Cadillac Desert (87 page)

There were excesses of both degree and style. For thousands of years Egyptian farmers irrigated by simple diversions from the Nile and nothing went badly wrong; then Egypt built the Aswan High Dam and got waterlogged land, salinity, schistosomiasis, nutrient-starved fields, a dying Mediterranean fishery, and a bill for all of the above that will easily eclipse the value of the irrigation “miracle” wrought by the dam. In the American West, the Bureau and the Corps fostered a similar style of water development that, though amazingly fruitful in the short run, leaves everyone and everything more vulnerable in the end. Only the federal government had the money to build the big mainstem reservoirs, which will end up being choked by silt or, at the very least, will require billions of dollars’ worth of silt-retention dams to keep the main reservoirs alive (these smaller reservoirs will, of course, silt up fairly quickly themselves, even assuming it makes economic sense to build them). It was through the federal government that millions of acres of poorly drained land not only were opened to farming but were sold dirt-cheap water; the farmers flooded their fields with their cheap water and made the waterlogging and salt problems even worse; now that the lands are beginning to succumb to salt it looks as if the farmers will, in many cases, have to solve things on their own, and a lot of land that cost a fortune to bring into production is going to be left to die.

We didn’t have to build main-stem dams on rivers carrying vast loads of silt; we could have built more primitive offstream reservoirs, which is what many private irrigation districts did—and successfully—but the federal engineers were enthralled by dams. We didn’t have to mine ten thousand years’ worth of groundwater in a scant half century, any more than we had to keep building 5,000-pound cars with 450-cubic-inch V8’s. We didn’t have to dump eight tons of dissolved salts on an acre of land in a year; we could have foresworn development on the most poorly drained lands or demanded that, in exchange for water, the farmers conserve as much as possible. But the Bureau still sells them water so cheaply they can’t
afford
to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more. The Israelis, who have far too little water to waste any of it, are stunned when they see the consumption of a typical western farm. And it is no coincidence that most of the water-saving innovations of the past years, such as drip irrigation, originated in Israel instead of here.

But the tragic and ludicrous aspect of the whole situation is that cheap water keeps the machine running: the water lobby cannot have enough of it, just as the engineers cannot build enough dams; and how convenient that cheap water encourages waste, which results in more dams. No one loses except, of course, the taxpayers at large.

Recently, the magnitude of these losses has finally begun to come to light. In August of 1985, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report on the Central Valley Project that it commissioned from a team of economists supported by a Ford Foundation grant. Through that report, a window was thrown open for the first time on the kinds of liberties the Bureau has been taking with public funds and the law in order to perpetuate the myth of abundance and keep up the demand for more dams.

According to the report, the Bureau not only has been giving its California clients—the nation’s richest farmers—cheap water; it has been inventing a whole new realm of subsidies, which are quite possibly illegal, in order to keep the price from going up. For one thing, it adopted, years ago, a completely unwarranted interpretation of the principle of “ability to pay,” which is one of the main instruments by which water prices are set. Originally, adjusting water rates according to the farmers’ “ability to pay” meant that the price of water could vary from good years to bad ones, as long as the momentum of the fifty-year replayment schedules was maintained. But the Bureau undercharged its client farmers so regularly that the CVP repayment schedule had fallen drastically into arrears by 1985. By that year—some three decades after the project was essentially completed—the farmers had repaid a mere $50 million of the $931 million in capital costs that they are obligated to pay back. (Remember that the farmers are exempted from paying interest on this amount, a subsidy worth at least a couple of billion dollars in its own right.) What is worse, since 1982, payments for water and power have not been sufficient even to cover the operation and maintenance costs of the project, and the Bureau has been cannibalizing the capital-cast fund to keep it from running out of operating funds. This, of course, is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and according to the NRDC it is perfectly illegal. It would have been perfectly
legal
for the Bureau to raise its water rates—it may even have been required by law—but that was never done.

