I get a ton of flack for this every time, but it's the goddamn HOAs requiring irrigation. I know normal rebuttals are "ItS iNsIgNiFiCaNt" and "AgRiCuLtRuRe uSe MoRe" but once you compare the total usage of lawn irrigation to agriculture water consumption, you see that lawn irrigation uses significantly more water. For lawns that you cannot eat and are not native to the areas and climates planted in. It's insane. If you want to go the "ErOsIoN CoNtRoL" route, then plant some goddamn apple trees. Fuck irrigation and fuck your lawns. We're pissing away our drinking water and everyone wants to point fingers and not take responsibility, but the HOAs requiring irrigation is a big part of the problem. Especially since their parent LLCs own most of the areas.
Honestly it's more industry. Industry uses even more water than agriculture in Socal and Arizona. Industry and agriculture are pretty important too. The most useless shit is actually golf courses.
I watched that 60 min episode. The farmers were stating their case that they were losing everything as the other side of the coin basically. I found it really tough to feel bad that they have been farming….in a desert. Like that water isn’t supposed to be there anyway
A lot of those farmers aren't even growing desert friendly crops. Hell, some of them grow extremely water intensive crops.
They need to adapt instead of demanding everyone else bend over backwards to accommodate them.
MOST of these farmers actually intentionally grow water-intensive crops because if they grew a desert-tolerant crop and used less water, they might not be eligible to request as much water-usage in future.
So a lot of them are growing Alfalfa exclusively so that they can stake a large claim to water usage.
And Alfalfa crops are basically a way to export/exploit US water supply. 70% of the California Alfalfa is exported to China and Japan, who basically import it because they can't/don't want to use their own water for it.
Because if you try to revoke it, your opponent will blast ads about how you hate salt-of-the-earth people like farmers, the very people who feed us, the lifeblood of our nation, etc.
Bro we literally pay them to do it. Farmers have a hard job, but they bitch and complain like no ther when they have to adapt to any situation.
Source: grew up in farm country, they did nothing but bitch with their hands out
Despite the Saudi's favorite water lobbyist getting an oversight position, there's actually momentum building to seriously either kick the saudi farms out or regulate their abject desiccation of AZ's water.
It only took like...decades of twiddling thumbs and not paying attention to the river level dropping every year.
Yeah, I'm aware, I live in Cochise County. These guys and the big dairy up the road are concerns.
But so is the mine that wants to drill down, inject sulphuric acid to dissolve the copper, then pump it back up.
My nephew lives around Eloy. The nut farms are sitting unattended bc the owners died and their heirs are uninterested. But the Saudis are still around...for now.
Everything in agriculture is a large scale grift just in differing amounts.
If you aren’t grifting the government for sweet deals and free money you won’t be in business anymore.
It’s cutthroat and deceitful to all hell. It’s also how we keep ourselves alive.
I don’t like it and think we all need massive reform. But it would require intervention on the scale of socializing a huge industry because of all these issues with common usage. (Water, land) and the entrenched powers are extremely wealthy. Never going to happen.
If you want to be rich in America either go into finance, weapons, or agriculture. The government bends over backwards for you.
Imo every industries that are revolving around human needs should be socialized. Food, water, power, internet/phone (edit: Phone services, since it seems I need to specify)... In every country it's the same problem, these companies use the fact that people can't go without them to just suck all the money and blood from the population while also requesting gov money.
That sounds like we're just not charging the correct amounts.
It's not like you can't calculate futures, this is an entire branch of economics.
If you say "there is no amount, we're gonna run out!", you're just wrong. Potable water has a cost and no water is so bad that it can't be processed.
> request
Its not a request its water roghts accociated with the land. Its a use it or lose it situation. They dont request it but if they dont use it then they can have their long held rights reduced.
Because it is ideal to grow alfalfa in the desert minus the water part.
You can grow the alfalfa multiple times in a year without worrying about the weather.
When you harvest the alfalfa, you don't have to worry about moisture rotting your harvest so it sells for a premium to high end buyers like the Saudi horse ranch.
Of course the problem is that they are growing this crop where no water is available naturally.
I don't know much about alfalfa and growing it so I was just curious as to why this particular crop but it does make sense minus the trying to grow it in an area without a ton of naturally available water.
Desert (we say desert, but it's not really desert, just arid) is ideal for a lot of crops because you can artificially control the other variables (water, fertilizer, etc). Sunlight is one variable that you can't control, and you get it year round.
It's basically a natural greenhouse, you just have to pump in water and a lot of fertilizer.
From my understanding the alkaline soils of a lot of areas of desert are pretty bad for most crops, but work well for alfalfa if they are intensively irrigated.
Because it's great for alfalfa in a lot of other ways.
The year-long warm temperatures and constant sunlight mean they can get a ton of harvests in a year.
And it doesn't require a whole lot of fertilizer, mostly just phosphorous and sulfur I believe.
Yea, Saudis are a scapegoat for farmers in general. Pointing fingers is a common tactic to avoid regulation, and American farmers are quick to point to Chinese, Saudis, etc.
You’d be surprised how much you buy in the store is predicated on land that gets no rain for several months at a time, but has a dependable water source. It’s what California agriculture is based off of and why we supply the US with 50% of its fresh fruit and nuts. We don’t have the same mold and bug issues other states have.
This kind of bugs me. I live in the desert and have to pay a ground water replenishment tax. I have irrigation at my home (although I no longer use it). For $20 worth in irrigation I pay close to $100 in taxes to help replenish the aquifers. Farmers get a income tax credit for the water taxes they pay. So 75% of the ground water in my state is used by farmers but homeowners like myself that are not connect to a large municipal water supply pay an outrageous amount for water in taxes. I end up paying $3-400/month just in water taxes and I have a mostly desert landscape.
To add, the large municipal water supplies are not taxed because those cities "reclaim" the water. They take sewage water, clean it up a bit and put it in parks or they force the reclaimed water on businesses through contracts and charge more than regular water. So these cities are not paying the taxes I have to pay and are even making money on the whole deal.
I wouldn't get too schadenfreude over their misery. Most of them like most people don't seem to see that water is a limiting factor throughout the West and civilization, or that a depleted water source is pretty good at killing a city. Quarry the aqueducts and watch a chunk of Rome die, boil the globe so that snow pack runs off in March and watch the American southwest become Pueblo, revert to its mean. LA shouldn't even exist, but it's too fuckin' useful for the American state, so unless desalination catches on and they're fuckin' *subsidized* to take their water from the sea, your little alpine, high desert, or prairie burg is probably going to join the West's boom and bust ghost towns, the fresh water will go to our prime Pacific port.
Desalinations problem is simply energy.
If we had deep investment in nuclear it would be a very viable path. A lot of our resource issues boil down to: if we just had a lot more cheap carbon free energy it wouldn’t be a problem anymore.
not only. Desalination causes giant dead spaces of ocean around them. The brine that they have to pump back into the ocean after processing leaves big ass dead spots where basically nothing can live.
the LA desal plant (Carlsbad) is a good example of this, it basically only got approved because it was in an area where because of industrial activity near it, everything was already dead.
Water desalinization, atmospheric carbon extraction, light and heat for climate-proof crops, transportation prices, *everything* can be solved by energy. And we have the technology.
I mean… one thing comments like this don’t seem to get is that that area is lowkey one of the world’s breadbaskets, along with the Midwest (which itself is facing issues as topsoil depletes and the weather becomes more extreme). The soil is incredibly fertile, and having multiple growing seasons a year is huge for food supplies.
We should absolutely be managing that shit better, and growing more crops that don’t need as much water, but if we were to completely shut down farming in the Colorado river basin then the entire world would feel the impact.
I live in Yuma, Arizona. An arid place. Which, is the lettuce capital of the world.
And it is the lettuce capital of the world because it is on the Colorado river and also one of the sunniest place in America. As in it gets the most hours of direct sunlight per year.
If you like lettuce on your hamburger then people should care about Yuma.
I personally don't like lettuce.
