Lettuce in July?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Donald Worster, "Rivers of Empire":

Over the past century virtually every major western river has been dammed,
diverted, and siphoned off to distant places, until the natural drainage of
water has been obliterated over large parts. (A good many eastern rivers
have also been altered, especially those under the Tennessee Valley
Authority?s administration.)

One of the more substantial achievements of that river control has been the
industrialization of American agriculture. Wherever intensive, large-scale
irrigation has appeared, farming has quickly become a factory operation,
mass producing for a mass-consuming market. Since at least the 1930s, the
irrigated farms of the Southwest and the West Coast have led the nation in
adopting the industrial mode, and they have forced farmers elsewhere to
keep pace or drop out. Irrigation farming is expensive, requiring large
amounts of capital investment; where there is no subsidy, only a small
number of farmers can afford it. Once agriculture has started down that
industrial road, it is not easy to stop: waterworks are followed by
pesticides, chemical fertilizers, armies of stoop-and-pick laborers, and a
high degree of mechanization. The western river thus ends up becoming an
assembly line, rolling unceasingly toward the goal of unlimited production.
After basic human needs have been satisfied, there appears to be no deeply
considered purpose justifying this production; water comes to have merely
an international-trade value, abstracted from its natural milieu and made
to serve the industrial imperative of growth as a self-justifying end. When
we can "drink" no more irrigated oranges or corn or rice, world marketers
tell us, we can sell our rivers (sell, that is, the products they water) to
Japan or Germany. In that outcome is the final alienation of a people from
their land and its stream of life?when both are sold to the uttermost parts
of the planet for a mess of gadgets.

Alienation is an abstract, though completely real, outcome. Thirst is more
concrete and measurable, and it is staring us in the face. The irrigated
factory farms of the West are likely to drink the region dry. Irrigated
crops currently use about one-half of this country?s annual withdrawal of
water. But in western states with low rainfall that proportion is much
higher: 80 or 90 percent. According to the U.S. Geological Survey,
California withdrew in 1970 some thirty-three billion gallons of water per
day for irrigation, or one-fourth of the national total, from surface and
ground-water sources. Idaho was the second largest agricultural user, with
a daily withdrawal of fifteen billion gallons; Texas came next, with ten
billion gallons. Thirteen other states?all but one of them (Florida)
located west of the Mississippi?used at least one billion gallons a day for
irrigation. In some places most of the water comes not directly from rivers
but from long-accumulated underground deposits. Each year farmers pump from
the Ogallala aquifer of the Great Plains more than the entire flow of the
Colorado River. That resource, left over from Pleistocene times, once the
largest natural storage system of its kind anywhere, now has a life
expectancy of about forty years. Irrigated farming, carried on in so grand
a fashion, has become an extravagance this nation cannot afford and which
many states cannot much longer sustain.

Even if there were enough water to last forever, in many cases there might
not be enough energy to make it available. Modern irrigation involves the
drastic reorganization of the hydrological cycle, and that task can succeed
only with plenty of cheap energy. In the United States, it has taken an
abundance of artificial energy to make our rivers move in unnatural ways,
in ways that are less efficient in terms of their own dynamics. For in
nature, Robert Curry explains, a river constantly seeks the most
energy-efficient path to the ocean. Wherever an obstacle appears, the river
goes to work to remove it or find another route. Put a dam across a canyon
and the river there immediately gets busy at washing it away. Somewhere
humans must find a ready source of energy to keep that river blocked, to
force it out of its bed and over tablelands and floodplains, or to lift it
across mountain ranges to run in city pipes. Exhaust or lose that external
source of energy to apply against the river and humans lose the ability to
overcome the natural laws of watershed energetics. They must then let the
water flow where it finds the going easiest. That is the prospect we are
now facing in our man-made water regime.

In the ancient Egyptian world, the energy for water manipulation came from
corvées, immense legions of peasants drafted by the government to build and
maintain works, impelled by the whip when they got tired. The modern
approach has been to substitute fossil fuels for much of that sweat. We
have celebrated the change with expansive rhetoric: "unlimited abundance"
and "plenty of water and electricity at the throwing of a switch." But no
one has yet told us precisely and comprehensively how much energy it has
required to erect works like Hoover Dam, to keep them in repair, and to
pump their stored water away, nor have we been told how that energy demand
compares with the hydropower they generate. James Bethal and Martin
Massengale have calculated that irrigation pumping and distribution alone
consume 13 percent of all energy used in American agriculture. In a state
like Nebraska, where the center-pivot sprinklers spread underground water
over round, checker-like cornfields, ten times as much fossil fuel goes
into irrigation as goes into all nonfarm requirements. The mounting cost of
fuel today may put the farmer out of that enterprise long before his well
runs dry. Water cannot run uphill unless there is enough money to push it.
Only the foolhardy will state unequivocally that no new source of low-cost
fuel will ever be found, but it will be a bigger fool who will tell us that
such a breakthrough can come with no strings attached, no undesirable side
effects, no need to confront ecological limits. So long as we do not think
as rivers do, our irrigated agriculture will always be an exercise in the
ultimate futility of trying to repeal the natural laws of flow.

The decreasing supplies of water and energy are only the most obvious
threats to the American irrigation empire. Perhaps a more serious,
long-range nemesis is the salt poisoning of arable land, which seems to be
an inevitable consequence of desert irrigation. This is the problem of soil
and water quality degraded through overuse. In regions of scarce rainfall,
the earth contains a large amount of unleached salts; pouring water onto
fields there brings those salts to the surface and into the river system.
Continual stream diversions lead inexorably to poisoning downstream, for as
the irrigation water evaporates from reservoirs or transpires from rows of
plants, it leaves a whitish residue of salt behind. This salinization put
the Mesopotamian irrigators out of business thousands of years ago. Today
more than one-third of the world?s irrigated land has salt-pollution
problems that diminish the productivity of the soil and, in extreme cases,
ruin it forever. There is very serious salinization of farmland in
California, Hawaii, along the Rio Grande, and throughout the Colorado River
Basin. The Coachella Valley near Palm Springs must use much of its canal
water not to water crops but to flush away salt left behind by earlier
irrigation. The nearby Imperial Irrigation District has already spent
millions to keep ahead of creeping salinity and now hopes that taxpayers
will foot the bill to stave off this self-induced destruction. No matter
who pays for the remedies, the only cure is more water consumption, more
drains to get rid of excess water quickly, more energy and capital for
desalting installations?a cure that becomes at some point even worse than
the illness. Is it really worth the risk of irreversible poisoning of the
land to keep agricultural exports high? To have lettuce in January?


Louis Proyect
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