A multibillion-dollar interest exemption, a repayment schedule allowed to slip drastically toward default, an amazingly magnanimous interpretation of “ability to pay”—that would seem to be subsidy enough; but the Bureau wouldn’t even stop there. A substantial chunk of the project’s cost has been written off to fish and wildlife “benefits,” even though the main impact on fish and wildlife has been a drastic reduction in salmon and waterfowl populations. In addition, the NRDC report disclosed, the Bureau has for years been selling power to the farmers for considerably less than it pays to wheel it down from the dams in the Pacific Northwest.

The effect of everything, according to the economists, is that a few thousand farmers will, over the course of fifty years, receive a billion and a half dollars’ worth of taxpayer generosity that was never supposed to be theirs. (The value of the interest exemption isn’t included in this figure; that was their right.) And the result, according to the NRDC, is that “the repayment of [capital] costs of the CVP is likely to be zero by the time most of the water contracts expire in the 1990s.” The farmers, who were entitled to incredibly cheap water, have ended up getting it nearly free.

Who are the beneficiaries of this vast unintended largess? The report found that the biggest subsidies, on a farm-by-farm basis, are going to the Westlands Water District, which is where the biggest farmers in the CVP service area happen to reside. (The Westlands, in fact, consumes about 25 percent of the water the project has for sale, enough to supply all of New York City.) By the economists’ calculations, the true cost of delivering water to Westlands has now reached $97 per acre-foot; the farmers are being charged between $7.50 and $11.80. Taking the average farm size in the district, this translates into a subsidy of around $500,000 per farm—per year.

That sounds bad enough, but it is even worse than it sounds. Spread across the district, the subsidy to Westlands amounts to something like $217 per acre per year; the average annual
revenue
produced by an acre of Westlands land is only $290. This means that 70 percent of the profit on what is supposed to be some of the richest farmland in the world comes solely through taxpayer subsidization—not crop production. Not only that, but the main Westlands crop was then cotton, which in the 1980s had become very much a surplus crop. So the same. subsidies that were helping to enrich some of the wealthiest farmers in the nation were at the same time depressing crop prices elsewhere and undoubtedly driving unsubsidized cotton farmers in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi out of business.

It was these same Westlands farmers, incidentally, who, with the help of their good friends Senator Alan Cranston and Representative Tony Coelho, led the successful effort to expand the acreage limitation from 160 to 960 acres in 1982. Even so, when their ten-year “grace” period expires in 1992, many will still be in violation of the law unless they sell off their excess lands; farms of 2,000 and 3,000 acres are commonplace; “farms” of 30,000 acres are not unknown; not a single 160-acre farm exists within its borders. (Why such a group of farmers should have received subsidized water in the first place is a good question.) After saying all this, it hardly seems worth mentioning that the Westlands Water District’s irrigation return flows are the main source of the valley’s high levels of selenium, which have been poisoning tens of thousands of waterfowl in the valley wildlife refuges and, from the available evidence, all the way into San Francisco Bay.

There, in a nutshell, is how one of the nation’s preeminent examples of reform legislation is stood completely on its head: illegal subsidies enrich big farmers, whose excess production depresses crop prices nationwide and whose waste of cheap water creates an environmental calamity that could cost billions to solve. And what was the response of the Bureau to the NRDC report? It quibbled about the actual size of the subsidies but, strikingly enough, didn’t deny that they are occurring or even that they are illegal, and it didn’t deny that the Central Valley Project is at least hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in debt. Its response was a strange, calm, qualified agreement, as if to say, “Of course this is what has been going on. But it isn’t really our fault.”

