11.
“the new temple of resurgent India”: Jawaharlal Nehru, quoted in Specter, 68.
Soviet Union increased its water use eightfold: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 163.
358–359. double irrigated cropland in the first quarter century: Ibid., 179, 278. Water use, meanwhile, quintupled during the same period; see also Jim Yardley, “Under China’s Booming North, the Future Is Drying Up,” New York Times, September 28, 2007.
India’s 4,300 large dams ranked it third: Peet, 9.
13 were being erected on average every day: Ibid., 9–10.
World reservoir capacity quadrupled: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 26.
World hydropower output doubled: Ibid., 5. World population doubled from 3 to 6 billion from 1960 to 2000, while economic output sextupled.
irrigation nearly tripled in the half century: Hans Schreier, “Mountain Wise and Water Smart,” in McDonald and Jehl, 90.
all the corn grown in the United States was hybrid: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 220.
Hybrid dwarf wheat: Dwarf wheat started in the 1920s with Norin 10, a semi-dwarf variety developed in Japan that crossed Japanese and U.S. varieties, then was further crossbred in Mexico in the 1950s by pathbreaking plant breeder Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize in 1970 for his work.
hybrid varietals increased their share: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 222.
60 percent of all larger river systems in the world: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 32.
best hydropower and irrigation dam sites: This was not true in Africa, which had for the most part been bypassed by the Green Revolution and still had good, untapped hydropower potential.
“for a small but measurable change in the wobble of the earth”: Gleick, “Making Every Drop Count,” 42.
retired as fast as new irrigated land was developed: Simmons, 258.
10 percent of world farming was unsustainable: Postel, “Growing More Food with Less Water,” 46–47.
Chapter Fourteen: Water: The New Oil
half the renewable global runoff: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 106.
1.1 billion people: United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation, 4.
lives are uprooted catastrophically: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 13; United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Water and Sanitation, 17.
occurred from 1999 to 2005: Peter H. Gleick, “Environment and Security: Water Conflict Chronology,” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2006–2007, 207–212. Yemen, Jordan, Namibia, Sicily, and Algeria were among the multitude of places where water was rationed. Fierce, perennial litigation over water rights was normative in the United States and other countries governed by credible rules of law. The annals between 1999 and 2005 provided an illustrative sample of the increasingly commonplace violent protests and clashes within countries. Chinese farmers from Hebei and Henan provinces fired mortars and bombs at one another in a battle over limited water resources; a year later small-scale water wars and riots broke out, leading to several deaths, in Shandong province along the Yellow River when the government tried to stop thousands of farmers illegally diverting water from a reservoir earmarked to supply China’s drying northern cities. In Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city, one person died when 30,000 protesters clashed with police for several days in a fury over the government’s privatization of the municipal water delivery system, which pushed prices up to one-quarter of many residents’ wages. Karachi, Pakistan, was shaken by four bombings and riots from demonstrators chanting “Give us water” during a period of prolonged drought. Neighboring India had several incidents and deaths in different parts of the country, including riots in Gujarat when water trucks regularly failed to provide enough water. More than 20 were killed in tribal violence in northwestern Kenya following charges by Masai herdsmen that a local Kikuyu politician had diverted a river to irrigate his farm. Somalia’s “War of the Well” claimed 250 dead as villagers clashed in the extensive violence that accompanied the three-year drought and dysfunctional central government. Water wells in Darfur were intentionally destroyed and contaminated as part of the campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing.
“Many of the wars”: Ismail Serageldin, quoted in “Of Water and Wars.”
“now well beyond levels that can be sustained”: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 6.
rise from half to 70 percent by 2025: Sterling, 30.
372–373. one-quarter o
f global freshwater use: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 6, 106–107. Fifteen percent to 35 percent of withdrawals for irrigated crops were drawn from depleting resources.
265 gallons for a single glass: Pearce, 3–4.
ordinary cotton T-shirt: Sterling, 31.
By 2025 up to 3.6 billion people: Postel, Last Oasis, xvi.
virtual water: J. A. Allan, professor at Kings College London and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, won the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize for his pioneering work on the concept of virtual water in the early 1990s.
evaporation-transpiration: Transpiration is the process of water vapor emission from organic matter such as plants and humans.
that one-third totals enough: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 119; Postel, Last Oasis, 28; Pearce, 28.
large share runs off unused: The Amazon watershed alone accounted for 15 percent of the runoff, while only four-tenths of 1 percent of the world’s population lived there.
in Africa only one-fifth of all rainfall: Clarke, Water: The International Crisis, 10.
history’s poorest societies often had: Grey and Sadoff, 545.
90 percent of the dry-land inhabitants: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 13.
governments still routinely maintain monopolistic control: In the United States, water was the one surviving great state monopoly, which had previously included electricity and telecommunications.
“tragedy of the commons”: As used here, the term tragedy of the commons refers to the social trap caused by combined individual exploitation of a shared resource that is injurious to the greater public good. The concept has a long history, but was coined in modern times in a famous 1968 essay in Science by biologist Garrett Hardin.
Aral Sea: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 163–164.
Lake Chad: Pearce, 85. Lake Chad had oscillated in size from natural forces since at least the Middle Ages. A natural peak was reached in 1962 with a drainage zone comparable in size to continental western Europe. About half to one-third of the shrinkage from the 1960s to 2004 was estimated to have come from man-made irrigation water diversions. The major irrigation dam projects were in Nigeria and Cameroon.
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