High Plains water depletion, and why you should care

"Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the High Plains"

by William Ashworth

Norton, 330 pp., $26.95

Eight states rely heavily on something called the Ogallala Aquifer, consisting of billions of gallons of water left underground millions of years ago. As the water is drawn out of the aquifer for drinking and growing crops and nourishing livestock and watering lawns and recreation such as boating, it cannot be replenished. That geologic era is long gone.

If the next American civil war comes, it might revolve around water, not slavery.

The diminished water supply means parched conditions for portions of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and South Dakota. Plenty of residents in those states have heard about the coming crisis, but behave as if the water will never run out. As for residents of the 42 other states, they tend toward ignorance about the problem — after all, the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer is not their problem, right?

Wrong. That brand of logic is akin to saying the traditions of Southern slavery igniting the Civil War were not the problem of the Northern states. Maybe not at first, but trouble finds a way to spread across permeable state lines.

William Ashworth, a prolific author from Ashland, Ore., whose previous books discuss the Great Lakes, bears, penguins and counterproductive congressional policymaking, is not an alarmist. He is, instead, a skilled, understated, fact-based reporter determined to marshal those facts so that readers in every state understand the consequences of unrestricted water use.

The subtle message of Ashworth's research is that all of nature and all of human nature are interconnected. What happens in New Mexico affects what happens in South Dakota and eventually what happens in New York, even though the connection might seem indirect. Because the eight states dependent on the aquifer's water produce so much of the food for the United States and other nations, eventually the ripple effects could seem cataclysmic.

The structure of Ashworth's book echoes the complexity of the water problem. That is not a criticism of the book. Rather, it is a statement that, despite Ashworth's clear, compelling writing style, the text is intellectually challenging. A section-by-section summary, while not always the best way to review a book, seems appropriate in this case.

• An Army Corps of Engineers dam, built near Guymon, Okla., in the mid-1970s for $46 million, is devoid of water. Why? Because water is being extracted from the Ogallala Aquifer so much faster than projected that nothing is left to flow through the dam. Aquifers consist of wet dirt, with the wetness caused by rivers that flowed perhaps 3 million years ago. New water will dampen the dirt up to a point, but not like in prehistoric eras. "We are pumping it out more than three times as fast as Nature can put it back," Ashworth reports. "Over the aquifer as a whole, that loss pencils out to a net deficit of nearly 12 billion gallons a day — enough to supply a typical American family for more than 80,000 years."

• Economic development is usually seen as an immediate positive — a retail center or a theme park or a dairy in the sparsely populated portions of the High Plains provides jobs, and thus much-needed income. But copious water and development are rarely found in the same place.

• More common than economic development on the High Plains is agriculture. But agriculture above the Ogallala Aquifer cannot exist without irrigation. Irrigation is so expensive as water becomes more scarce that lots of family farmers cannot afford to pay the bills. So they sell the farm — probably to an impersonal corporate operation that cares little for the social fabric of the locale.

• Corporate farming frequently involves agricultural chemicals to increase crop yields. Unless chemicals are applied just right, they seep into the aquifer, resulting in toxic pollution. Toxic to grasses and trees, toxic to animals, eventually toxic to humans.

• Laws and regulations instituted by government agencies could wrestle with depletion and toxicity. But disagreement over who owns the water under the ground is rife. If legislators in New Mexico define ownership differently from legislators in Texas — which is the case — then what? Such disagreement causes bitterness, making meaningful legislating and regulating difficult.

Who will lead the potentially parched citizenry to wiser water use? Ashworth is unsure. He is sure, however, that "we cannot save this lifestyle, not in this form. All we can do is plan for its failure. And we had better be doing exactly that" before the aquifer runs dry.

Steve Weinberg is a freelance journalist living in Columbia, Mo. He is a director of the National Book Critics Circle.