In the ongoing saga known as the settlement of the American West, the alchemist is one who has mastered the illusion of forcing water to flow uphill, towards money. The practice is one that requires equal parts greed, short-sightedness, and collusion. Therein lies a cautionary tale.
As famously depicted in the movie classic, “Chinatown,” the winning strategy says if you can’t bring the people to the water, bring the water to the people. It involves separating the water resource from where it is naturally found, and then moving it, by any number of questionable legal vehicles and drastic physical means, to a different location. The intended result being that land deemed less desirable is suddenly transformed into a much more valuable asset.
Recent reports indicate a renewed interest in freeing up land that is held by the federal government (which can be translated to mean the citizens of the United States) so that it can be developed for housing, which is in extremely short supply.
This would not be unprecedented, and there are examples of such endeavors that have been successful. It can be argued that the most beneficial use for certain tracts of public land might be to make them available for that very purpose.
Proponents point out that the most appropriate holdings are found in locations managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
The U.S. government owns and manages about 640 million acres of land, or about 28 percent of the total land area of the United States, mostly concentrated in the Western states. It’s fair to say that a shortage of dirt is not the problem.
The land owned and managed by the BLM has emerged as a top contender for housing and development because it is not comprised of national park or forest land, nor Native American land. Rather, it is “primarily vast, undeveloped tracts located near or adjacent to high-growth cities.” Las Vegas and Phoenix are frequently mentioned as prime examples.
This, however, is where the bad decisions of the past come home to roost. The locations that have the development and building sector drooling are already some of the most water starved in the country. As early as the 1500s, a scribe of the Spanish explorer Coronado wrote in a report to the King of Spain that the lands along the mid Rio Grande valley, although they had a perennial water flow, were “not suitable for permanent habitation.”
The journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition echo the same kinds of concerns. In 1878, John Wesley Powell sent Congress his “Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the USA” in which he estimated that only 2 percent of the land west of the 100th meridian was suitable for agriculture. But the federal government, land speculators and the railroads all pushed for economic growth. Warnings about water scarcity in their “promised land” were summarily rejected in favor of more optimistic opinions.
We know the rest of the story. Inflated estimates of the flow rates for the Colorado River Basin, to the tune of 16.4 million-acre-feet-per-year, based largely on wishful thinking, errors in past flow amounts, inaccurate water evaporation assumptions and grossly exaggerated future precipitation considerations. The more-scientific calculations based on flow rates measured at Lee’s Ferry—which set the rate at 15 million-acre-feet per year—overestimated the rates by a million and a half units.
Fast forward to the present and the population of the basin depending on Colorado River water has grown from 20 million in 1980 to more than 40 million today, coupled with the fact that the current two-decade (and ongoing) drought has resulted in flow rates that have averaged 12.4m acre feet, while the total water allocation for the river system has ballooned to 19.3m acre feet.
Is it not easy to understand why the water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell are nearing critical lows? The current federal administration appears to be too concerned with re-installing high-flow shower heads for personal satisfaction. They should be concerned with ensuring that future residential developments have not only the acreage needed to support new homes, but that those houses, neighborhoods and communities will have a sustainable supply of water.
We all want to believe in magic, but let’s not fall for the same old tricks.