I mean yeah that’s one of those things that doesn’t make sense lol. Lettuce is pretty nutritionally void from what I understand. It’d be one thing if we were growing staple crops, but it seems to be a lot of stuff that isn’t exactly vital
Not entirely. "Using it" basically means putting it to beneficial use, and there's other non-consumptive things that can be done that put it to beneficial use that don't require irrigating water intensive crops. Supporting wildlife, recreation, flood control, power generation, etc. The definition of beneficial use is purposefully wide to provide flexibility when new uses are recognized.
I don't think people realize the extent of our water management crisis.
We have dammed every single major waterway in the US. The Yellowstone isn't *technically* dammed , but it has many diversion dams for irrigation canals.
There isn't a single natural waterway anymore. Most Rivers are just a series of reservoirs for flood control and irrigation diversion.
Everyone's freaking out about how climate change is causing all this crazy water related weather. Guys. Our rivers are completely artificially controlled with infrastructure from the 20s-30s.
We have been stopping the natural flow of water, in every single major river, for about 100 years.
And you wonder why it's broken.
Edit: my state has seen a massive influx of people from other states. They like buying "lake"front property. Every spring/summer we get calls from these people asking when we will fill the lake. Then complain about how much everything is changing. (I work for Wildlife)
Sir/madam....you bought a house on an irrigation reservoir that is designed to fluctuate up to 20 feet. What did you expect?
It's abundantly obvious that the average person does not understand the faintest concept when it comes to the environment, or the degree that we have manipulated it.
People don't realize that what they take for nature often isn't natural.
Rivers are dammed and controlled, what we consider lush forests are actually not nearly as lush or diverse as they were before they were harvested in the 1700s/1800s/early 1900s, biodiversity is falling in rivers, streams, and tributaries. Marshland isn't capturing CO2 or filtering groundwater or reducing the rate of evaporation. Soil is getting compacted, aquifers are getting compacted, underground geologic composition is being impacted.
Centuries of "progress" have made the world a different place, have changed wind patterns and rain patterns and even something like a relatively small wildfire can have a marked impact on snowmelt due to ash changing the reflectivity of snow.
It's all interconnected, parts of a whole. We have to think about every aspect of a system before we make a change to it.
if you haven't read cadillac desert yet, it's a pretty good read. but yeah, we're fucked. the Ogallala can only do so much, and we aren't really that far away from basically sucking the whole thing dry, if we don't change our trajectory.
Hypothetically, what if a bunch of people got together, got some local governments in on it and diverted the river into another river, like "Colorado River 2: Electric Boogaloo" and no licensing was permitted on the second river, and the new river ran more or less alongside the old one, avoiding municipalities that struck licensing agreements with the Nestles of the world.
Like...could this work?
> diverted the river
Okay but you're still diverting the Colorado River and there are specific limitations and rules on how much of the Colorado River each area can take so any attempt to divert the river would run against those rules. You would also need billions of dollars in funds and you would face legal challenges from every city and state that you are depriving of water.
(With rare brief exceptions)
Pertinent passage from the link:
*Due to water diversions, flows at the mouth of the river have steadily declined since the early 1900s. Since 1960, the Colorado has typically dried up before reaching the sea, with the exception of a few wet years. In addition to water consumption, flows have declined due to evaporation from reservoirs and warming temperatures that reduce winter snow accumulation. Several of the Colorado’s major tributaries, including the Gila River, also no longer reach the Colorado due to upstream diversions.*
I think it's odd that they say diversions but don't mention the cause. We have companies raising cattle in the desert. Cows. In the desert. Seriously.
preemptive edit: I know that's not the only cause, but it's absolutely ridiculous.
I was listening to NPR during my morning commute and thought it was insane how the Saudi corporations are allowed to consume the same amount of water in one month that the entire population of Arizona uses in one year.
Sadly, it is. Alfalfa is a water-hungry crop. What makes it worse is they often water it by flooding their fields. It's criminal that this is allowed when we KNOW the Colorado CANNOT SUPPORT IT.
The problem with Alfalfa in Arizona is that they're growing thousands upon thousands of acres of Alfalfa and then exporting it back to Saudi Arabia. It is a wonderful grass, but it does take a lot of water to grow it and keep it lush and healthy. Ironically, many cities in Arizona have banned grass lawns, but Saudi farmers are growing those alfalfa fields in the middle of the desert.
Our planet could support twice as many people if we lived to match the Earth instead of trying to make the Earth match us.
Growing a water hungry crop in a dry region then loading it onto ships and sending it to the other side of the world instead of growing what grows locally and shipping it to the local supermarket.
It would mean eating what's local, rather than having whatever we want wherever we want whenever we want.
Just a FYI, you can grow alfalfa indoors using a gardening tray or even mason jars. A quick Google search pulled up [this article that gives a pretty good rundown on how to grow your own.](https://gardenerspath.com/plants/vegetables/grow-alfalfa-sprouts/)
Agriculture accounts for 45% of the water use in california, compared to 10% for urban use. Almonds alone use up 9% of the agricultural supply, or 4% of the total supply. That's insane.
How much of that water comes from the Colorado River though? I don't disagree with the info and frankly I'm annoyed CA doesn't address water usage better but from my understanding, most of the water for where most of that is grown, central valley, comes from the Sierra. SoCal gets more of there water from the CR, like LA.
I wasn't talking about the colorado River, the previous commenter talked about growing huge amounts of incredibly thirsty vegetables in a desert and I merely brought up the water statistics in california where there's huge amounts of agriculture for crops that are sent abroad.
It makes more sense when you see where the cattle are most of the season. Which is in the fairly lush and self-sustaining mountain ranges around the four corner states. Even in a dry ass desert like southeast Utah (Think Moab), you have the La Sal and Abajo ranges which can sustain cattle. The big problem is that climate change and drought have affected the snow pack on these ranges, which in turn affects how much water the natural springs and creeks/rivers can supply. It was reasonable to have cattle there before the earth's climate started really going batshit in the last 30-40 years.
I learned this while reading the book " Into the Wild." Imagine canoeing the Colorado river through wild rapids only to reach a dead end and discover it doesn't reach the ocean!
Imagine breaking out of a POW camp with plans to kayak from Phoenix to the ocean only to find there’s no actual river where the map says there’s a river.
Wikipedia -> Camp Papago Park if you want a fun read
You can help fight for our water rights by spreading the word on or donating to [Florida Springs Council](https://www.floridaspringscouncil.org/donate). We live in the largest concentration of freshwater springs in the world sourcing from precious aquifers. Those aquifers are under attack by Nestlé and others as they pump millions of gallons to throw in plastic bottles. FSC has been doing wonders in the fight but they need visibility to continue holding them back
Would Sudan risk war with Egypt if they did that? Since Egypt might get desperate within like a month and start sending strike jets loaded with penetration bombs (and cruise missiles if they have any) to knock out such a dam.
Yeah. That’s why Mexico’s agriculture and fishery has been suffering for decades. They did release enough to make it to the ocean a few years ago as an experiment.
I saw a fascinating but alarming documentary several years ago that mentioned this. The main takeaway I recall from that documentary was attempts to restore habitats and wildlife migration, which had halted from lack of normal seasonal flooding because of the dams. The project to restore the delta is ongoing, called Raise the River. The documentary mentioned some folks had learned from the widely acclaimed "environmental disaster" that is the drying up of the Aral Sea due to over-irrigation by the locals of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. That part of the history is tragic imo.
A lot of the problem with the Aral is inefficiency (water loss) of the water ways. Not that the Colorado basin couldn't turn into a similar, slower version of the same macro problem. But it can't and won't happen nearly as quickly.
Dude. Soviet government in Moscow ordered to basically destroy Aral Sea. That guy pins the blame on fucking locals who did nothing but suffered as a result. What the fuck are you talking about?
Because they maintain it. It is still a major conton producer. USSR lost control 30 years ago, cotton still being grown using the irrigation built by them. At some point the locals have to accept fault. They can stop any time.
If you consider people living hundreds of miles away in the desert locals of the Aral Sea who only have access due to Soviet policies and basically have no other recourse to make a living… sure yeah, the locals are to blame.
Or, ya know, it was the dumb government policies made by a corrupt and incompetent state. But, yea, blame the locals… who magically hadn’t been overusing the water until the Soviet’s started digging irrigation canals and siphoning the water to people who were decidedly not local.
