[Marxism] Why the Great Plains are dying

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://hnn.us/articles/37781.html
Why the Great Plains Are Dying
By Steven Conn

Mr. Conn is an associate professor in the history department at Ohio 
State University and a writer for the History News Service.

Much of the western United States has been experiencing a severe drought 
for nearly a decade, and the future only looks drier. One of the 
conclusions of the new United Nations study on global climate change is 
that wet places on the planet will probably get wetter and dry places, 
like much of the American West, will become even more parched. John 
Wesley Powell is rolling over in his grave.

Powell isn't a household name any more, but in the era after the Civil 
War he was among the most prominent American scientists and explorers. 
His expedition down the Colorado River became the stuff of heroic legend 
in the late 19th century.

But Powell was not simply an adventurer. Between 1881 and 1894 Powell 
directed the United States Geologic Survey. Based on his research he 
concluded that there were really two Americas, one wet and one dry, 
divided almost exactly down the middle, roughly at the 100th meridian. 
That unalterable fact of the climate, Powell warned, would force limits 
on the way Americans settled the West.

Americans don't like to be told that there are limits. The very idea 
rubs us the wrong way and it did in Powell's day as well. Yet then as 
now scientists were telling us that we faced real environmental 
constraints. Then as now the question was whether we were prepared to 
face those limits, restrain our use of resources, and re-imagine our 
national aspirations so that they were more environmentally sustainable. 
Powell's career serves as a reminder of what it ultimately costs if we 
stick our heads in the sand.

In 1878 Powell wrote and submitted to Congress his Report on the Arid 
Lands of the United States. It was a blockbuster as scientific reports 
go. Powell told Congress that if the West was going to be settled at 
all, the region would require an extensive plan for water management and 
allocation.

It was not what Congress wanted to hear, any more than Congress wants to 
hear that message today, especially not the expansion-minded politicians 
from the West who rashly predicted that their states would some day be 
home to as any as 180 million Americans. Rep. Thomas Patterson of 
Colorado denounced Powell as "a charlatan in science and intermeddler in 
affairs of which he has no proper conception." The bill to reconfigure 
the use of public land in the West that resulted from Powell's report 
died a slow procedural death.

Events proved Powell right, of course, though being right has never been 
a path to political success in America. Americans have a long and rich 
tradition of shooting the messengers bearing bad news. Drought hit the 
arid lands in the 1880s, creating the first large-scale farm crisis in 
the nation's history. "In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted," so the 
expression went at the time.

The rains stopped again in the 1930s and created the environmental 
disaster of the Dust Bowl. Look at a map of the areas most devastated by 
the drought and wind of the "dirty '30s" and you'll notice they hug that 
100th meridian -- exactly the region that Powell worried would be 
under-watered and over-farmed.

After World War II, farmers on the plains dealt with the natural cycles 
of rain and drought by pumping water from the Ogallala aquifer, a vast 
underground lake, to irrigate their fields.  It's the agricultural 
equivalent of paying your mortgage with a credit card -- the bank 
catches up with you eventually. In this case the water table under the 
Great Plains is now dropping dramatically, as much as five feet in a 
single year, and to what end? The plains are being depopulated; the 
nation's poorest county is now in Nebraska.

Meanwhile, suburban regions in the west continue to sprawl without 
restraint. It makes even less sense to water lawns and golf courses in 
the Las Vegas desert than it does to farm intensively on the plains. Yet 
they continue to sprout up, surreal, unnatural green dots on a tan and 
tawny landscape.

In the West, the region Powell spent a lifetime studying, no quantity of 
boosterism, or political grandstanding or individual will can create 
more water where there isn't enough. Denying a problem doesn't make it 
go away. Oklahoma's Sen. James Inhofe, who still insists in 2007 that 
climate change is a "hoax," is simply the successor to Rep. Patterson in 
1878.

Climate change is no more a hoax now than Powell was a charlatan. We 
have paid a grievous environmental price for our failure to take 
Powell's warnings about water seriously. Perhaps we can learn from that 
failure and face the challenges posed by climate change by pulling our 
heads out of the sand.



________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism