Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The vanishing groundwater in Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nebraska is all part of the Ogallala aquifer, which holds two distinctions: one of being the largest discrete aquifer in the world, the other of being the fastest-disappearing aquifer in the world. The rate of withdrawal over natural replenishment is now roughly equivalent to the flow of the Colorado River. This was the region called the Dust Bowl, the one devastated by the Great Drought; that was back before anyone knew there was so much water underfoot, and before the invention of the centrifugal pump. The prospect that a region so plagued by catastrophe could become rich and fertile was far too tantalizing to resist; the more irrigation, everyone thought, the better. The states knew the groundwater couldn’t last forever (even if the farmers thought it would), so, like the Saudis with their oil, they had to decide how long to make it last. A reasonable period, they decided, was twenty-five to fifty years. “What are you going to do with all that water?” asks Felix Sparks, the former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “Are you just going to leave it in the ground?” Not necessarily, one could reply, but fifty years or a little longer is an awfully short period in which to exhaust the providence of half a million years, to consume as much nonrenewable water as there is in Lake Huron.