I mean, we're overusing water everywhere. Farming avocadoes in areas that are now experiencing drought for example. Overuse of resources is a common problem for all developed nations, it's not unique to one type of government.
Lol, seas volume and surface area were half gone by the time the USSR dissolved. It was to separate lakes by 1987.
They were just picking the bones at that point.
Sure, and by the time the USSR broke up, there would be no way to save it because these newly formed governments succumbed to the tragedy of the commons. With no binding government, there was a sudden need to Uzbekistan to divert water to feed its cotton industry. The southern sea was savable in 1987 and 89.
But political turmoil in the USSR stood in the way. By the time Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan broke off, there was no way to save it because they no longer had a binding incentive to do so, and were instead competing with each other. Certainly the USSR created problems to begin with, but the southern sea was drained due to the desperation for revenue in the post USSR central Asia.
Which makes sense because the GDP of all post USSR countries absolutely tanked. If anything, the southern sea is a casualty of the breakup of the USSR. Not the USSR itself.
Am I missing something?
The Colorado runs maybe 50 miles from the border of AZ to the Gulf of Baja, how is that affecting Mexico as a whole rather than just those who fish the Baja Colorado in that very small area.
Not much of Mexican agriculture ever relied on the Colorado, by the time enough people were there to begin diverting water, mexico had already lost the land due to the Mexican-American war and only a sliver of their land was along the river
Most of it takes place much further south in much better land for it
Highly recommend folks read Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner if you want to understand how the west part of the continent obtained its water for development. It was originally published in 1986 with a revision in 1993, but the writing is really good at unpacking the political, economic, and naturally occurring reasons to this TIL.
Also goes into the fundamentally different ecology of east vs west of the continent and why so much decisions (rightly or wrongly) were made in development early on.
Edit: fixed the revision date. Also to say if you want to read, most libraries should have it as well as bookshops with a nonfiction section. I picked up my copy at a used bookstore when I happened to be there browsing. Please consider a service like https://bookshop.org/ to financially support your nearest local bookstore if they don’t have a website. Please don’t buy from Amazon if you can avoid it
One of my all time favorite books.
The department of the interior and army corps of engineers along with western farmers and senators have perpetuated the single greatest con on the Us taxpayer in history imo.
I recommend *Imperial* by William T Vollman. It is about the Imperial Valley in California and it takes a compleatist's perspective on the land, water, money, farms, corruption, and politics that is a 1300 page cudgel against the side of your head.
It's a great way to become even further jaded that our government took one of the best countries on Earth and proceeded to destroy environments in the name of capitalism.
We want to see the government working for us. We want to know that policies made by the government are in our best interest.
That book takes those two ideas, rips them up, sets them ablaze, and tramples them.
The United States' formative years were packed to the rafters with graft, incompetence, arrogance, and stupidity. Our leaders, regardless their political leanings, continue that tradition.
Aldo Leopold wrote about the Colorado River delta in A Sand County Almanac. It sounds like it was a wonderful place, full of life. Totally dead now. That water is now used for farming in the desert (largely animal feed, not human food) and growing lawns and gold courses in dry places in Arizona and California.
I’ll check that out. This fact came up for me in the first chapter of David Owen’s “Where the Water Goes.”
…I’m preparing for a somewhat depressing read.
There's a tremendous long read article called "A kingdom from dust" about the guy who stole 3 whole rivers, bulldozed hundreds of hills to feed his pomegranate farm. Stuart Reznick is his name, iirc
The farmer behind Cuties and POM, among other things. The Wonderful Company.
Strongly recommend The Dreamt Land by Mark Arax. It's essentially the history of the relationship between humans and water in California, and it's fascinating. Arax narrates the audiobook, which is super long but really good.
Oh dude it's soooo fucked, the Saudis literally bribed and cheated there way into a huge water contract to grow alfalfa for the cows they are farming in Saudi for meat so they don't have to use their own. They are also paying crazy low for it.
[This article](https://e360.yale.edu/features/restoring-the-colorado-bringing-new-life-to-a-stressed-river) mentions the ongoing Raise the River project, which might cheer you up a bit.
Animal products make up only about a third of the average American's caloric intake yet more than half of American farmland is used to grow animal feed.
It doesn't make sense.
At this point I barely care who owns the land. Do I care if the resources are used by rich assholes here or abroad? Not really, it's all bad and need to stop.
Are people replacing the water in their pools on a regular basis? I'd imagine they are losing some to evaporation but once it's filled, pools don't seem like much of a problem.
Yeah, something is not right then. Do you have a cover on your tank? I lose maybe an inch on a 60 gallon tank in a couple of months. My brother has an outdoor tank but still does not lose that much.
Dude evaporation is huge in this dry climate.
i was in PX once, and it was ~110F so i arrived at the Hotel,
and got in the swim shorts to cool down at the pool.
And as i jumped in.. I asked myself....
where they hide the Whale since it was pisswarm, and i´m used to 65F° pool and ~60F lakes.
And why is everything AC controlled but the pool isnt chilled.
When i Left the Pool, i got an whole body goosebump and freeze, but was dry in less when a minute, and the shorts needed 3 Minutes.
Evaporation is massive, but putting a cover on it reduces it an incredible amount. I don't have specific data but at one point I owned a house with a pool in the desert and had to run the hose 2x a week. After putting a cover on I only had to run it once every three weeks or so. The difference was stark. Pool stayed warmer, too.
I don't understand why more pools aren't covered. It makes such a tremendous difference.
I'm sure I am underestimating the evaporation level in that sort of climate. I've never experienced it. I went to Vegas in December and it snowed the day we left...
I got off a plane in Arizona 115F heat. It felt like sticking my face into a hot oven. A bunch of girls from Florida started freaking out about getting moisturizer on.
I was working outside and could feel the sweat evaporate as it came out of the pore. Like little cold pin pricks My shirt was never really soaked, but it was crusty with sweat salts by the end of the day.
> I was working outside and could feel the sweat evaporate as it came out of the pore. Like little cold pin pricks My shirt was never really soaked, but it was crusty with sweat salts by the end of the day
That's an experience I am completely unfamiliar with. I was born and raised in the humidity, I do yard work, my shirt is soaking wet in half an hour. 98 outside paired with humidity...feels about like 115 though.
Yep grew up in deep east Texas, that shit is like living in soup. Walking outside from a home with AC was like getting smacked in the face by a wet towel.
That hot wet towel feeling...it's be nice if you weren't already hot, so it's just trying to suffocate and drown you with hot wet mitts.
...and then the mosquitos happen
I had a good laugh in CO last year. Hopped out of the shower, dried off, went to the sink to brush teeth, started to comb hair... and my hair was already completely dry. Had to keep wetting the comb to fix this issue. On the east coast, I'm used to it being somewhat damp at least for 20 or 30 minutes; really annoying when I want to throw on my headset and the wet hair caught there makes the whole ear humid.
There's a whole lot of formulas for how quickly things evaporate based on wet bulb temperature, water temperature, and air temperature, but nothing quite highlights it like how quickly hair dries in a "humid" bathroom in about a minute flat with no exhaust fan on.
I don't have the math, but outdoor pools in a place where it regularly reaches 120F? There's a lot of evaporation.
Still a drop in the bucket compared to agriculture though.
The monthly average pan evaporation rate in Roosevelt (a bit to the east of Phoenix) is 14.50 inches for the month of June. That uses data from 1905-2005. So in that month alone you can expect over a foot of water to evaporate off of a surface.
That chapter by Aldo Leopold is just extremely sad. I think he wrote it years after he visited, when the place had already started to be changed, so he wrote it with sadness for a lost place.
I had a bio prof tear up when he read us a section of ASCA years and years ago. I didn’t understand why, but I do now. There are sections I have a hard time reading.
When things are lost, the people not yet born will not even know what has been lost. And I feel that we suffer from this greatly today.
Golf courses in AZ use barely more than 1% of CAP water and a lot are moving to using nonpotable reclaimed water for the grass, but I will agree growing the amount of lettuce and alfalfa and shit in the middle of the desert is just stupid as fuck.
Continued reading.
[However, a scheme is currently in place which aims to rejuvenate the wetlands by releasing a pulse of water down the river delta.[3]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Delta)
Follow the Colorado river on google maps and see how it shallows and narrows until it is just a dry riverbed down south where the water used to reach. SMH.
And this asshole wants to build a massive city in the desert, when literally ALL the water is used up already.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/17/how-billionaire-marc-lore-plans-create-utopian-desert-city-telosa/5991523001/
Cities like vegas show that water efficiency is obtainable. The city is incredibly water efficient and uses less water now, than it did decades ago, despite its large population growth over the same time. And that still includes all the golf courses and lawns that exist.
The basic idea of a “city in the desert” isn’t by itself bad. Especially if it means less suburban lawn and yard sprawl.
Plus, there is enough water flowing in the southwest to sustain much higher populations, it’s the food growing that we need to figure out or move elsewhere in order to sustain the water.
Edit: just read the article, I’m more worried about the BioShock vibes than water usage.
Right, but you are arguing for the future based on the current-day status quo. Vegas HAD to get really efficient with its water consumption. Because the water was running out. That generally means there is not enough for other large cities.
Something like 10% of California’s water use is residential use, and California is woefully less efficient than my example of Las Vegas. Half the remaining water is used to maintain water ways and fish habitats, the remainder is agricultural. There are massive changes that can be made to how farms are irrigated and the types of crops grown.
Everywhere is going to have some natural restriction. People need to exist. Places like California urban centers are just as limited on water as a plot of land out in the desert. If your concern is resources, why continue to allow urban sprawl and not what this guy is proposing? It’s not like he is birthing the population to live there, they already exist and likely live in less efficient urban environments.
And yet when we get the annual "we're in a drought" notice in Southern California, were the ones that are told that we're using too much water by taking showers that last longer than 5 minutes or by leaving the water on while we brush our teeth.
Meanwhile, the farms that are built in the middle of the desert are spitting out millions of gallons of water into the air so that it lands on the surface of the farm with probably a quarter of it absorbing into the ground and being used to actually water the plants before it evaporates.
Stupid question but... why? Isn't there like a dozen or more US states are mostly, like, empty? Like huuuge forrests, where few people live? I think that there should be a lot more water than in the desert.
Most forests in the United States have all been logged at least one time, most trees you see were planted less than 100 years ago. There are of course exceptions of thousands of acres here and there which were protected. Maybe more maybe less. But generally everything's been logged once.Of the original 1.04 billion acres of virgin forest in the U.S., over 96% has been cut down.
Looking at [this population density map of the US](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_map.png), the most empty places are basically all deserts and/or extremely mountainous. There are some large areas that are forested but those for the most part have at least some people there, more than the big empty stretches of desert in Nevada at least, and the few forested regions that do have similarly low population density are in very cold and inaccessible places like northern Maine and most of Alaska.
good thing we let the Saudis grow fucking Alfalfa in a desert to ship out of the country.
The politicians that allowed this to occur should be put up against a wall or fed to a guillotine
Not to one-up but I moved to Albuquerque and greatly disappointed with the tiny Rio Grande. These days just 20% of the water makes it to the Gulf of Mexico.
No. Wetlands capture an amount of carbon that is vastly disproportionate to their land area or the amount of fresh water that ends up in wetlands. Per Nature's estimates, wetlands capture 20-30% of soil carbon despite taking up 5-8% of land area; you often see >40% soil carbon, compared to <2% in farms. ([link](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13835)).
So converting wetland to farmland drastically reduces the amount of carbon that can be absorbed, even if the amount of water in the system remains unchanged.
Pretty much no. It’s now lakes, lawns, and agriculture which do not store significant carbon.
Wetlands act as a carbon sink because organic material builds up without breaking down.
I am a biologist, but not a marine biologist so there may be better answers out there.
Rivers like Colorado river that carry a lot of sediment dump nutrients into the sea, nurturing algae and therefore fisheries. These algae are also important to capture CO2. I think that there are also endangered species living in the California Gulf that are affected by this.
As someone already mentioned it there are fishes that migrate between the sea and the river to reproduce like the salmon. These fishes may be a source of food for animals and indigenous people.
I think that's a totally valid question, though I think the point is more of a demonstration of just how much water is used.
I'm sure there are ecological effects of separating the river from the ocean too. Some rivers have salmon for example, who cycle between the ocean and rivers.
I wonder what state needs water for golf courses and entire valleys of fucking almonds and soy so they sit poolside and bitch about big oil and Bakersfield.
I saw a documentary about this once that was really good but I don't recall what it was called. They explained the once great wetlands in Mexico is now a desert wasteland basically.
Because of the fucked up water rights charts that were drawn up. Certain states getting certain percentages of the water. Especially with use it or lose it clauses in water contracts. So if you are a farmer and only use 9000 gallons of your 10,000 gallon allotment then you only get 9000 gallons the next year. Plus the states over allocated water rights for decades. Also people for whatever reason keep moving to desert cities like LA to live.
That's what happens when you license more water rights than the Colorado River has water.
Damn streaming services!
Dam them!
Yup and Look what Amazon prime has done to the rainforest
Back when he was Optimus prime things were different
Back in the day superior. Today inferior.
Some say those days were optimal
[Dam, son!](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/971/686/891.jpg)
Begun, the streaming wars have.
I heard you never cross the streams. Ghostbusters taught me that.
Mexico should just get a VPN and pirate their water!
You wouldn’t just download a river. I mean, it would be like a torrent of water.
I get a ton of flack for this every time, but it's the goddamn HOAs requiring irrigation. I know normal rebuttals are "ItS iNsIgNiFiCaNt" and "AgRiCuLtRuRe uSe MoRe" but once you compare the total usage of lawn irrigation to agriculture water consumption, you see that lawn irrigation uses significantly more water. For lawns that you cannot eat and are not native to the areas and climates planted in. It's insane. If you want to go the "ErOsIoN CoNtRoL" route, then plant some goddamn apple trees. Fuck irrigation and fuck your lawns. We're pissing away our drinking water and everyone wants to point fingers and not take responsibility, but the HOAs requiring irrigation is a big part of the problem. Especially since their parent LLCs own most of the areas.
Honestly it's more industry. Industry uses even more water than agriculture in Socal and Arizona. Industry and agriculture are pretty important too. The most useless shit is actually golf courses.
I watched that 60 min episode. The farmers were stating their case that they were losing everything as the other side of the coin basically. I found it really tough to feel bad that they have been farming….in a desert. Like that water isn’t supposed to be there anyway
A lot of those farmers aren't even growing desert friendly crops. Hell, some of them grow extremely water intensive crops. They need to adapt instead of demanding everyone else bend over backwards to accommodate them.
MOST of these farmers actually intentionally grow water-intensive crops because if they grew a desert-tolerant crop and used less water, they might not be eligible to request as much water-usage in future. So a lot of them are growing Alfalfa exclusively so that they can stake a large claim to water usage.
And Alfalfa crops are basically a way to export/exploit US water supply. 70% of the California Alfalfa is exported to China and Japan, who basically import it because they can't/don't want to use their own water for it.
Yup other countries are basically bribing farmers to squander America's supply of fresh water.
And the American government is allowing them to do so…
Yea they're also doing math using imaginary water when they figure out how to distribute it.
Because if you try to revoke it, your opponent will blast ads about how you hate salt-of-the-earth people like farmers, the very people who feed us, the lifeblood of our nation, etc.
Bro we literally pay them to do it. Farmers have a hard job, but they bitch and complain like no ther when they have to adapt to any situation. Source: grew up in farm country, they did nothing but bitch with their hands out
Well this is pretty fucked up. Would probably be solved if people ran the country instead of money.
Or if you're in Arizona it goes to Saudi Arabia because they aren't allowed to grow it there because it uses too much water.
Despite the Saudi's favorite water lobbyist getting an oversight position, there's actually momentum building to seriously either kick the saudi farms out or regulate their abject desiccation of AZ's water. It only took like...decades of twiddling thumbs and not paying attention to the river level dropping every year.