In a sense, the Bureau is right. If blame is laid anywhere, it ought to be laid at Congress’s door. Congress authorized the Central Valley Project; Congress approved the Westlands contract; Congress persistently refused to reform the Reclamation Act in any way except to enlarge the subsidies and to permit subsidized water to be sold to bigger farms; Congress, instead of offering incentives to conserve water, issued a multibillion-dollar license to waste it in the form of more and more dams. What cynic can blame it? To Congress, the federal water bureaucracy has been the closest thing to a schmoo, the little creature out of “Lil’l Abner” that reproduced mightily and lived only to be eaten by us. The dams created jobs (how efficiently is another matter) and made the unions happy; they enriched the engineering and contracting firms, from giants like Bechtel and Parsons to small-time cement pourers in Sioux Falls, and made them happy; they subsidized the irrigation farmers and made them happy; they offered enough water to the cities to make them happy; they gave free flood protection to the real estate developers who ran the booming cities of the West out of their pockets and made them happy; and as a result of all this, the politicians were reelected, which made them happy. No one lost except the nation at large.

What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere, grew at mad rates, and ended up as Frank Lloyd Wright’s sanitary slums; while they were being rescued from the tyranny of the desert they gave themselves over as slaves to the automobile. Millions of people and green acres took over a region that, from appearances, is unforgivingly hostile to life. It was a spectacular achievement, and its most implacable critics have to acknowledge its positive side. The economy was, no doubt, enriched. Population dispersion was achieved. Land that had been dry-farmed and overgrazed and horribly abused was stabilized and saved from the drought winds. “Wasting” resources—the rivers and aquifers—were put to productive use.

The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. Thus far, nature has paid the highest price. Glen Canyon is gone. The Colorado Delta is dead. The Missouri bottomlands have disappeared. Nine out of ten acres of wetlands in California have vanished, and with them millions of migratory birds. The great salmon runs in the Columbia, the Sacramento, the San Joaquin, and dozens of tributaries are diminished or extinct. The prairie is civilized and is dull; its last wild features, the pothole marshes in the Dakotas, could all but disappear at the hands of the Garrison Diversion and Cendak projects, if they are ever built. And it didn’t happen only in the West. Much the same thing happened in the East, especially in the South, where an incredible diversity and history and beauty in the old river valleys lies submerged under hundreds of featureless reservoirs. The vast oak and cypress swamps of the old South have been dried up, courtesy mainly of the Corps of Engineers, and converted to soybean fields (another crop of which we have an enormous glut). In fact, the Corps of Engineers is responsible for creating a lot more artificial farmland, wisely or unwisely, than the Bureau of Reclamation; by its own estimate, it has converted some 26 million acres of marshy or flood-threatened land, most of it in the East, into permanent crops. Depending on one’s point of view, this achievement has been a monstrous travesty against nature, a boon to the local economies, or—the viewpoint most likely held by the Corps of Engineers—a fine opportunity to keep building more drainage projects and dams in order to protect what is only a precarious foothold against the forces of nature.

As we discover afresh each day, those forces can only be held at bay, never vanquished, and that is where the real vandalism—the financial vandalism of the future—comes in. Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? To bring more water to whole regions, whole states, dependent on aquifers that have been recklessly mined? To restore wetlands and wild rivers and other natural features of the landscape that have been obliterated, now that more and more people are discovering that life is impoverished without them?

We won’t have to. Our children probably won’t have to. But somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and between a $4 trillion national debt (a good bit of it incurred financing the dams) and the inevitability of expensive energy, it will be a miracle if they can pay it.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves. What we achieved may be spectacular; in another sense, though, we achieved the obverse of our goals. The Bureau of Reclamation set out to help the small farmers of the West but ended up making a lot of rich farmers even wealthier at the small farmers’ expense. Through water development, the federal government set out to rescue farmers from natural hardships—droughts and floods—but created a new kind of hardship in the form of a chronic, seemingly permanent condition of agricultural glut. We set out to tame the rivers and ended up killing them. We set out to make the future of the American West secure; what we really did was make ourselves rich and our descendants insecure. Few of them are apt to regret that we built Hoover Dam; on balance, however, they may find themselves wishing that we had left things pretty much as they were.