drought: A long period of abnormally low rainfall, especially one that adversely affects growing or living conditions.
One big question, that few journalists seem willing to consider: What is ‘normal’?
In Part Five of this editorial series, I shared a quote from “”History of Colorado River Law, Development and Use” by Greg Hobbs Jr.:
Contrary to the now popular notion that the compact commissioners had only really good water years [data] to work with and, so, hugely over allocated the available supply, they were well aware of the extended drought of the 1890s that lasted through 1902…
That extended drought, during the 1890s, shows up in the following graph of ‘Reconstructed’ Colorado River flows, shared by the National Science Foundation. The black arrow showing the “Lowest observed” appears to be pointing at 1976, which recorded the lowest river flows during the 20th century. The extended 1890s drought is shown by the dip just to the left of that black arrow.
We note that the 1890s drought was not the worst one, in this scientific reconstruction of ‘Naturalized Flow’ (the estimated flow if all human diversions were nonexistent.) The American Southwest appears to have experienced its worst drought of the past 1,200 years during the mid-1100s… with other significant droughts between 850 AD and 900 AD, between 1250 AD and 1300 AD, and between 1550 AD and 1600 AD.
Looking at this graph, one might get the idea that extended droughts are a perfectly normal occurrence in the American West. Not a perfectly pleasant occurrence, certainly. But perfectly normal. Scientist and explorer John Wesley Powell knew this in 1878, when he published his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, constructed upon a simple premise: the West could never support the dense populations seen in the eastern US, nor large-scale agriculture.
I wrote a Daily Post piece about this subject back in 2019.
When people use the word ‘drought’, what they typically mean is not ‘abnormally low rainfall’, but rather ‘less rainfall than what we wanted.’ Or, stated more cynically, “less rainfall than our golf course required to remain in top notch condition.”
In my experience, the creation of ‘facts’ and the disbursement of ‘facts’ is often driven by money — and by the belief systems and agendas of wealthy individuals and corporations — and the rest of us are merely along for the ride. The involvement of the Walton Family Foundation in water policy development since 2016, for example, includes funding for journalists, river restoration, and educational campaigns directed by non-profit corporations, with a clear agenda to spotlight efforts to mitigate climate change. Of the 1,200 grants awarded by WFF since 2016, about 122 were directly related to the “Colorado River”.
I found it curious that almost none of the water policy grants seem to be aimed at scientific research. Apparently, WFF is leaving the research funding — the creation of the ‘facts’ — to other foundations, and to government. Perhaps the Foundation is satisfied with existing ‘facts’? And is interested in using its wealth to spread those ‘facts’ as widely as possible?
I’m sure some Daily Post readers have already written off this editorial series as the ravings of a madman unwilling to acknowledge the well-accepted reality of anthropogenic climate change. Certainly, most media outlets I come across, in my day-to-day research, have accepted that reality as undeniable, and the Walton Family Foundation definitely affirms that particular political stance. But, in my humble opinion, it’s one thing to accept ‘climate change’ as undeniable, and a very different thing to condemn the American West — in our imaginations — to a devastating, ‘megadrought’ future.
It’s certainly possible that Colorado and the American West is headed into a lengthy period of drier weather. Scientists tell us, it’s happened before. But should we blame ‘climate change’ for our current predicament?
I mean, what exactly is a ‘drought’?
Here’s a quote from Arizona cotton farmer Greg Wuertz, as quoted by reporters Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam in a May 2015 Pro Publica article , “Holy Crop: How federal dollars are financing the water crisis in the West.”
“Some years, all of what you made came from the government,” Wuertz said. “Your bank would finance your farming operation… because they knew the support was guaranteed. They wouldn’t finance wheat, or alfalfa. Cotton was always dependable, it would always work…”
Like many farmers, Mr. Wuertz gets a subsidy check from the U.S. government or from his insurance company when his crop does poorly — or when the price of cotton falls below a certain level. Without government subsidies, farmers like Mr. Wuertz might choose to grow a different crop in the middle of a desert, rather than cotton.
Like lettuce?
Lettuce grown in the American Southwest consumes about 8 inches of water during its growing season. By comparison, a cotton plant sucks up about 41 inches of the precious fluid. By comparison, potatoes absorb about 24 inches of water; sweet corn consumes about 20 inches.
From the 2015 Pro Publica article mentioned above:
Getting plants to grow in the Sonoran Desert is made possible by importing billions of gallons of water each year. Cotton is one of the thirstiest crops in existence, and each acre cultivated here demands six times as much water as lettuce, 60 percent more than wheat. That precious liquid is pulled from a nearby federal reservoir, siphoned from beleaguered underground aquifers, and pumped in from the Colorado River hundreds of miles away…
What we are not often told, by media outlets funded by concerned philanthropic organizations, is that the word ‘drought’ is most often used to mean, “too little water to grow ridiculous crops in the desert.”
Here’s that chart again, showing the reconstructed flows of the Colorado River over the past 1,200 years.
In a sense, this is an unpretentious picture of how Mother Nature treats the American Southwest. She’s often hard, and just as often, generous.
Her treatment may have become more severe, as punishment for burning up the world’s fossil fuel resources.
But maybe we’re just being really stupid, when we put our faith in the engineers who build dams and irrigation canals…
…and then expect the taxpayers to subsidize our cotton crops.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.