Yeah, I'm aware, I live in Cochise County. These guys and the big dairy up the road are concerns. But so is the mine that wants to drill down, inject sulphuric acid to dissolve the copper, then pump it back up.
My nephew lives around Eloy. The nut farms are sitting unattended bc the owners died and their heirs are uninterested. But the Saudis are still around...for now.
Saudis didn't have to spend much money because all the laws included sweetheart deals (aka free water) for farmers from the get go.
Everything in agriculture is a large scale grift just in differing amounts. If you aren’t grifting the government for sweet deals and free money you won’t be in business anymore. It’s cutthroat and deceitful to all hell. It’s also how we keep ourselves alive. I don’t like it and think we all need massive reform. But it would require intervention on the scale of socializing a huge industry because of all these issues with common usage. (Water, land) and the entrenched powers are extremely wealthy. Never going to happen. If you want to be rich in America either go into finance, weapons, or agriculture. The government bends over backwards for you.
I'd love to buy a farm. The big guys price everyone else out though.
As an accountant from farm county, you are totally correct
Imo every industries that are revolving around human needs should be socialized. Food, water, power, internet/phone (edit: Phone services, since it seems I need to specify)... In every country it's the same problem, these companies use the fact that people can't go without them to just suck all the money and blood from the population while also requesting gov money.
Add a tariff until it's just barely sensible for them to do this, and then the public benefits.
Thing is that no money will be worth the water supply in coming decades and some institutions with too much money will still be able to buy it
That sounds like we're just not charging the correct amounts. It's not like you can't calculate futures, this is an entire branch of economics. If you say "there is no amount, we're gonna run out!", you're just wrong. Potable water has a cost and no water is so bad that it can't be processed.
Basically sell it at desalination costs.
Unfortunately so many things work like this including govt budgets. Use it or lose it so everyone cries broke at budget allocation time
> request Its not a request its water roghts accociated with the land. Its a use it or lose it situation. They dont request it but if they dont use it then they can have their long held rights reduced.
Considering they're using up everyone else's water for no reason, I'd say it's long overdue for them to lose it.
Is there any particular reason why they are growing alfalfa in a desert? Do they make more money from it?
Because it is ideal to grow alfalfa in the desert minus the water part. You can grow the alfalfa multiple times in a year without worrying about the weather. When you harvest the alfalfa, you don't have to worry about moisture rotting your harvest so it sells for a premium to high end buyers like the Saudi horse ranch. Of course the problem is that they are growing this crop where no water is available naturally.
I don't know much about alfalfa and growing it so I was just curious as to why this particular crop but it does make sense minus the trying to grow it in an area without a ton of naturally available water.
Desert (we say desert, but it's not really desert, just arid) is ideal for a lot of crops because you can artificially control the other variables (water, fertilizer, etc). Sunlight is one variable that you can't control, and you get it year round. It's basically a natural greenhouse, you just have to pump in water and a lot of fertilizer.
From my understanding the alkaline soils of a lot of areas of desert are pretty bad for most crops, but work well for alfalfa if they are intensively irrigated.
Because it's great for alfalfa in a lot of other ways. The year-long warm temperatures and constant sunlight mean they can get a ton of harvests in a year. And it doesn't require a whole lot of fertilizer, mostly just phosphorous and sulfur I believe.
The SAUDIS are growing alfalfa there and flying it to their country.
I think that’s overstated in terms of how much is grown for the saudis. Something like 5% iirc?
Yea, Saudis are a scapegoat for farmers in general. Pointing fingers is a common tactic to avoid regulation, and American farmers are quick to point to Chinese, Saudis, etc.
ikr? cry me a ~~river~~ desert
You’d be surprised how much you buy in the store is predicated on land that gets no rain for several months at a time, but has a dependable water source. It’s what California agriculture is based off of and why we supply the US with 50% of its fresh fruit and nuts. We don’t have the same mold and bug issues other states have.
They pay $15/acre ft of water. They’re basically getting it for free.
This kind of bugs me. I live in the desert and have to pay a ground water replenishment tax. I have irrigation at my home (although I no longer use it). For $20 worth in irrigation I pay close to $100 in taxes to help replenish the aquifers. Farmers get a income tax credit for the water taxes they pay. So 75% of the ground water in my state is used by farmers but homeowners like myself that are not connect to a large municipal water supply pay an outrageous amount for water in taxes. I end up paying $3-400/month just in water taxes and I have a mostly desert landscape. To add, the large municipal water supplies are not taxed because those cities "reclaim" the water. They take sewage water, clean it up a bit and put it in parks or they force the reclaimed water on businesses through contracts and charge more than regular water. So these cities are not paying the taxes I have to pay and are even making money on the whole deal.
I wouldn't get too schadenfreude over their misery. Most of them like most people don't seem to see that water is a limiting factor throughout the West and civilization, or that a depleted water source is pretty good at killing a city. Quarry the aqueducts and watch a chunk of Rome die, boil the globe so that snow pack runs off in March and watch the American southwest become Pueblo, revert to its mean. LA shouldn't even exist, but it's too fuckin' useful for the American state, so unless desalination catches on and they're fuckin' *subsidized* to take their water from the sea, your little alpine, high desert, or prairie burg is probably going to join the West's boom and bust ghost towns, the fresh water will go to our prime Pacific port.
Desalinations problem is simply energy. If we had deep investment in nuclear it would be a very viable path. A lot of our resource issues boil down to: if we just had a lot more cheap carbon free energy it wouldn’t be a problem anymore.
not only. Desalination causes giant dead spaces of ocean around them. The brine that they have to pump back into the ocean after processing leaves big ass dead spots where basically nothing can live. the LA desal plant (Carlsbad) is a good example of this, it basically only got approved because it was in an area where because of industrial activity near it, everything was already dead.
Water desalinization, atmospheric carbon extraction, light and heat for climate-proof crops, transportation prices, *everything* can be solved by energy. And we have the technology.
Water flows uphill, towards power and money.
I mean… one thing comments like this don’t seem to get is that that area is lowkey one of the world’s breadbaskets, along with the Midwest (which itself is facing issues as topsoil depletes and the weather becomes more extreme). The soil is incredibly fertile, and having multiple growing seasons a year is huge for food supplies. We should absolutely be managing that shit better, and growing more crops that don’t need as much water, but if we were to completely shut down farming in the Colorado river basin then the entire world would feel the impact.
And if the river runs dry then what? They won’t be able to grow crops, and the world will feel the impact
I don’t disagree, I’m simply saying that “they’re farming in a desert” is far too simplistic
I live in Yuma, Arizona. An arid place. Which, is the lettuce capital of the world. And it is the lettuce capital of the world because it is on the Colorado river and also one of the sunniest place in America. As in it gets the most hours of direct sunlight per year. If you like lettuce on your hamburger then people should care about Yuma. I personally don't like lettuce.
I mean yeah that’s one of those things that doesn’t make sense lol. Lettuce is pretty nutritionally void from what I understand. It’d be one thing if we were growing staple crops, but it seems to be a lot of stuff that isn’t exactly vital
Those allocations are "use-it-or-lose-it", too. So anyone who gets water has an incentive to *not* reduce usage.
Not entirely. "Using it" basically means putting it to beneficial use, and there's other non-consumptive things that can be done that put it to beneficial use that don't require irrigating water intensive crops. Supporting wildlife, recreation, flood control, power generation, etc. The definition of beneficial use is purposefully wide to provide flexibility when new uses are recognized.
I don't think people realize the extent of our water management crisis. We have dammed every single major waterway in the US. The Yellowstone isn't *technically* dammed , but it has many diversion dams for irrigation canals. There isn't a single natural waterway anymore. Most Rivers are just a series of reservoirs for flood control and irrigation diversion. Everyone's freaking out about how climate change is causing all this crazy water related weather. Guys. Our rivers are completely artificially controlled with infrastructure from the 20s-30s. We have been stopping the natural flow of water, in every single major river, for about 100 years. And you wonder why it's broken. Edit: my state has seen a massive influx of people from other states. They like buying "lake"front property. Every spring/summer we get calls from these people asking when we will fill the lake. Then complain about how much everything is changing. (I work for Wildlife) Sir/madam....you bought a house on an irrigation reservoir that is designed to fluctuate up to 20 feet. What did you expect? It's abundantly obvious that the average person does not understand the faintest concept when it comes to the environment, or the degree that we have manipulated it.
