By Hal Rothman, 1-31-06

Editor's Note: This is the first in a two-part series on Western water from Hal Rothman.  Click here for the part two, an investigation into the solution.  

I stood at an overlook above Lake Mead and marveled at the white of the bathtub ring, the area once under water now exposed to light by the extended drought the Southwest has experienced. A remarkable repository of rural California’s water, the man-made Lake Mead has precipitously decreased from 1,214 feet in elevation in 1999 to 1137.5 feet in December 2005. Even last winter's powerful weather only temporarily reversed the decline. Since early in 2005, when water levels rose after unusually heavy rainfalls, the lake has again dropped to nearly unprecedented levels.

The resulting landscape is ominous. New islands, once submerged when the water was deeper, break the lake’s smooth surface. "Dangerous boating down there," my seatmate on a recent flight into Las Vegas wryly informed me with the faux panache of an experienced sea captain. But he had a point. Rock formations appear like icebergs, dark in the places where never submerged, pale white where the water once covered their exposed points. They stick up, far above the water level, like the submerged mountains hiding long-buried canyons they truly are.

The change in vista is stunning, its implications – of a dry and desolate future ala Mad Max, a feral world of scarcity - a terrifying prospect. Another year of light snowmelt could spell the end of this technological stunt. These days, no look at Lake Mead makes a case to sustain the existing system.

Lake Mead’s shrinking water tells the story of an Armageddon we have yet to grasp. Since Americans built the chain of dams that dot the Colorado River and bind the Grand Canyon between them, we have promised ourselves that a combination of law that divides the river’s bounty and faith in technological solutions to every class of problem will allow us not only to survive but to thrive in the desert. We believed that we could build dams, turn the water on and off like a kitchen faucet, and regulate the river to serve our needs.

Like everything else, the intersection of law and technology has consequences. We have overallocated the river without making provisions for the environmental changes damming causes, the changing nature of water use in the West, and the spate of legislation that is predicated on water to fulfill its mandate.

The problem starts with statute, the archaic and flawed "Law of the River," the Colorado River Compact. It deserves to be called “the fiction of the river," for it is an oppressive disaster, the root cause of a considerable amount of inequity in the Southwest and a clog in the intake pipe to middle-class opportunity for those who seek to the American Dream.

The Colorado River Compact dates from the legendary 1922 US Supreme Court case, Wyoming v. California. The court ruled the “first in time, first in right” presumption of priority in western water use applied across state lines as well as within states. Tossed aside by the court, upper river states like Wyoming and Colorado tried to reserve water for their own future growth – which they then imagined as agriculture – by letting California take most of the water south of Lee’s Ferry, Arizona. They salvaged an equal amount for the states on the upper river. More than seventy years later, this expedient agreement from the 1920s had become an albatross on the region, a cross that we all bear that not only destroys what many value most about the region, but impoverishes many to fill the coffers of an oligarchic few.

Since 1927, the Colorado River Compact has inherently favored agriculture and ranching over urban use. Even though it is based on the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act, an effort to irrigate the desert land to create family farms, this law has become the underpinning of agribusiness in the desert. 160-acre family farms? Show them to me!

The result is stunning. 3.8 million of the 4.4 million acre-feet that California receives under the compact belongs to three agricultural districts in eastern California. In a state where urban economic activity exceeds that of even the enormous agricultural industry by exponential factors, such an arrangement defies economic logic.

In every western state, 80% of the water goes to agriculture and ranching. In no state, even California, do those activities generate 5% of the state economy. Agriculture and ranching in California in 2005 generated a gross of about $21 billion. The gross domestic product of the state the same year was $1.55 trillion. 80% of the water goes to produce 1.3% of the fifth-largest economy in the world. It doesn't make sense.

Outside of Baker, Nevada, an award-winning rancher named Dean Baker runs 2,000 head of cattle and raises alfalfa on 2,000 acres. Baker may be the best at what he does in Nevada. He has received the BLM's stewardship award for Utah, and has been voted Nevada Cattlemen of the Year and Rancher of the Year. This is an impressive set of accomplishments.

For every million gallons of water used, a single Las Vegas Strip hotel produces 550 times the employment offered by any Nevada farm, as well as more than 275 times the wage and salary payments of agriculture. Dean Baker, for all his accomplishments and admirable rhetoric about individualism and property rights, produces no comparable contribution to the state economy.

As I have long argued, the urban West would come out way ahead if it paid agriculture and ranching not to raise crops and animals. There is simply no more inefficient economic use of water in the arid West than agriculture and ranching.

Every hour of every day, water goes to western agriculture because it always has, not because the crops its produces are necessary or it creates plentiful jobs or taxes on its profits fill state coffers. Subsidized agriculture also creates competition for farmers and ranchers elsewhere in the country who are not so fortunate to receive federal subsidies. Even worse, the uses of the water border on the ridiculous. This precious resource grows cotton outside of Yuma, Arizona and alfalfa on the Walker River in northern Nevada.

The last time I looked, alfalfa and cotton were neither valuable nor scarce.

Who's kidding who? Why do we do this? Because we always have? Could there possibly be a better way? We will never know unless the public pressures elected officials to take a look at this ridiculous situation and see if it merits some kind of adjustment. It is simply too hard for elected officials take on entrenched interests without a brutally forceful shove from the public.

Hal K. Rothman is Professor and Barrick Distinguished Scholar at the Department of History at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Considered the one of the nation’s leading expert on tourism, travel, and post-industrial economies, he is the award-winning author of countless books, including the widely acclaimed Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century (2002), Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West, (1998 ), Saving the Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth Century (2000), which received the 1999 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Contemporary Nonfiction, and many others.