There is a very striking photo heading this article in the NY Times — a pier, once used for fishing in Lake Mead, AZ, suspended over dry, brown, lake bottom. I know the place. Lake Mead is one of the possible take-outs for river runners down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I was on a trip the summer of 2007 and we battled our way against strong head-winds into the lake — then in it’s eighth summer of a drought.
New scientific evidence suggests that periodic long, severe droughts have become the norm in the Colorado River basin, undermining calculations of how much water the river can be expected to provide and intensifying pressures to find new solutions or sources.
The effects of the drought can be seen at Lake Mead in Nevada, where a drop in the water level left docks hanging from newly formed cliffs, and a marina surrounded by dry land. Upriver at Lake Powell, which is at its lowest level since spring 1973, receding waters have exposed miles of mud in the side canyons leading to the Glen Canyon Dam.
The article is mostly about the foolish things people are doing in response to the drought. Not moving there is not among these things. The population is exploding, so naturally multi-billion dollar engineering projects come to mind. Somehow the picture of desalinization plants sucking up brackish groundwater, of 300 mile canals carrying rivers from one drought area to another all in the midst of week-long sand storms and not a plant with roots that will hold is not a pretty one.
This is not to say that much of our attention should not go to adapting to the inevitable. We are not going to reverse climate change before it is upon us. Our hope is to slow the change and eventually stabilize the greenhouse gases at, shall we say, classic values? That leaves us several hundred years to deal with rising tides, shifting weather patterns, changing agricultural zones, increases and decreases in rainfall, groundwater, snow run-off. I expect cities and towns to increase and decrease in size along the way, zoning laws to respond to new needs of the residents and a million other things. It does not seem wise, however, to go back to the bad old ways of trying to control the contours of the Mississippi, or of building mega-dams to slake the thirst of those who put working on their tans as first priority.