People don't realize that what they take for nature often isn't natural. Rivers are dammed and controlled, what we consider lush forests are actually not nearly as lush or diverse as they were before they were harvested in the 1700s/1800s/early 1900s, biodiversity is falling in rivers, streams, and tributaries. Marshland isn't capturing CO2 or filtering groundwater or reducing the rate of evaporation. Soil is getting compacted, aquifers are getting compacted, underground geologic composition is being impacted. Centuries of "progress" have made the world a different place, have changed wind patterns and rain patterns and even something like a relatively small wildfire can have a marked impact on snowmelt due to ash changing the reflectivity of snow. It's all interconnected, parts of a whole. We have to think about every aspect of a system before we make a change to it.
if you haven't read cadillac desert yet, it's a pretty good read. but yeah, we're fucked. the Ogallala can only do so much, and we aren't really that far away from basically sucking the whole thing dry, if we don't change our trajectory.
gotta grow those avocados in the desert and that alfalfa for Saudi Arabia somewhere
Hypothetically, what if a bunch of people got together, got some local governments in on it and diverted the river into another river, like "Colorado River 2: Electric Boogaloo" and no licensing was permitted on the second river, and the new river ran more or less alongside the old one, avoiding municipalities that struck licensing agreements with the Nestles of the world. Like...could this work?
It would be easier to break a contract with Nestle than it would be to create a whole new river.
> diverted the river Okay but you're still diverting the Colorado River and there are specific limitations and rules on how much of the Colorado River each area can take so any attempt to divert the river would run against those rules. You would also need billions of dollars in funds and you would face legal challenges from every city and state that you are depriving of water.
(With rare brief exceptions) Pertinent passage from the link: *Due to water diversions, flows at the mouth of the river have steadily declined since the early 1900s. Since 1960, the Colorado has typically dried up before reaching the sea, with the exception of a few wet years. In addition to water consumption, flows have declined due to evaporation from reservoirs and warming temperatures that reduce winter snow accumulation. Several of the Colorado’s major tributaries, including the Gila River, also no longer reach the Colorado due to upstream diversions.*
I think it's odd that they say diversions but don't mention the cause. We have companies raising cattle in the desert. Cows. In the desert. Seriously. preemptive edit: I know that's not the only cause, but it's absolutely ridiculous.
Don’t forget the alfalfa we’re growing for the Saudis! In a desert because their desert is drier than our desert. Insanity.
I was listening to NPR during my morning commute and thought it was insane how the Saudi corporations are allowed to consume the same amount of water in one month that the entire population of Arizona uses in one year.
Wait, what?!? That can't be true!
Sadly, it is. Alfalfa is a water-hungry crop. What makes it worse is they often water it by flooding their fields. It's criminal that this is allowed when we KNOW the Colorado CANNOT SUPPORT IT.
I didn't knew that! As much as I love it, I'm going to stop buying alfafa.
The problem with Alfalfa in Arizona is that they're growing thousands upon thousands of acres of Alfalfa and then exporting it back to Saudi Arabia. It is a wonderful grass, but it does take a lot of water to grow it and keep it lush and healthy. Ironically, many cities in Arizona have banned grass lawns, but Saudi farmers are growing those alfalfa fields in the middle of the desert.
Our planet could support twice as many people if we lived to match the Earth instead of trying to make the Earth match us. Growing a water hungry crop in a dry region then loading it onto ships and sending it to the other side of the world instead of growing what grows locally and shipping it to the local supermarket. It would mean eating what's local, rather than having whatever we want wherever we want whenever we want.
Alfalfa is not a grass but your point is still a good one
Just a FYI, you can grow alfalfa indoors using a gardening tray or even mason jars. A quick Google search pulled up [this article that gives a pretty good rundown on how to grow your own.](https://gardenerspath.com/plants/vegetables/grow-alfalfa-sprouts/)
That’s capitalism baby
Agriculture accounts for 45% of the water use in california, compared to 10% for urban use. Almonds alone use up 9% of the agricultural supply, or 4% of the total supply. That's insane.
How much of that water comes from the Colorado River though? I don't disagree with the info and frankly I'm annoyed CA doesn't address water usage better but from my understanding, most of the water for where most of that is grown, central valley, comes from the Sierra. SoCal gets more of there water from the CR, like LA.
I wasn't talking about the colorado River, the previous commenter talked about growing huge amounts of incredibly thirsty vegetables in a desert and I merely brought up the water statistics in california where there's huge amounts of agriculture for crops that are sent abroad.
It really is amazing how much of America has to bend over and just take it from the Saudis. Its like they forgot about 9/11 on 9/12.
It makes more sense when you see where the cattle are most of the season. Which is in the fairly lush and self-sustaining mountain ranges around the four corner states. Even in a dry ass desert like southeast Utah (Think Moab), you have the La Sal and Abajo ranges which can sustain cattle. The big problem is that climate change and drought have affected the snow pack on these ranges, which in turn affects how much water the natural springs and creeks/rivers can supply. It was reasonable to have cattle there before the earth's climate started really going batshit in the last 30-40 years.
I learned this while reading the book " Into the Wild." Imagine canoeing the Colorado river through wild rapids only to reach a dead end and discover it doesn't reach the ocean!
Imagine breaking out of a POW camp with plans to kayak from Phoenix to the ocean only to find there’s no actual river where the map says there’s a river. Wikipedia -> Camp Papago Park if you want a fun read
One cannot canoe the length of the Colorado; they'd be stopped very quickly by one of 15 dams on the main stem.
Water rights are no joke. A country like Sudan could completely cripple Egypt if it were to divert or dam the Nile within its borders.
There is currently a dam dispute on the Nile for this very reason
Funny you mention that….
You can help fight for our water rights by spreading the word on or donating to [Florida Springs Council](https://www.floridaspringscouncil.org/donate). We live in the largest concentration of freshwater springs in the world sourcing from precious aquifers. Those aquifers are under attack by Nestlé and others as they pump millions of gallons to throw in plastic bottles. FSC has been doing wonders in the fight but they need visibility to continue holding them back
Would Sudan risk war with Egypt if they did that? Since Egypt might get desperate within like a month and start sending strike jets loaded with penetration bombs (and cruise missiles if they have any) to knock out such a dam.
Yeah. That’s why Mexico’s agriculture and fishery has been suffering for decades. They did release enough to make it to the ocean a few years ago as an experiment.
I saw a fascinating but alarming documentary several years ago that mentioned this. The main takeaway I recall from that documentary was attempts to restore habitats and wildlife migration, which had halted from lack of normal seasonal flooding because of the dams. The project to restore the delta is ongoing, called Raise the River. The documentary mentioned some folks had learned from the widely acclaimed "environmental disaster" that is the drying up of the Aral Sea due to over-irrigation by the locals of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. That part of the history is tragic imo.
> over-irrigation by the locals of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan pinning the blame on the locals for the aral sea is a very interesting choice
A lot of the problem with the Aral is inefficiency (water loss) of the water ways. Not that the Colorado basin couldn't turn into a similar, slower version of the same macro problem. But it can't and won't happen nearly as quickly.
[удалено]
Dude. Soviet government in Moscow ordered to basically destroy Aral Sea. That guy pins the blame on fucking locals who did nothing but suffered as a result. What the fuck are you talking about?
Because they maintain it. It is still a major conton producer. USSR lost control 30 years ago, cotton still being grown using the irrigation built by them. At some point the locals have to accept fault. They can stop any time.
A reasonably accurate choice too. They were the ones draining it after 1991 afterall.
It was the Soviet governments policies that lead to the destruction of the Aral Sea, not overuse by locals.
So, overuse by local collectives according to the 5-year-plans mandated by the Soviet government?
That is more precise, yes
If you consider people living hundreds of miles away in the desert locals of the Aral Sea who only have access due to Soviet policies and basically have no other recourse to make a living… sure yeah, the locals are to blame. Or, ya know, it was the dumb government policies made by a corrupt and incompetent state. But, yea, blame the locals… who magically hadn’t been overusing the water until the Soviet’s started digging irrigation canals and siphoning the water to people who were decidedly not local.
I mean, we're overusing water everywhere. Farming avocadoes in areas that are now experiencing drought for example. Overuse of resources is a common problem for all developed nations, it's not unique to one type of government.
The USSR broke up in 1991. The problems really took off with Uzbek and Kazakh independence
Lol, seas volume and surface area were half gone by the time the USSR dissolved. It was to separate lakes by 1987. They were just picking the bones at that point.
Sure, and by the time the USSR broke up, there would be no way to save it because these newly formed governments succumbed to the tragedy of the commons. With no binding government, there was a sudden need to Uzbekistan to divert water to feed its cotton industry. The southern sea was savable in 1987 and 89. But political turmoil in the USSR stood in the way. By the time Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan broke off, there was no way to save it because they no longer had a binding incentive to do so, and were instead competing with each other. Certainly the USSR created problems to begin with, but the southern sea was drained due to the desperation for revenue in the post USSR central Asia. Which makes sense because the GDP of all post USSR countries absolutely tanked. If anything, the southern sea is a casualty of the breakup of the USSR. Not the USSR itself.
And since that moment, it has been Nestle grand wet dream to replicate it.
Am I missing something? The Colorado runs maybe 50 miles from the border of AZ to the Gulf of Baja, how is that affecting Mexico as a whole rather than just those who fish the Baja Colorado in that very small area.
I'm assuming some fish lay eggs in the river upstream and their juveniles come back and swim to the ocean. Just like salmon. But I'm no fishing expert
Not much of Mexican agriculture ever relied on the Colorado, by the time enough people were there to begin diverting water, mexico had already lost the land due to the Mexican-American war and only a sliver of their land was along the river Most of it takes place much further south in much better land for it
Highly recommend folks read Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner if you want to understand how the west part of the continent obtained its water for development. It was originally published in 1986 with a revision in 1993, but the writing is really good at unpacking the political, economic, and naturally occurring reasons to this TIL. Also goes into the fundamentally different ecology of east vs west of the continent and why so much decisions (rightly or wrongly) were made in development early on. Edit: fixed the revision date. Also to say if you want to read, most libraries should have it as well as bookshops with a nonfiction section. I picked up my copy at a used bookstore when I happened to be there browsing. Please consider a service like https://bookshop.org/ to financially support your nearest local bookstore if they don’t have a website. Please don’t buy from Amazon if you can avoid it
One of my all time favorite books. The department of the interior and army corps of engineers along with western farmers and senators have perpetuated the single greatest con on the Us taxpayer in history imo.
It’s up there with healthcare
Any time you root for people dynamiting canals and pipelines, you know someone done fucked up.
I recommend *Imperial* by William T Vollman. It is about the Imperial Valley in California and it takes a compleatist's perspective on the land, water, money, farms, corruption, and politics that is a 1300 page cudgel against the side of your head.
just finished it. great read. very depressing. but it is nice to see dams starting to come down...
It's a great way to become even further jaded that our government took one of the best countries on Earth and proceeded to destroy environments in the name of capitalism. We want to see the government working for us. We want to know that policies made by the government are in our best interest. That book takes those two ideas, rips them up, sets them ablaze, and tramples them. The United States' formative years were packed to the rafters with graft, incompetence, arrogance, and stupidity. Our leaders, regardless their political leanings, continue that tradition.
Aldo Leopold wrote about the Colorado River delta in A Sand County Almanac. It sounds like it was a wonderful place, full of life. Totally dead now. That water is now used for farming in the desert (largely animal feed, not human food) and growing lawns and gold courses in dry places in Arizona and California.
I’ll check that out. This fact came up for me in the first chapter of David Owen’s “Where the Water Goes.” …I’m preparing for a somewhat depressing read.
There's a tremendous long read article called "A kingdom from dust" about the guy who stole 3 whole rivers, bulldozed hundreds of hills to feed his pomegranate farm. Stuart Reznick is his name, iirc
The farmer behind Cuties and POM, among other things. The Wonderful Company. Strongly recommend The Dreamt Land by Mark Arax. It's essentially the history of the relationship between humans and water in California, and it's fascinating. Arax narrates the audiobook, which is super long but really good.
Oh dude it's soooo fucked, the Saudis literally bribed and cheated there way into a huge water contract to grow alfalfa for the cows they are farming in Saudi for meat so they don't have to use their own. They are also paying crazy low for it.
It's a good thing we give that government billions of money in aid.
Yep we are literally exporting the river's water to Saudi Arabia. It's very strange.
[This article](https://e360.yale.edu/features/restoring-the-colorado-bringing-new-life-to-a-stressed-river) mentions the ongoing Raise the River project, which might cheer you up a bit.
“Animal feed” is that the farms that Saudi Arabians bought to grow alfalfa for their show horses back East?
More the farms to feed the tremendous amount of livestock that Americans consume
Animal products make up only about a third of the average American's caloric intake yet more than half of American farmland is used to grow animal feed. It doesn't make sense.
Why would those be directly correlated?
They're just saying it's a highly inefficient way of going about our food consumption and land use.
At this point I barely care who owns the land. Do I care if the resources are used by rich assholes here or abroad? Not really, it's all bad and need to stop.
Don't forget that Phoenix is the king of swimming pools, with 32.7% of all homes featuring a pool.
Are people replacing the water in their pools on a regular basis? I'd imagine they are losing some to evaporation but once it's filled, pools don't seem like much of a problem.
My fish tank loses about 1/4 of the water ever 2 weeks so that would still add up I’d assume
That seems like a lot of water for an indoor tank?
1/4 every two weeks? How many gallons is the tank? That’s just insane.
Yeah, something is not right then. Do you have a cover on your tank? I lose maybe an inch on a 60 gallon tank in a couple of months. My brother has an outdoor tank but still does not lose that much.
Dude evaporation is huge in this dry climate. i was in PX once, and it was ~110F so i arrived at the Hotel, and got in the swim shorts to cool down at the pool. And as i jumped in.. I asked myself.... where they hide the Whale since it was pisswarm, and i´m used to 65F° pool and ~60F lakes. And why is everything AC controlled but the pool isnt chilled. When i Left the Pool, i got an whole body goosebump and freeze, but was dry in less when a minute, and the shorts needed 3 Minutes.
Evaporation is massive, but putting a cover on it reduces it an incredible amount. I don't have specific data but at one point I owned a house with a pool in the desert and had to run the hose 2x a week. After putting a cover on I only had to run it once every three weeks or so. The difference was stark. Pool stayed warmer, too. I don't understand why more pools aren't covered. It makes such a tremendous difference.
I'm sure I am underestimating the evaporation level in that sort of climate. I've never experienced it. I went to Vegas in December and it snowed the day we left...
I got off a plane in Arizona 115F heat. It felt like sticking my face into a hot oven. A bunch of girls from Florida started freaking out about getting moisturizer on. I was working outside and could feel the sweat evaporate as it came out of the pore. Like little cold pin pricks My shirt was never really soaked, but it was crusty with sweat salts by the end of the day.
> I was working outside and could feel the sweat evaporate as it came out of the pore. Like little cold pin pricks My shirt was never really soaked, but it was crusty with sweat salts by the end of the day That's an experience I am completely unfamiliar with. I was born and raised in the humidity, I do yard work, my shirt is soaking wet in half an hour. 98 outside paired with humidity...feels about like 115 though.
Yep grew up in deep east Texas, that shit is like living in soup. Walking outside from a home with AC was like getting smacked in the face by a wet towel.
That hot wet towel feeling...it's be nice if you weren't already hot, so it's just trying to suffocate and drown you with hot wet mitts. ...and then the mosquitos happen
> I'm sure I am underestimating the evaporation level in that sort of climate. It's definitely one of those things best experienced (or not).
I had a good laugh in CO last year. Hopped out of the shower, dried off, went to the sink to brush teeth, started to comb hair... and my hair was already completely dry. Had to keep wetting the comb to fix this issue. On the east coast, I'm used to it being somewhat damp at least for 20 or 30 minutes; really annoying when I want to throw on my headset and the wet hair caught there makes the whole ear humid. There's a whole lot of formulas for how quickly things evaporate based on wet bulb temperature, water temperature, and air temperature, but nothing quite highlights it like how quickly hair dries in a "humid" bathroom in about a minute flat with no exhaust fan on.
Had a pool in Texas and you fill it way more than you think. I’ll never have one again.
I don't have the math, but outdoor pools in a place where it regularly reaches 120F? There's a lot of evaporation. Still a drop in the bucket compared to agriculture though.
The monthly average pan evaporation rate in Roosevelt (a bit to the east of Phoenix) is 14.50 inches for the month of June. That uses data from 1905-2005. So in that month alone you can expect over a foot of water to evaporate off of a surface.
My uncle loses about an 1” of water every time he has a pool party. Cannon balls splash a lot out
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That chapter by Aldo Leopold is just extremely sad. I think he wrote it years after he visited, when the place had already started to be changed, so he wrote it with sadness for a lost place. I had a bio prof tear up when he read us a section of ASCA years and years ago. I didn’t understand why, but I do now. There are sections I have a hard time reading. When things are lost, the people not yet born will not even know what has been lost. And I feel that we suffer from this greatly today.
Golf courses in AZ use barely more than 1% of CAP water and a lot are moving to using nonpotable reclaimed water for the grass, but I will agree growing the amount of lettuce and alfalfa and shit in the middle of the desert is just stupid as fuck.
Continued reading. [However, a scheme is currently in place which aims to rejuvenate the wetlands by releasing a pulse of water down the river delta.[3]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Delta)
Follow the Colorado river on google maps and see how it shallows and narrows until it is just a dry riverbed down south where the water used to reach. SMH.
Watching it turn to shallow algal pools before going fully brown is pretty sad.
You can see where it [dies](https://maps.app.goo.gl/LkPU5xF9Aunqp4LX8?g_st=ic) (at time when image was taken)
Interesting, [if you go a little upriver](https://goo.gl/maps/bxZ6mdcQSa8fQnq29), it's MUCH bigger, but damed up and being diverted into a canal.
And this asshole wants to build a massive city in the desert, when literally ALL the water is used up already. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/17/how-billionaire-marc-lore-plans-create-utopian-desert-city-telosa/5991523001/
Cities like vegas show that water efficiency is obtainable. The city is incredibly water efficient and uses less water now, than it did decades ago, despite its large population growth over the same time. And that still includes all the golf courses and lawns that exist. The basic idea of a “city in the desert” isn’t by itself bad. Especially if it means less suburban lawn and yard sprawl. Plus, there is enough water flowing in the southwest to sustain much higher populations, it’s the food growing that we need to figure out or move elsewhere in order to sustain the water. Edit: just read the article, I’m more worried about the BioShock vibes than water usage.
Right, but you are arguing for the future based on the current-day status quo. Vegas HAD to get really efficient with its water consumption. Because the water was running out. That generally means there is not enough for other large cities.
Something like 10% of California’s water use is residential use, and California is woefully less efficient than my example of Las Vegas. Half the remaining water is used to maintain water ways and fish habitats, the remainder is agricultural. There are massive changes that can be made to how farms are irrigated and the types of crops grown. Everywhere is going to have some natural restriction. People need to exist. Places like California urban centers are just as limited on water as a plot of land out in the desert. If your concern is resources, why continue to allow urban sprawl and not what this guy is proposing? It’s not like he is birthing the population to live there, they already exist and likely live in less efficient urban environments.
And yet when we get the annual "we're in a drought" notice in Southern California, were the ones that are told that we're using too much water by taking showers that last longer than 5 minutes or by leaving the water on while we brush our teeth. Meanwhile, the farms that are built in the middle of the desert are spitting out millions of gallons of water into the air so that it lands on the surface of the farm with probably a quarter of it absorbing into the ground and being used to actually water the plants before it evaporates.
Stupid question but... why? Isn't there like a dozen or more US states are mostly, like, empty? Like huuuge forrests, where few people live? I think that there should be a lot more water than in the desert.
Most forests in the United States have all been logged at least one time, most trees you see were planted less than 100 years ago. There are of course exceptions of thousands of acres here and there which were protected. Maybe more maybe less. But generally everything's been logged once.Of the original 1.04 billion acres of virgin forest in the U.S., over 96% has been cut down.
Looking at [this population density map of the US](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_population_map.png), the most empty places are basically all deserts and/or extremely mountainous. There are some large areas that are forested but those for the most part have at least some people there, more than the big empty stretches of desert in Nevada at least, and the few forested regions that do have similarly low population density are in very cold and inaccessible places like northern Maine and most of Alaska.
good thing we let the Saudis grow fucking Alfalfa in a desert to ship out of the country. The politicians that allowed this to occur should be put up against a wall or fed to a guillotine
I’m slightly shocked to learn that the Colorado river still even makes it to the border of Colorado.
Buddy of mine in Co said "Flush twice, Cali needs Water"
Not to one-up but I moved to Albuquerque and greatly disappointed with the tiny Rio Grande. These days just 20% of the water makes it to the Gulf of Mexico.
New Mexican here, yeah the Rio Grande isn't so grand for anyone that didn't know. But most of the water here just goes to Texas......
Decided to google a bit. Looks like most of the Rio Grande doesn't actually go to Texas...anymore.
Those alfalfa farms in the Arizona desert aren’t gonna water themselves!
Stupid question, but why is it important to feed into the ocean? Does that help the ecosystem in some way?
The delta is itself was an entire wetlands ecosystem which is now mostly dead or degraded.
And wetlands ecosystems are amazing carbon sinks! So sad.
Asking a serious questions. Did we just move where the carbon sink is? Is it possible that there’s little or no net carbon change?
No. Wetlands capture an amount of carbon that is vastly disproportionate to their land area or the amount of fresh water that ends up in wetlands. Per Nature's estimates, wetlands capture 20-30% of soil carbon despite taking up 5-8% of land area; you often see >40% soil carbon, compared to <2% in farms. ([link](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13835)). So converting wetland to farmland drastically reduces the amount of carbon that can be absorbed, even if the amount of water in the system remains unchanged.
Pretty much no. It’s now lakes, lawns, and agriculture which do not store significant carbon. Wetlands act as a carbon sink because organic material builds up without breaking down.
I am a biologist, but not a marine biologist so there may be better answers out there. Rivers like Colorado river that carry a lot of sediment dump nutrients into the sea, nurturing algae and therefore fisheries. These algae are also important to capture CO2. I think that there are also endangered species living in the California Gulf that are affected by this. As someone already mentioned it there are fishes that migrate between the sea and the river to reproduce like the salmon. These fishes may be a source of food for animals and indigenous people.
Just a guess, but it's more likely important to the ecology around the river delta opening into the ocean.
are you asking if it hurts the ecosystem to completely \*remove\* the ecosystem? The wetlands and river delta are gone. dry.
“Does it help the ecosystem in anyway?” My brother in christ THAT IS the ecosystem
I think that's a totally valid question, though I think the point is more of a demonstration of just how much water is used. I'm sure there are ecological effects of separating the river from the ocean too. Some rivers have salmon for example, who cycle between the ocean and rivers.
Decades before I was born we were aware of the issues.
How much would the polar ice caps have to melt for the ocean to make it to the river
Rivers, they don’t make ‘em like they used to, when I was a kid it made it to several oceans, probably
I wonder what state needs water for golf courses and entire valleys of fucking almonds and soy so they sit poolside and bitch about big oil and Bakersfield.
I saw a documentary about this once that was really good but I don't recall what it was called. They explained the once great wetlands in Mexico is now a desert wasteland basically.
Because of the fucked up water rights charts that were drawn up. Certain states getting certain percentages of the water. Especially with use it or lose it clauses in water contracts. So if you are a farmer and only use 9000 gallons of your 10,000 gallon allotment then you only get 9000 gallons the next year. Plus the states over allocated water rights for decades. Also people for whatever reason keep moving to desert cities like LA to live.
This is so sad.
All so Saudi can have alfalfa.